Rob Jedi's Miniatures Blog

Super Dungeon Explore finally arrived :D

2012-01-27T15:42:00.004+11:00

I've literally been waiting like a year and a half for this game. Since it was 1st announced it has taken forever to get through development delays, manufacturing delays, shipping delays, customs delays, distribution delays, then finally shipping to Australia delays. The only quick bit was I got it the day after it arrived in Australia.

So I immediately opened it up and took a bunch of pics.

looks like this may be version 1.1 already ;)

bases were a bit smaller than expected, they are 23mm across instead of the usual 25mm slot base size. The pretextured top are great though.

sooooooo many bits

here I've started cleaning the models. The mold lines aren't too bad but there are so many bits. Clean up seems has to be done with a file, scraping with a blade didn't do much. The plastic seems like vinyl of some sort rather than styrene, very similar to what Privateer Press uses.

here's some comparison size photos with Nendoroid petites, a few trading figures and some regular gaming miniatures

Western Town Progress at last

2012-01-18T12:31:00.004+11:00

It's been a bit of a dry patch for my painting. Summer dries the paints out too fast. I'd rather be going out or playing video games and damn there were a lot of good long video games. Got through Assassin's Creed Revelations, Uncharted 3, Resistance 3, I'm still working on Halo Anniversary, Batman Arkham City, Forza 4 never ends and I just got Saints Row the Third so it took some effort to sit down and try and get all of these done and out of the way. Oh I've also been writing game reviews over here: www.techromp.com

the whole town is done here sitting on the kitchen table at my friends place. We were putting in a bit of team effort to get these done and get a heap of signage ready for Cancon coming up in another week.

Now for some WIP shots

discovery: it's way easier to paint these buildings flat than when they are all built. Note that for next time. This one is the walls of Lum's Laundry in the lineup named after my friend Andrew Lum.

a couple shots of the barber shop as I was painting on all that trim around the awning and stuff already glued on, gah such a pain. I figured it needed a barber's pole so made one from a plastic BB and a bit of tubing, with a bit of copper wire wrapped around the join.

here's the secret of painting the stripe quick and clearly. I painted the pole cream 1st then drybrushed it white. Then I cut a thin strip of masking tape and wrapped it around the pole.

paint on your stripe, don't need to be neat.

peel off the tape and there you go.

Nurgle Champion Ozpainters painting workshop

2011-11-19T23:46:00.003+11:00

Had a busy day today painting up the current Nurgle champion in the Sydney Ozpainters get together and painting workshop. Along with a nice BBQ lunch and going out for Japanese for dinner was a pretty good day.

He's an ugly brute of a figure so I had to think a bit how to paint him after quickly assembling him and giving him a white prime with an airbrush. For my version I started with a pale rotting green basecoat for the skin then shaded with more normal flesh tones and highlighted up to menoth white.

everyone busily panting away

and some of the very nice minis that people had brought in to show off

some of the other painters versions in progress

back to my one, I started doing deep shading first with brown then with scab red

then after all the skin was pretty done I painted the metal areas and underneath black then painted the armour folk art gunmetal then drybrushed chainmail

then rust, rust and more rust

I got the idea to use Tamiya clear red on his open wounds and to bloody up the axe, it really brightened up the figure a lot and shifted the tones into the reds quite a bit.

After dinner I drybrushed the base and called him done, just needed some Silfas grass on his base when I got home.

Guild Austringer WIP

2011-11-08T20:39:00.003+11:00

Did a bit of work on my remaining Guild ally the Austringer and did a bit of work on some Ronin for my eternally unfinished Twins gang.

Unlike the official yellowish brown paint scheme for the bird I tried to make mine look like an American Bald Eagle, I may have gotten carried away with the wing tips but I'm very happy with the look of him.

So much blue jeans.

Death Marshals and their new office.

2011-11-08T20:31:00.004+11:00

Had a bit of painting weekend with fellow Ozpainters Andrew and Nick. We wanted to make a good dent in the town worth of Aetherworks Wild West builings they churned through a couple play quality buildings and I got through all the panel lining on my whitewashed buildings and finished the Marshal's office.

so many buildings to finish

then I pulled out the board to put them on

More Terrain

2011-10-26T11:57:00.002+11:00

I finally got the big ruined tower and warhammer fences done.

