The Warforge Miniature Modelling and Conversion

A Beast in the Khadoran Wild

Beast 09's been all based up, and I think I'm done here.

 

Pretty happy with the outcome. I did some quick lines up on the base to indicate front arc and direct facing.

I love the smell of Thresher in the morning

Beast 09's roughly 90% done now, I think. I've got him glued up on the base for now, and I'm happy with how it's going so far.

 

He needs to be touched up a bit. There's a couple spots on his chassis that look like they have some color differences, which is a result of the washes I've been using. They leave a glossy finish wherever they touch, which is why in some of these pictures the colors might look just a little uneven. I'm going to be matte varnishing the whole thing when I'm done, which should even out a lot of those differences.

I need to clean up the base a bit and then add the snow. I've seen a lot of methods for going about the snow, but I think the easiest and best one I have available to me is actually simple superglue and sand. I have some white, very fine-grained sand, and I figure if I spread some cyanoacrylate around and bury the base in the stuff, I'll have some decent snow effects.

There's a couple spots on the warjack itself that are still being tweaked, but for the most part I'm happy with it. It's not amazing, and it won't win any awards, but it's good enough for the table.

Beast 09 at 2/3

So, I've obviously failed a bit in my optimistic goal to update daily, but whatever. My job at the courthouse keeps me plenty busy, and the extra time I have ontop of that has been mostly spent with my fiance, but in my spare moments I've been working on painting up Beast 09 to a reasonable level. I'd say he's about 2/3 done at the moment.

 

Painting such a large area in such bright colors is a giant pain in the ass, because my usual washes don't work very well on it - they tend to pool and leave weird drying stains. I've slowly been hammering away at it, though. It looks a little... maybe messy is the word? But I'm not particularly unhappy with how he's coming.

Things still to do:

• Finish the ice effect on the axe.
• Pick out and highlight some of the metallics
• Pick out all of the rivets with metallics
• Try and paint a proper furnace effect in the head visor and slits on the torso
• Add the glowing effect to the glyphs over the head and groin plate.

And probably some other stuff I can't remember at the moment. This is all without having touched the base yet, which should be pretty straightforward in terms of painting.

Onwards!

Beast 09 ready for paint

I think I've got this guy all done, on the modelling end of things!

 

Pretty close match to the art, as far as I'm concerned. It's not 1:1, but I don't think there's any real question what it's aiming for.

Beast’s Basic Body

I did a fair bit of reposing on Beast 09's lower half so far, and it's hardly done, but I figured I'd mock him up a little and take some photos to check myself.

 

Beast's left leg (the leading one) was hacked at the knee and turned outwards to match the source image. I figure that has to be where he's jointed, anyway, since the ankle design allows for basically no rotation whatsoever (other than up-down) if you actually look at it. The trailing leg was hacked at the ankle and reposed a bit to be more compressed, as though the jack were leaning most of its weight on that point. I need to do some greenstuff repairs on some parts, but on the whole, I'm pretty pleased with how the pose is working so far. A 1:1 match with the art is probably unreasonable, given the source model's limitations, but I think I'll be able to pull off something close enough that there won't be any question at all.

You’ve activated my trap base!

Beast 09 is a warjack that strikes fear into the hearts of Khador's enemies. He's disgustingly good on the table, and his model's no slouch either. Since I have Beast in my to-do pile, I thought I'd start work on 'em by reposing. However, I have a specific goal in mind: I want to sort've evoke the image above, right down to the base. To do that, the base'd have to be done first, so that I could then work on posing the elements of the warjack itself around it. The key element is the jack traps, which are the chained and sharpened logs which, I assume, are intended to trip up clumsy warjacks or serve as rough terrain. I wandered around outside for a bit, found some ideal twigs, broke out the jewelry chain, and started hammering away, and this is where I'm at:

 

It's not quite a picture-perfect match, but I think it adequately conjures up the image above. I was trying to be very careful about how I arranged the elements on the base, because I didn't want the jack-trap to stick so far off the base as to make it impossible to actually get in B2B with other models. I set the logs as far back on the base as I could bear to while still making sure that there'd be enough room for Beast to actually stand. I will probably build the surrounding terrain up a little bit more, but I'm letting all the glue holding that big mess of putty, cork, and ballast together dry overnight first.