Okay, so now I'm shifting over to painting on this guy. I made him a base on a 40mm round, since he would never have comfortably fit on a 25mm'er. Warforge frequenter Made of Bees has been awesome and has donated a Manufactorum kit to me for use on whatever projects I'm working on, and I figured basing the Kommando on the rubble of a manufactorum would be nothing if not appropriate - the result of a successful sabotage mission, perhaps? There's a small bundle of TNT towards the back edge of the base, just to finish the job.

 

So, painting starts! Any areas I missed with primer will be easy enough to touch up with some watered-down black paint, so I'm not too concerned with it.

In the mean time, if anyone knows where I can pick up some Kommandos for cheap, I'd be interested - I have 5 of the metals, but I want to get a full squad of the things to go along with him.

I've been working on and off on this Boomwagon when I have time, and I'm actually pretty happy with how it's coming along. I did some highlighting along the edges of the armor plates, first with Vallejo Model Air German Grey, and then with Model Air USA Grey, before washing the whole tank down a bunch with some thin black. I've picked out some red areas (mostly the glyphs) as highlights, but I'm trying not to get too much color on this since it's a Goff vehicle and the Goffs are a rather dark-colored and serious lot.

 

I still need to work on the treads and ram a bit, and I need to add the white elements in - I'm thinking some checker panels or stripes will set off nicely.

Not a lot of work's been done on this thing thanks to school, but I have had a little time to make a grappling hook for the Kommando Nob, and hung it off the backpack. I think I just want to put a little bit more gear on him, to make him look loaded up and ready for any sabotage mission imaginable, but the model itself is nearly done.

I need to base him, but I don't actually seem to have any 40mm bases to work from, so I haven't had the chance yet. Soon, hopefully.

It's been brought to my attention that The Warforge's gallery features have not been playing well with Chrome, despite working just fine in Internet Explorer and Firefox (and other browsers). I've looked into this a bit, and it doesn't look like I'll be able to fix the problem myself, and since my browser stat logs show that a bunch of you are using Chrome, I thought I'd address the issue.

The good news is that Google's fixing the problem themselves. The gallery problem has been fixed with the latest BETA version of Chrome. As of 2/8/2010, the latest stable version of Chrome is 4.***. The latest BETA version is 5.0.317.2 Beta. You can download from Google at http://www.google.com/landing/chrome/beta/

Basically, the takeaway from this is that when Google has it's next version release, everything will go back to normal - the issue is with the browser and how it reads the gallery code, not the code itself, so there's little I can do to alleviate it with my current web coding knowledge.

Sorry!

So I managed to get out for a game today for the first time in... well, months.

I took some assorted pictures of the game, just for the fun of things. We both took absolutely silly lists - I took a bunch of warbikes with Wazzdakka, stormboyz, a pair of kanz, and a looted wagon, and he took two trukks, a looted wagon, a burna boy squad, a boyz squad, and a nobz squad with a boss.

 

I soundly lost both games, but I think it was more to do with my lack of familiarity with all the fast attack stuff I had on the board. Also, Nobz are impossible to bring down.

Had time for a little more work on this Kommando character, so I finished off his other arm. I ended up moving the hand just a liiitle bit off to one side of his face, because I realized that I would never, ever be able to paint that face properly if I had that hand in the way. Hopefully the effect still works, though.

Edit: Actually, I just bent it back a little bit more to the front just now (post-pictures), since it didn't look enough like he was 'shhh'ing, so... there you go.

 

Z sent a lovely backpack along for him that I've been playing around with a bit. I stuck a Stikkbomb up top to hide where the backpack and the body join. I could have sculpted it onto the back properly, but I'm leaving the pack as removable for now just to make painting easier. I also added a small coil of rope that's hanging from the bottom of the pack right now - when I have  a bit more time, I'm going to add a grappling hook next to the rope, and then probably hang a couple more gubbinz off the thing like a tankbusta bomb or that sort of thing. I'm also going to smooth out the sculpt a bit in the back, around the boot area.