I spent way too much time on these fences but I'm happy with how they turned out so guess it was worth it.

The tower went from generic grey to funky browns and rust and green weathering all over the place, then I went nuts with grass growing out of all the nooks and crannies around the base of it, I think it's turned out as a really interesting piece despite all the stupid skulls everywhere.

And now more WIP shots

I kinda wonder if I should have left them like this and not added flock to the bases, oh well too late now.

swarming with Guild

I'm Famous (uncredited)

2011-10-26T11:15:00.004+11:00

Browsing through the Reaper website for new releases and was looking through the box sets. They finally put my Abyst on the box that they used to use in the catalog.

Link

Rushed Army on Parade board

2011-10-25T22:45:00.004+11:00

At the last minute I managed to get a ticket to games day from a very generous fellow OzPainter and after a poke from Numbat I got it in my head to rush an army on parade board to try for a wild card entry into the comp. I started with a big sheet of 12mm MDF from Bunnings which I had cut into 2 60cm x 60cm boards.

I already had a bunch of GW terrain mostly done from recent efforts so figured I had enough to fill a board.

that was the basic layout guestimated and traced onto the board. I surrounded the terrain bits with slate then covered the board with sand and stuff.

many hours of painting and drybrushing later

few orky baracade sections after rusting up and a metallic drybrush, they add a nice amount of detail, still have to pick out all the skulls and skellies and stuff

rusty spiky columns

getting there, still a lot of skulls to pick out and a heap of grass to add.

so many skulls and skeletons

after all the grass flock

Here's the board on the day. Unfortunately I stayed up way too late getting the board done and didn't make it in time to get enough votes. Oh well.

Post Games Day & MOAB loot

2011-10-14T12:36:00.003+11:00

I totally forgot to post about Games Day and MOAB this year. At the very last minute a generous fellow from OzPainters gave me a spare ticket to Games Day so I got it into my head to try and rush an Armies on Parade board. On one hand it was a stirring of inspiration I haven't had all year for GW stuff on the other hand it was madness to try and rush it in one day. I'll post up pics of the board in the next post. In the mean time here's my loot from the weekend. I was a lot more reserved in my spending than most years (damn mortgage)I also had Dreadfleet ordered from mailorder (wish I'd bought it at MOAB instead).

If you are wondering about the White Dwarf in the back I got it signed by the Perry Twins
:D

that's them with my Wax 5 (it now has magical powers of sculpting)

Water tower painted and work on town buildings

2011-10-09T15:41:00.001+11:00

Amongst doing some work on my town buildings I got the water tower painted. Basically a heap of drybrushing and some washes over the metal areas. Quite happy with the results.

The buildings are from www.aetherworks.com.au if you are curious.

Western Water Tower

2011-09-03T11:28:00.000+10:00

Yay I have internet again, my connection has been down a week and I've been stuck home much of that time with a sprained ankle :( well I at least got some inspiration to do some modelling. I'd been meaning to add a water tower to my town for a while but was looking for a good tin or something to use as the core of the tower. Finishing up a container of drinking chocolate gave me the perfect tube to start with since it has cardboard sides which are easy to glue to and a tin base good for strength.I figured it was a bit too tall so measured down to where I'd like to cut it and then used masking tape to give me an even line all the way around to cut along.next I cut craft sticks down to the height of the can sides. Using heavy duty scissors made this quick work but I wore holes in my thumb and finger :( so maybe I need some more comfortable grip scissors.the sticks were all glued on the side using PVA.then strips of card were added as metal bands.next I tried cutting out a few different sizes of circles from newspaper to work out what size to cut for the conical roof. This one seemed to fit about right so I cut it again from Cereal box card.I glued matchsticks to the underside as supports, it looks a lot like a paper umbrella from underneath.here it is on the tower after I cut off the top pull off bit of the plastic lid.after a few hours of cutting out shingles from card and glueing them on one at a time. I had to cut the shingles tapered to make them fit in circles. I cut another cone to cap it at the top.next up lots of rivets cut from plastic rod superglued in place. Then some legs from ancient balsa wood I had lying around.I went through a few different design ideas for the cross supports. I initially used some coffee stirrers but they seemed to thick and was difficult to have them cross so instead I went for matchsticks with one set of 4 going on the inside and another set on the outside.I'm pretty happy with the size and look of it. It still needs a filling pipe though.

