2009298:02
am
Warforged Miniatures
Frequent visitors might well have noticed my update rate has dropped off a bit in the past week or two, and I figured I may as well explain myself because there are two reasons, one trivial and one very good.
First, the trivial reason: I formatted my computer. It took me a day or two to back up everything I wanted backed up, and another few days to actually get all of the essentials back onto the machine. Without something like photoshop, scaling pictures down to a reasonable size and working on the site becomes substantially harder, so I focused on getting my machine to 100%.
Second is the much better reason! Whenever I pursue a project that requires any degree of casting, a few people inevitably approach me with the idea of selling copies of my work. My typical answer is always something along the lines of "I'd love to, but I simply don't have the time" due to both family and my legal education. However, this is all about to change.
I've started working with a company located in Forth Worth, Texas, named D6 Hobbies. The company has some great people, quality casting equipment, and excellent materials at its disposal. Accordingly, I've negotiated a deal for them to produce and sell the resin casts of original parts that I send them. Therefore, I'm pleased to announce the creation of...
Warforged Miniatures is the new brand of the resin-cast products I will be offering through D6 Hobbies, with it's own section in the webstore. The first product I'm happy to offer, by popular demand, are my Heavy Automatic Cannons, available for purchase individually♦ or in sets of four. Nozeminer joins me in this endeavor with his own, unique brand of miniature bitz, offered under the moniker of "Nozeminer Studios". Those of you who browse The Warforge regularly know that I sometimes outsource sculpting projects to Nozeminer, and to say that his sculpting talents are amazing is an understatement. He's put up a selection of useful bitz for all sorts of 28mm miniatures: Peaked Officer Caps, Savage Voodoo Masks, and Abhuman Gas Masks. We're going to have fully-painted pictures of our products in the next few days, and D6 Hobbies is restocking constantly.
2009278:39
am
Finish line in the distance
I finally sorted out my lighting setup a bit for when I take photographs, so the following will hopefully be slightly clearer. I think it may actually be a bit on the dark side, but I'll turn the exposure up a teeny bit for the next round of photos and see if that has any effect. Anyway, two more stormboyz are taken care of, mostly.
The one with the red tips on his rokkit is probably my favorite so far, though I just noticed I failed to do the fingernails on his leading hand. I'll take care of that now.
Just a reminder, so there's no confusion: The smoke's not painted at all. I'm leaving that off till last, until I get a good idea of how I want to tackle it. I'm considering adding blood spatters on all their weapons, but I'm not sure if that'd reduce the visual impact of the hazard stripes they're all packing.
A current mob shot:
And on we go. Only 2 boyz and the grot pair left till this project's tidied up.
20092510:02
am
5 down
Picking up where we left off, I've managed to finish painting two more of the Stormboyz which, all told, is not that much of an impressive feat, considering it's been about two weeks since my last update. Still, I've been busy!
The mob's coming along. I'm saving the Stormgrots for last as a sort of treat, I think. Doing the smoke/flames and the bases shouldn't take long once I have all of the models finished up.
2009142:58
pm
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.
2009108:53
am
More dakka – obtained!
I got off my ass this morning and made all the casts of the cannon that I'd need.
Please note that I haven't cleaned them up yet, as I couldn't find my good knife. There's a few things that need to be touched up here or there, but overall I think it came out pretty decently. The ammo feed/drum thing that goes on the side is being stubborn; apparently, the one I made was airtight, and imploded when I threw it into the pressure pot. The gun nearly did, as well! It probably would have if I hadn't filled it with a two-part plumbing epoxy while I was building it for strength. As-is, a little rubber managed to leak into my original gun's housing, but nobody'll ever know...
Wait, drat!
Anyway, here's my rough mockup:
I think it's looking pretty sharp. Now to go clean off the guns.
200982:56
pm
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!
200982:52
pm
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.
2009810:22
am
Needs more dakka!
I finished up the gun and designed it so that it would be reversible. I'm going to cast the gun and the ammo feed will be cast separately, so that I can put it on either side to make it fit the left or right half of the quad-cannon.
I also toyed a bit with the top of the turret, adding a hatch, a guardsman, and some simple armor plating. The 'sensor array', or radar dish, or whatever the hell that is on the normal Forgeworld model, will have an equivalent added on this thing soon, though I may change the design a bit.
Going to throw the cannon into the casting process, and in a day or two I should have all the copies I'll ever need of this gun.
200966:13
am
The Imperial Flakwagon
So I owe one of my good friends a favor that I've been putting off, and he bugged me enough about it that I thought I'd give painting a quick break and see if I couldn't get it done. I had a spare Chimera (actually, a Basilisk) chassis laying around in my bitz bins that was mostly-complete, and I thought I'd make him a Hydra out of it. I started by framing off the general chassis of the chimera and building a rough shape of the turret. Then, I grabbed my styrene tubing and set about making a basic Hydra autocannon. I figured making 4 of the same gun for this would be a monumental pain in the ass, so I'm going to make a single cannon without much detail on the sides so that I can cast it and use it on both sides of the turret; three extras should be enough to finish the turret off.
Both the turret mount and, more obviously, the cannon itself are loose and sitll being worked on. I didn't have enough tracks to actually go all the way around the Chimera chassis, so I'm going to be adding a full track guard to the top of the track well to cover up that little fact.
The greenstuff is going to get sanded down and smoothed out once it's dry. I was using it to help make up for some of the gaps in the construction - I'm not used to imperial vehicles, and I can get away with all sorts of sloppy work on ork ones that won't fly here!
200951:57
pm
Mob Rule of Leadership 3
One more stormboy mostly down.
These photos reveal a couple places that I need to touch up, but I'll get to that later on. Group shot again:
Quick question. Do these images appear too bright or dark to some of you? I've got multiple monitors on my PC, and I usually try and normalize the images that come out of my camera to have a proper light balance based on the biggest screen that I use primarily for work. Odd thing is that these images look different on each monitor, so I'm not sure if my photography's actually coming out looking decently for the majority of you guys.

June 9th, 2010