Some of you may notice there's substantially more white styrene replacements on this model than in the previous photos. Much to my lament, it seems every time I handle the miniature like the big, ham-fisted moron that I am, some of the tiny details end up falling off, like his teeth or goggles. Very upsetting, but I'm trying to keep up with it by simply putting new ones on, since I can't for the life of me find something like a goggle lens when it falls off.

So here's the deal!

Zsoulless was sculpting a rather lovely Kommando Nob based on the one from Dawn of War 2, and I've managed to get my hands on it!

This is what he gave me:

A couple of his teef went missin' on the trip over, but I've been sticking styrene replacements back in his gob. Some of the smaller gubbinz like grenades also fell off his straps, but I'll replace them soon enough. Z designed it without arms so that whoever eventually ended up with it could do whatever they wanted with it. I figured that I'd make him a Snikrot conversion, since I already had the arms lying around and he seemed deserving of such attention. I'm currently in the process of trying to sculpt the upper arms and shoulders so that they blend in properly.

His backpack'll see some tweaking - I want to add some ropes and grapples onto a pack for him.

And then, of course, I'll need some Kommandoz...

Something to think about for the dread banner.

Edit: Now with paint.

I'm not that great at freehanding, but I suppose it'll work after I'm finished touching it up a little bit. It doesn't have to look too terrific, since I plan on weathering the hell out of it to make it look centuries old. The back of the thing will look like parchment, which is why the parts that are hanging folded over are starting to be tan.

Just for those who are unfamiliar, the Legion of the Damned are rumored to be the remnants of the Fire Hawks Space Marines chapter after a trip through the Warp gone horribly wrong. Their chapter symbol was a mushroom cloud, because as I understand it their homeworld was destroyed in a nuclear event.

Edit: One more time, still trying to smooth it over a bit.

Some people seemed to be a bit horrified that the banner was yellow, but those are the Fire Hawk colors, so...

I figured I'd get some paint onto this thing soon, so while I was messing around with the airbrush this morning I set about putting some color onto it. I primed black, and then used some Vallejo Model Air German Grey and US Grey to brighten the thing up substantially in the hopes that after a black wash or two, I'll be able to tone the greys down to a nice, richer-looking black armor.

 

There's a couple places where I could have done better with the spray, but I figure the washes'll help blend it all together decently enough. Before I do those washes, though, I'm going to set about base-coating the colors on this thing properly, which means picking out the bones, scrollwork, and any other details.

So I figured I'd keep experimenting a bit on the tank. Into the Warp it went, to stew in Simple Green for the better part of a week while I occupied myself at school. When I fished it out and scrubbed it down, I actually managed to get most of the paint off right down to the underlying styrene:

Then I set about hitting it with my ol' Krylon Rust Primer again, and airbrushed some brighter orange colors overtop just to try and make the rust brighter. After that, I started applying the toothpaste again, in the hopes that I might be a bit more conservative with it this time.

Then came an airbrushed coat of grey overtop - again, a lighter color than the final coal black I picture the tank being at the end, largely because I hope to use some black washes on the entirety of the thing to make the armor plates stand out more.

Then came the pivotal moment - about half an hour after the last spray, I stuck the tank under the sink again. You don't want to work too slowly when you're using toothpaste, because if you leave it on there long enough it'll turn rock-hard and won't rinse off. This time, I had a much stranger experience with rinsing the mask off - in some places, the water actually managed to get underneath the grey paint after I'd rinsed the toothpaste off, and it lifted larger patches of the paint off than I actually masked. However, it did so in a very organic manner, leaving me with an irregular looking, patchy paint and rust job that I actually sort've like.

 

I think this looks a lot less like camo than my first go around at this method, and I think it'll be workable in the long run. I'm going to probably stipple the rust areas with a very bright color like blazing orange to give them some irregular coloring, and then I'll set about adding the actual colors onto the plates of the tank that will be getting 'em. After that, a black wash should help make the whole thing a bit more Goffy.