New Terrain - so much grey

2011-08-15T13:33:00.003+10:00

I know it's been months since my last update. I've been rather annoyed at GW and their retarded handling of our local market. Basically the Australian dollar has gone up a lot over the last year, so that buying from overseas has basically been 1/2 the local price. So rather than encourage local sales by redressing the prices they instead went the greedy arsehole route instead and put an embargo on UK and US retailers from sending to the Southern Hemisphere. They also about the same time changed metal minis over to the new fragile finecast resin and raised prices 20% as well. So basically if I were to buy any more of their product it would cost 240% what it used to.

So this lot here was my last UK order before the gate closed possibly forever on me buying their product. I bought a bunch of their nice generic friendly terrain kits that I can use for Malifaux and Warmachine. The Ruins of Osgiliath LOTR terrain kit I had purchased one of before so got a 2nd. Their warhammer fences kit and trees kits are both very good and not overladen with skulls. The stonehenge like skull altar however has lots and the ruined skull temple has even more, I figured it would make a nice display base for my old World Eaters army.

While I was painting these I dug out some other kits that needed attention, the ruined round wizard tower that came out several months ago. Lastly a real oldy the tower from the Battle Masters game.

As you can see there was a lot of putty work in cleaning up the joins on these kits

This shot shows rather nicely the dramatic difference a few layers of drybrushing makes. I started painting them by priming with black mat spray then a 1st very heavy drybrush of charcoal grey followed by the medium grey on the right and lastly a very light grey. I may follow this up with some light white touches on the edges later.

Have to say these all paint up really nicely and pretty easily. I had the help of the lovely assistant Hanna at the gaming club to knock the last colour of drybrushing out. Next step will be to do all the wood parts and pick out details and add some dirt.

While I was knocking these out the club was also finally getting some progress on some home made Mordheim terrain they'd had in the back for ages.

Oh if anyone was curious about the figure it's a Nendoroid Petite of Lucky Star's Konata cosplaying as Saber from Fate Stay Night. The other reason I haven't painted anything in ages is I got seriously hooked on buying anime figures :D

Dead West Marshal and Cowboy

2011-05-31T00:31:00.001+10:00

Here's a better photo of those Dead West minis from last week

More painting Bricks the hard way

2011-05-31T00:26:00.003+10:00

Painting the Marshall's office continues. Next building is definitely getting drybrushed instead XD

Marshall's Office

2011-05-23T15:48:00.003+10:00

Yay I'm starting to do some painting again. I painted these 2 cowboys from Dead Lands and finished my Death Marshall's crew for Malifaux. Will take some better shots of them in the next update.

This is a new building from Aetherworks I just started. I'm painting the bricks in the most time consuming way possible, one at a time with variations of mixed paint between a sand colour and medium brown. Next time I think I'll start dark and dry drybrush them all.

Tin Soldier Penrith

2011-03-29T11:27:00.002+11:00

Went along with a couple friends to check out the last remaining Tins in Sydney, way out west in Penrith. As is usual it was up some stairs and tucked away where no one would see the store from the street, but it turned out to have a massive floorspace and maybe a dozen gaming tables layed out with quite good terrain. It looked like a great place to get a game in. I took some snaps of the unused tables, love nice terrain, the trench table was a standout.

