Celestial Lions Land Speeder (Part 6 -Finished!)

And here we are:

Finished!

Yes, I finished this thing -finally! Here are the final steps leading up to the finish. This next pic shows the addition of the middle stabilizing strut thingy that hangs down from the Land Speeder's hill. The trick here is to eye-ball it just right to get it as centered as possible.

Centering of the stabilizing thing.

Next was the time comsuming and agonzing hand painting of the Celestial Lions icons. I think the ones on the marine pauldrons turned out alright but the ones on the Speeder are just OK. And OK enough to not feel the desire to redo them.

Icons done. 

Next came the addition of the ball-joint mount.  Unlike a previous Land Speeder I remembered to lube the ball joint with some petroleum jelly so that it moves better and removes easier. If the ball breaks off inside the mount it is a real pain in the ass getting it back out!

Mount and ball joint flight stand.

And it's done! Woo-hoo! A Land Speeder Tornado with all the weapon options fully magnetized!

Multi-melta and Heavy Flamer

Heavy Bolter and Heavy Flamer

Heavy Bolter with Assault Cannon.

Multi-Melta and Multi-melta. For extra meltiness!

All-in-all it was a fun project and despite the span of a year I am really very satisfied with how it turned out. Now I just need to get The Bob or some other volunteer to blow it up on the first turn of a Kill Team game!

Mime Time

Mime Time! 

Back in May of last year my Harlequins took to the field of battle for the first (and still only) time. It was my first (and still only) game of Shadow War: Armageddon). In that game I had two "juve level" models called Mimes. It bothered me that the models were not WYSIWYG and I set about correcting that problem. After acquiring the models I wanted to use, in this case two of the passenger models from the Shadow Weaver kit, I kit-bashed them with a few Dark Eldar bits, most notably the mirror heads from the Wyches box set.

Kitbashed.

After some time I picked these clowns up again and began painting them in the Reaper's Mirth scheme that I have selected to paint my Harlequin force in.

Base coats.

Happily I can claim that it didn't take very long to complete these two.

Already finished?

 I will note a few changes to this scheme: The backpacks on the plastic Harlequins are a bit more dsitinguished then they are on the really old metals, so following the guide in the Warriors of the Laughing God paint guide I opted to paint these in a metallic color. I did this with Bolt Gun metal, Nuln Oil and a highlight of Mitheril Silver.

Back pack units. 

 The mirror masks, sword and knife were painted in Mitheril Silver, then a glaze of Drakenhof Nightshade, the highlighted slightly with Mitheril Silver again.

Final Highlights.

After that, I drew their icons onto their knee pads using a micron. I deviated their placement with the justification that these are 'juve-level' Harleys and this is a another way to distinguish that.

I have also started on another model used in that Shadow War game, but I will include him in a future Clowning Around post.

For the future.

Clowning Around (Part 5)

The Reaper's Mirth rebounds!

Goodness, it has been a good while since I posted about these mirthful clowns huh? Well, over the course of a year I have dabbled and poked on some of these miniatures but it was done in a random and chaotic manner. While doing such an activity I noticed that this particular miniature looked...odd.

Something is wrong...

When I got this miniature it was primed black, which hid the issue surprisingly well. It just appeared to be in a dynamic leap and stretching his back to the extreme as it is doing so. But when I sat down and started applying basecoats a problem became apparent: it had a broken spine! There was no way this thing was assembled correctly, so I pried it appart.

What the heck kind of glue is this?!

It was glued together using the strangest of glue. I don't know what this stuff was but it was stretchy and did not want to come off of the metal.

Seperated at last!

After getting it seperated I went about scrapping this goopy stuff off of the miniature to reveal the proper joins.

The glue is removed.

I decided to paint the miniature almost all the way before reassembling him.

Rejoined and mostly painted. 

And with just a bit of focus I completed thia miniature. The icons were the hardest bit, of course, but I am OK with how they turned out. Especially the triangular Prism icon which I liked so much I decided not to fill it in!

Finished with icons. 

I was tempted to add some diamonds to this model but I decided that the white was such a harsh and punchy color that it was best to let it be. Maybe I will do that on some of the other models as I get around to them.

Diamond free.

 I chose to go with green on the gems with this Harley for the sake of contrast. Like I did with the Death Jester.

Green gems, truly outrageous!

As I worked on this I was also working on a few of the other Harleys, particularly the three from the last post. But will hold off for now and will instead show you those, and perhaps more, in the next part.

Celestial Lions Land Speeder (Part 5)

So close to done it hurts.

Continuing on from Part-4, I focused on trying to make the gunner(s) magnetic. It was an excercise in tenacity but I managed to persevere. It took a lot of cutting, scrapping and fiddling to get it to a point where I was happy with them both.The joins are concealed fairly well and I will be able to take full advantage of the slide-bar if I choose too.

Magnetic torsos.

