Fistz ‘n Feet!

I decided to go ahead and make a second rokk to complement the first.

 

Pretty much the same procedure as last time, only this time it's obviously a bit more stompy. I'll probably spray some blast/reentry burns on both when I next have my airbrush out, but in the mean while, here's both markers with a boy for scale.

I think I may actually look into gluing spare rhino doors and hatches onto these things, just for show. It's not really at the top of my to-do list.

If I make a third marker for the unlikely 3rd d3 rokk, it might be a giant ork head carved out of stone. That, or perhaps a big choppa. It's monstrously unlikely that even if I had 3 Rokks to use in a game all 3 would land on the board, though.

High five!

I let the putty harden for about 24 hours and tried carving into it a bit. The results were a bit... poor. DAS is okay for getting a rocky covering, but you can't carve much texture into it.

I scratched my noggin for a little while, and dug through my garage. I found a spray can that's supposed to spray a stucco-ish texture onto walls for painting purposes, so I sprayed the whole fist down in it, grabbed a sponge, and tried roughing the surface up a bit so there might be something to drybrush on later.

This is what I ended up with:

 

It's okay. It's not quite got the hard, rocky angles that I originally envisioned the fist to have, but I guess it works. I grabbed a saw and cut a bit off the front of the fist so it sat 'deeper' into the crater. I secured it to the base with about 4 screws, sticking up into it at different angles so that it couldn't possibly wiggle itself loose. Then, all that was left was to grab a brush and give it a quick painting.

 

Trying to just be quick and dirty with most of this, really, since I wasn't sure how it'd come out, so I basically primed and drybrushed it about a bit with some awfully grimy folk art colors that I had in my basement. Seems to have worked okay though - it's enough to get the idea across, anyway. I'm probably not going to work too much harder on this one, though I've been thinking it might be a fun piece to keep handy on my desk to practice painting glyphs on. Orky faces graffitti'd into the sides, or stuff like 'CRUSH DA UMIES' scrawled on it in paint or something.

Either way, it's enough for now.   I'd be lucky if I got even one of these to hit the board to begin with, let alone not on my own boyz!

Oy! Wot’s dat up in da sky?

All of the most fun projects start with 'I couldn't help myself...'

This is one of those.

I was reading about the Orky tidbits in Apocalypse: Reloaded and something stuck out to me, big time. The strategic asset, 'Rokk Em, Boyz!'. The strategem involves hurling 1-3 giant asteroids from an orky tractor-beam ship up in space down onto the board. They cause an apoc. template hit, and scatter d6 FEET.

This is what those of us in the business of being orks like to call awesome.

So Ein finds himself with a little bit of time on his hands one morning, and starts thinking to himself. What should he work on? Troops? Bah. Too much work for me to bother with right now, I don't want to desprue all the crap I have. Big things? Squiggoths and baneblades can wait, I'm not feeling it. Oh wait! How about a strategic asset that doesn't even require a model to use!? Bingo.

So, let's think about this for a moment. Asteroids hurtling onto the board from space would probably cause more than just a template hit - it'd probably leave something behind. Well, you could go ahead and model a big giant rock stuck in the ground as a terrain feature I guess... But...

See, the way I sees it, orks wouldn't hurl just random asteroids and meteors down from the skies. Though the orkiness of such a thing is undeniable, I pictured something a bit more... fun.

That's right. Giant rock fists 'N feet rainin' from da skiez like da handz uv gork an' mork 'emselves!

The easiest way to do this was to use the moonscape craters that GW put out as a base. They already have roughly a 10" blast footprint on them, and you can easily just build off of the nice, flat middle crater.

So, off to my garage I went to cut, carve, and generally mangle foam. Since this is a very spur of the moment project, I screwed the foam together. It holds just as well, and glue takes days to dry between sheets of this stuff because it creates an airtight seal, and PVA glue needs air to set. Hot glue tends to destroy this stuff, too.

Anyway, after 10 minutes or so, I emerged from the garage covered in pink insulation foam and carrying a prototype 'rokk'.

 

Of course, you haven't gone truly overboard until you've added a rocket booster to the giant asteroid hurtling down from space, so I felt obliged...

Then it was off to get some cheap Prang DAS clay and cover the whole thing over, so I had some sort of surface I could carve, sand, and shape more reliably. It was a bit unweildy at first because it wouldn't 'stick' very well to the fist, but after a bit of fighting with it I got the whole thing nice and covered.

 

It's a bit lumpy looking, but who cares?   This is supposed to be a quick, fun project, so there's nothing to agonize about, and anyway I figure once it hardens I can sand it smooth(er) and carve at it with the knife a bit. If I dig too deep and hit foam, I'll just cover that area with some PVA glue so the foam doesn't melt.