Fairwell Friendly Local Game Store

2011-02-20T21:42:00.002+11:00

After decades of supplying minis and board games and all that other handy hobby stuff including a place to play them and occasionally sit around painting them or just talking about em Tin Soldier Sydney closed it's doors for the last time. I'd followed the store around the city through the years from the Dymocks Building when I 1st got into this hobby years before GW would go relatively main stream by opening it's own stores and start brainwashing little munchkins, years before Magic the Gathering and it's effects on the hobby by bringing in collectability into the hobby, it moved to the Mid City Centre across from Hobbyco when it too moved there, then it's move to Kent St and oddly next door to itself when it moved again. They've always been in pretty obscure spots that you'd never walk in to off the street but if you knew to look they always had way more stuff than the competing stores. It's already weird not being able to drop by there on a Thrursday night to just have a browse of the latest Reaper minis or the latest board game that someone had picked up and was inflicting on others to justify buying it (I know this feeling well). The chain isn't gone for good, they still have online and a store way way out west in Penrith but I'm going to miss em in the city.

Talon Pirate Warjack

2011-02-15T11:29:00.002+11:00

My gaming group has recently gotten into MkII Warmachine so I thought I'd go back and try and get some more work on my pirate army. I converted this guy quite a while ago and he's been sitting around half painted for ages. So on a painting day on the weekend I finally got around to finishing him off. Using my older Buccaneer jack as reference I copied the corroded metals and banged up look.

Saloon

2011-02-15T10:58:00.003+11:00

Been working on this one for a while. It was actually the 1st building designed for Aetherworks but ended up taking me ages to getting around to. I experimented a bit on this one with my very old airbrush and brand new air compressor laying down the initial shading on the coloured areas of the building. I kinda went too dark though and the building was too pink rather than faded red so it took a fair few washes over the top the soften the shaded areas and to fix the colour more to my liking. After that I painted all the trim areas and door and window frames then added some good old Devlin mud for shading then drybrushed them with white. I experimented a bit in masking the building walls while doing all the drybrushing, I think it helped a bit, same goes for the floor boards which were several shades of brown. I think I may go back and put some scaled posters on the walls sometime but I'm pretty happy with the result at the moment. It looks like a good start to a street butted up against the General Store.

Outhouses

2011-02-15T10:47:00.004+11:00

Cowboys gotta go somewhere. These are detailed up versions of the Aetherworks outhouse kit, with added planks on the outside made from cut up coffee stirrers and wood grain scored onto the planks with a sculpting tool. I've also added some rivets to the hinges area and a bit of wire for a door handle. For painting them it was basically a fair bit of drybrushing up through browns and greys to get a weathered left outside look to the wood and some badab black and devlin mud to darken the lines between the planks.

40K Missionary

2010-10-31T23:40:00.003+11:00

Good old Golden Demons last minute rush painting entries. Mostly done in the week leading up to entry weekend with the good old almost no sleep on the last right going through DVDs of seasons of Black Adder this time around.

WIP shots

Artizan Cowboys

2010-10-31T23:18:00.002+11:00

Was curious about the Artizan wild west range so picked a couple packs of guys on foot and on horse. They're unsurprisingly a bit small compared to the gigantic Dead Lands and generally tall Malifaux minis that I've collected so far. So to make them fit in a bit better I put a bit of plastic card under their cast on bases and then smoothed out the bases with plaster filler.

Old West General Store

2010-10-31T22:55:00.004+11:00

This is my 1st paint up on a small building that I designed for Aetherworks, they went on sale at MOAB recently but I didn't have time to get any painted till now. The gear on the porch is all from Hirst Arts.

and here are some WIP shots. I did the fades colouring by starting with a very pale green mix then progressively darkened it with Thraka Green wash then darkened and dirtied with Devlin Mud and Black Wash. Then all the plank lines traced with green then black washes followed by a drybrush of off white. The wooden parts were all drybrushed up from a dark brown to progressively lighter tans.

The Dwead Piwate Wuppwecht

2010-10-06T16:35:00.003+11:00

I painted up this little fellow for the MOAB painting competition the night before, he was a fun little guy with a great face to work on.

He took 2nd place in single figure. My crashed wagon took 1st place in terrain piece/ diorama and my ork boss took 1st and best of show in monster.

Wrecked Wagon Painted

2010-09-04T23:03:00.004+10:00

The wagon after a well aged paintjob. Basically lots and lots of drybrushing and a bit of Devlin Mud and Badab Black.