The gunner's arms were assembled by glueing them to the torso and quickly mounting the gun to the stabilizing rod and them glueing it to the grip in the shooter's hands. I did this with both sets of torsos allowing about 10 hours of curing time for each gunner torso. 

Heavy Bolter torso.

Both of the gunners magnetic option have turned out as I had hoped they would. Yay for the little victories! Now to get their iconography done.

Both the gunners together with their guns. 

Which leads to my next conundrum: the icons. Da Masta Cheef kindly suggested a seller on ebay who makes and sells many different and diverse iconography options in water tranfers. In particular spotted these Lion transfers he thought would work well for my needs, although in truth ge probably was just sick of me bitchibg about hand painting the Celestial Lions icons.

Lion icons.

However, although I like them, they just didn't work for my needs. And they were just too different in style from the ones I have been hand painting. So I will have to continue to hand paint the icons, and I am OK with that. There is a crude aspect about it that I like, that gives each marine a bit of their own character.

Compare and contrast.

Here is the Multimelta Gunner mounted into position after I attached his head. I have always thought tbis gun was a weird choice due to how big and LOS restricting it is. It must be difficult to aim at close ground targets unless the pilot angles and positions the Land Speeder just right.

Muti-melta gunner in position.

I added the driver's shield and the two steps as well. The steps needs a bit more paint though and they are bit too rusty at the moment. .

Driver's shield added.

Only a few touch-ups left (not much more) and of course the chapter icons need to be done which are going to be challenging as always. Watch out the next part to see how that turns out.

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Daemonettes En Plastique (Part 1)

Back towards the end of the summer of '17, I began assembling the first few of my plastic Daemonettes. I learned that the instructions aren't too helpful, at least not the ones from the original kit, in determining which legs go to a specific torso. In fact, at a glance, it would appear that you could mix them up. But you can not. It took some time to figure out and properly match them up.

"Get it together you lot!"

The legs and torsos are aranged on the sprue so that you assemble them according to their layout. This only matters with the legs and not the arms or heads which you can mix up as you please. It would have been really kind of whomever drafted up this original instruction sheet to have been a bit more clear about all of this.

With a sprinkling of skulls.

Never-the-less, I managed to get both boxes assembled  before Christmas arrived and I was looking forward to diving right into painting them when the New Year started. The cold and inclimate weather has been an obstacle with getting anything primed however.

(The above copy was written in early January.)

At this time it is early March, and Spring, for the most part, seems to have arrived early in east Tennessee. And I have managed to get some things primed when the opportunities have presented themselves.

Squad 1.

 Or at least until I ran out of Chaos Black primer. As evidenced in these photos my can petered out halfway through the priming process. Fear not, I already got a new can of primer and soon the rest will be coated. Then I will be launching Project: Slaanesh at full blast.

Squad 2.

So, yeah, nothing all that pretty in this post, other than seeing that Project: Slaanesh, as stated in my 2017 year end review, is going to really happen -and soon!

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Space Wolf Scouts (Part 3)

I finally decided on a scheme that I wanted to try on my Space Wolf Scouts I thought it would be interesting to paint them in a sort of fusion of the current paint scheme that GW uses and the early Advanced Space Crusade scheme.

Fenrisian fusion.

Below are examples of my early '90s Space Wolf Scouts painted to match the schemes presented in White Dwarf magazine circa 1991-1992.

Scouts from the early '90s.

In lieu of experimenting on my Shadow War Armageddon Space Wolf Scouts I opted to try it out on this long abandoned Scout. He was abandoned because I was not happy with the way the paint job was turning out at the time. Since then ("then" being around 2004) he has been knockeb about and chipped rather badly.

Before any touch-ups.

I simply tightened up the existing scheme by touching up the chips, recoloring the chest aquilla and painting Chaos Black on the gun. Since this is an experimental model I saw no crime in experimenting more with the gun's color scheme. I painted it in the typical Dark Angels scheme that I enjoy using. I have always wanted to see how it would turn out if I were to ink over this scheme. So I figured "what the heck" and washed it with Dakka Green. I decided this was strange and not dark enough. So next I tried the old and original Citadel Green Ink over this. The resulting color seriously popped out and was way too distracting.

Gun experiment.

I was not sure it was me or not so I asked a few friends for their opinions. After getting their input I ultimately decided that this was not going to work for what I was going for so I chose to abandon this. Shame too, because it really is a striking result. Perhaps if I ever wanted to paint Dark Eldar in a green color?

Fixed Green.

I went back to my Dark Angel scheme for the green Heavy Bolter. I also attempted to paint a 5 o'clock shadow on his face using Nuln Oil.

Back to Dark Angels Green.

I painted the left shoulder pad in Sunburst Yellow over Fiery Orange and then added the red fang icons.

Left shoulder pad.

All-in-all I am pleased with how this model turned out and how this scheme is working. Next in this series I will be applying this to the plastic scouts.

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