Wrecked Wagon WIP

2010-09-04T22:52:00.003+10:00

Bit of messing around with a wagon kit and some cast boxes and sacks and stuff from Hirst Arts and throw in one of those cacti from Pegasus. Plus a helpful dash of slate and gravel and a dud burn DVD.

Something handy for the painter with too many WIPs

2010-09-04T22:12:00.002+10:00

I picked this up last weekend while having a look at Ikea for cabinets and found it in the kitchen department, I instantly thought of how handy it would be to put minis in, also it has the benefit of being stackable so I may buy some more later. I could see it being quite useful for putting unit trays in for transport if the minis are held in with magnets. Me I just have too many works in progress all the time so it's a good way to get them out of the way.

Pegasus Hobbies - Cactus #1 review

2010-08-29T12:07:00.002+10:00

I've been working on a lot of cowboys and designs for lasercut terrain to match lately and something I thought I really needed were cacti to set the scene. Options out there for in scale plant life are fairly limited apart from the regular trees so I was rather happy that the local LGS had a pack of the Pegasus Cactus in stock, there are 2 different sets one of large plants the other of lots and lots of smaller ones. They only had the large set in stock so I picked that up. I must say apart from the horrible 1st impression you get when you open the box and see what looks like yucky bendy green plastic. It turns out it's actually proper styrene not bendy plastic. Set #1 builds into 2 identical sets of 9 different sized castus of the flute and pricky pear variety. I think they scale perfectly with 28-30mm minis like these from Reaper and Dead Lands.

ULTRAXES Bling Ultramarines Dreadnought - Finished

2010-08-29T00:24:00.009+10:00

Sorry dear readers for the stupidly long delay but I kept forgetting to clean up the photos of the finished Dreadnought.

Lotsa Cowboys, and gals

2010-07-03T21:27:00.004+10:00

Had a painting day at my gaming club and got some work done on all the bases and the Gatling Gun and one of the Death Marshalls with a new go at the duster coat, I wasn't liking the medium brown. The lighter tones mostly using colours from the P3 mercenary set.

Gather up a Posse

2010-06-21T22:47:00.004+10:00

Been working on cleaning up all my collected western minis that I bought over the years. Mostly from a clearance of Deadlands minis years ago. Playing a heap of Red Dead Redemption and Malefaux has encouraged me to get them all started so I've spent a couple weeks cleaning them all and doing up bases before priming them all in grey auto primer then dusting them with matt white.

World Eaters Possessed Chaos Dreadnaught

2010-05-15T19:56:00.000+10:00

Lastly the Chaos Possessed World Eaters Dreadnaught. This thing was a kitbash of an Inquisitor Chrono Gladiator, Chaos Dreadnaught, Sentinal, Jumppack, Defiler and some other bits and pieces. I got the idea to spiff the model up for the comp and added flames, lighting effects, weathering, scratches etc.

Empire Engineer

2010-05-15T19:45:00.001+10:00

Next from the same Golden Demons my Empire Engineer, again I dug through my collection for something to paint and he looked kind of fun. The mini is stock with a sculpted base following a similar idea as last years pirate girl. I put down a block of plastic and then sculpted over the top for all the stone work then did up some gears and levers copying some old ork gun details.

Old Ork Painboy

2010-05-15T19:29:00.001+10:00

This is from 3 years ago for Golden Demon I had a dig through my old collection of orks and whatnot and he had such a fun face and the detail of the bionic arm with exhaust and gears showing appealed to me. For an arm I had a look at the new ork plastic ones, I thought the chainsaw would be perfect but the arm reached his ankles so it needed a lot of cutting up and shortening. Also reposed one of the legs to make him a little taller.

Unfortunately in the end although he made it to the finals he didn't place. I was told by a judge "If it was a new model it would have placed" which frankly sucked.

Death Marshall meetup

2010-03-27T20:09:00.002+11:00

Fellow Sydney painter Numbat dropped by during the week for some Rock Band and Band Hero and also brought along his WIP Death Marshalls crew for a meet up with mine. I fished out some plaster buildings I never seem to get around to finishing and we took some photos.

Lady Justice and her Judge WIPs

2010-03-22T00:34:00.004+11:00

Had a painting day at the gaming club got a lot done and got the Judge mostly done with just a bit more finishing done tonight. Pretty happy with the results, he mostly follows the studio paint scheme with the light coat and blonde hair but I decided to try giving him Ghost's face mask on his bandana from Modern Warfare 2, I'm pretty happy with the result. Also got a fair bit of work done on Lady Justice with that mass of red hair done in a bunch of concecutive washes of orange then orange ink then red ink then sepia then red mixed with devlin mud and finally some highlights in yellow on top.

and here's the Judge with Lady Hammerstrike

WIP Lady Justice's Crew

2010-03-18T23:22:00.001+11:00

Little progress in the Wyrd crew, I know it's odd I finished the bases before the figs but drybrushing is messy so though I'd get that out of the way 1st.

Bit of sculpting

2010-03-15T23:38:00.002+11:00

Continuing with the preparing of Malefaux minis I did some work on the big nephalim. He's an interesting demon but I disliked his lack of a neck and hunched head between the shoulders so did some snipping and lot of sculpting to fill in the new neck, upper chest and hair over the top. Wavy hair is quite a challenge to sculpt I must say.

I also did some work on adding some modesty to Brigitte the naugty french maid from Reaper

Lady Justice and her crew of Death Marshalls

2010-03-13T00:19:00.002+11:00

Been meaning to get to these for months but major procrastination on my part. Had them cleaned up ages ago but had to do the fiddling pinning and assembling plus they needed some creative basework to get the marshalls set at interesting angles and to not look like midgets next to Lady Justice, she really is way taller than she should be. I bent her legs a bit too to get her a little closer to the artwork stance.

Ork Boss - con't some more

2010-03-09T00:11:00.004+11:00

More Ork boss

Got to be creative with the weathering on the banner, the bright yellow gave lots of contrast to the rust, streaks and chips.

now it's kind of obvious that I spent a hell of an all nighter from here on cause he's finished in the next bunch of pics.

well that's a full turnaround now for close ups

and finally a shot next to the Ork Nob that took Bronze the year before

Ork Warboss - con't

2010-03-08T23:52:00.003+11:00

I really should have posted the rest of these pics months ago, guess in the post GD burnout I just forgot, or didn't want to think about it. Anyway here is how he turned out.

here I've made a display base using cork sheet, plaster casts from link stonework molds and some coffee stirrers for floorboards.

I painted the grot 1st up then pinned him down.

I stained the floorboards with GW washes and also painted the bricks with the washes as well after giving them a few drybrushes up from grey to white. Quite happy with the red brick effect I got doing it this way.

Here's the big guy's head, figured it was best to paint seperately so I could still paint the rest of the body without it in the way.

Tank Girl

2010-03-02T11:21:00.003+11:00

Did this model long ago when it was easy to find Necromunda minis and it was obvious that the club wielding Escher juve was based off Tank Girl. I took a 1/35 scale tank kit and kit bashed on jet engines and spoilers and bigger guns and extended the turret, and did my 1st bit of sculpting making the little mascot guy on the front. The movie was terrible but fun and I had to have my own version.

The White Dwarf

2010-02-26T21:15:00.002+11:00

Did this guy up very quickly last year for the Golden Demons as a single fantasy entry, got as far as the State round. Ah well, might paint up all the old drunk dwarfs to go with him.

Again with the old stuff - Necromunda Goliath Gang

2010-02-26T20:30:00.004+11:00

As requested the Goliath gang I used to use, since I totally hated the ugly official Goliath minis I used a mix of Warzone, and Grenadier/Copplestone Future Warriors, a mad scientist from Deadlands and the girl from I can't quite remember where.

More old minis - Necromunda Escher gang

2010-02-26T13:26:00.002+11:00

I need to sort out photos from my last painting rush for Golden Demons last year, will try and post them up this weekend. In the mean time here's more pics saved from the old site.

Looking at these, man they have aged. No one would paint minis these bright now a days, and the dark lining is way too thick. I should look through the boxes of unpainted lead and paint some of the unpainted Eschers I know I saved.

Starship Troopers Diorama

2010-02-25T15:47:00.002+11:00

Here's a repost from my old website, I'll try and repost all the old content since geocities shut down. The models are old 40K metal Cadians and an fan made bug predating the official licensed game by quite a few years.

Red Faction Industrial Mecha

2010-02-24T21:53:00.003+11:00

Got this rather nice industrial mecha from the game Red Faction Guerrilla today from the local gaming club. I must say it'd make an excellent vehicle for 40K, Necromunda or Gorka Morka. Not sure what I'll do with it yet, I'm super impressed with the articulated extending hydraulics on the legs and the general detail all over, especially the stairs at the back with barely visible hand rails. The only meh detail area is the cockpit interior, a sentinel pilot would work great in there, will have to trawl the bits box to see what I can find.

Wyrd minis in progress

2009-11-08T21:14:00.002+11:00

At MOAB my friends at Mainly Medieval had brought along lots of stuff for the new Malifaux game, with all the starter sets to choose from it was hard to pick a faction so for the moment I had a dig through my unpainted collection and found all the Wyrd stuff I already had and cleaned em all up, Pandora was a damn tricky one to clean up and assemble, I got inspired to do a nice fancy pentagram base carved into a slab of plaster and for Lillith I used a cast of Linka molds brickwork and sculpted up some tentacles bursting from the sewers bellow.

Lady Hammerstrike V1 & 2

2009-11-08T21:05:00.002+11:00

Sorry about the ages between updates, I didn't want to show off how my GD entries had finished up before the finals.

So here's something else Lady Hammerstrike version 1 I rushed a while ago for a small Wyrd mini comp.

and for MOAB to boost entry numbers I thought I'd take another go at redoing her. Turned out I redid the skin, arm, hair pants tops and base. Only thing that stayed the same is the bottom part of the pants.

Dreadnought progress - WIP

2009-09-22T16:28:00.002+10:00

Been working on the metal areas of the dread since they required a lot of drybrushing layers and layers plus lots of washes.

Pretty happy with the banner so far. Still needs a name on there and the blue to be made to look like cloth. Still undecided what to paint on the back. Should it be blue as well or cream?

I needed a break from metals so did most of this guy quickly, he still needs his skin done.

Aliens

2009-09-22T16:23:00.002+10:00

Saw on Frothers someone had the idea to convert plastic bloodletters into Aliens' Aliens. I had to try it out for my plans to pimp out my old copy of Space Hulk with EM4 Colonial Marines and proper Aliens. Of course a day after I did this the new version of Space Hulk was announced. Kinda killed off the project, ah well I'll still do these up as Aliens as I have time.

Dreadnought Banner - WIP

2009-09-17T12:04:00.002+10:00

Worked on the banner last night, I'm trying to get the look of the heraldry being embroidered onto the banner. Not sure if the effect is too large to work properly. Seems to work at a short distance away.

The desert yellow base is given a wash of devlin mud for initial shading.

I start adding the embroidery lines on the eagle with yellow then white mixed with yellow then straight white.

Now I've done the skull and Ultra symbols. The Ultra starting from Space Wolf Grey and working up to white, the skull from a light coffee brown up to white.

A few layers of shading is added to the eagle give more of a gold look using several washes.

That's it for now, lots more to go.

Dreadnought Base - WIP

2009-09-11T10:53:00.006+10:00

Got to work on the dreadnought finally. Messy stuff always needs to be done 1st so I started with the base which involved a fair bit of drybrushing and washes, and individually painting all those tiles.

I'm pretty happy with the way the stone work has a concrete colouring to it and a good level of dirtiness to it.

edit: Here's the paints I used to paint the concrete

basically it was a series of drybrushes followed by picking up the edges carefully with white.

Greenskins WIP

2009-09-06T22:12:00.003+10:00

Finally got started on painting some of my greenskins for this years GD. Got started on the skin on all of them and got one gretchin done in the 1st day of painting.

Watchtower - Painted

2009-08-09T20:54:00.002+10:00

Had a very busy day of grinding away at base resin castings, so much resin dust gahhh. Thought I'd try and get all my pirate bases done in one go to get me motivated on getting my pirates done. So after I primed them I got to work on the bases of the jacks sitting on my desk and the tower since they are all timber.

Went with a dark base then 3 goes of drybrushing lighter browns then some quick shading with GW washes to deepen the tones and darken the joins. I think it works as a quick method to do timber.

Watchtower

2009-08-03T23:53:00.002+10:00

Got out the dremel today to work on this kit I picked up a couple months ago of a nice classic style watchtower. I want it to fit in with my pirate terrain so I engraved decking flooring and roof and covered it in wood grain. A total pain in the wrist to do but I got it all done then cut up and assembled in a day so yay. Will try and get it painted tommorow. Got my recent warjack primed too so will start on him as well.

Talon Light Warjack - New Big Daddy

2009-07-30T23:28:00.002+10:00

The Big Daddy jacks getting discovered by the video gaming blogs got me worked up to get back onto finishing these guys.

I recently picked up the 40K ork gretchin pack and the tesla style prod thingy got me thinking it would make a great stun lance tip, so ordered a Talon to add to my merc jacks.

I trimmed off the original conicle spear tip then cut down the zappy part to fit. It needed something wider behind it so I tried a wire hoop 1st but didn't like so did it again with a bit of plastic tubing spaced slightly from the spear shaft.

Seems I've added a wheel to all my previous jacks so gave one to the Talon too. It's half of a snap stud with some added rivets.

I was surprised how much shorter the Talon was when he arrived or should I say how tall the Buccaneer is. So I decided to alter his feet a bit to make him a tiny bit taller and to match the aquatic jacks look a bit more.

I trimmed off the sides of the toes 1st, then glued on plastic sheet under neath with an edge all the way around. Then filled the notch between the toes with filler putty then sanded it smooth.

For the new diver face of the jack I trimmed off a bit of the hood and then glued on a left over part from a plastic kit. I dremelled back the front of the dome part to fit on a window.

then I bent up some wire hoops to make a face cage, this time going over his back as well like the proper Big Daddies

I finished off the cage with some nice bolts where the cage joined the shoulders. Then I cut plastic rod and made a heap of rivets to circle the face for that high pressure tank look. Also added a rivetted plate over the top of the head cause every jack needs that collar looking thing up top.

I detailed the inside of the forearms a bit with staggered holes then glued them in place.

Last thing to do was make a decking base from balsa wood and I also added a couple rats on a little barrel from Rackham from one of their scenary details packs i got recently.

Couple more angles:

Here he is with the Buccaneer.

Speaking of detailing the bases I thought it'd look funny to have a drunk passed out under the beer jack (Mule) so slightly modded this passed out monk mini from Shadowforge, just split his robe to look like shorts then added a belt and a mo and filled in the shaved bald spot.

the Mariner gets a little girl packing heat from Freebooter, I think I need to add a face cage to him to match the rest.

OzPainters downtime! Back on 1st August!

2009-07-30T22:34:00.004+10:00

OzPainters hit the bandwidth cap - it should tick over on the turn of the calendar month. In the meantime, you can follow OzPainters on Twitter for status updates:

http://twitter.com/ozpainters

Update: The forums are back up.

Freaky week

2009-07-22T17:34:00.005+10:00

So weird to browse through Kotaku AU yesterday morning and find out my Big Daddy jacks made the news, then see em on Destructoid, Game Set Watch, Kotaku US and Toycutter. Sure drove my page views up. So welcome anyone that has just discovered my blog.

Black Scorpion Pirate

2009-07-17T14:08:00.003+10:00

Another older model, I really need to finish some of my many work in progress models on my desk. This fellow is a Black Scorpion pirate I did up for one of their online competitions, he earned an honourable mention If I recall correctly. They make some very characterful pirates at Black Scorpion and I've been meaning to get their new fantasy pirates to add to the collection.

Flaming Sword conversion

2009-07-10T14:24:00.003+10:00

Another old mini, I converted this fellow for our D&D campaign. Good front line fighter with a kickass flaming sword. tricky part was finding a flaming sword, instead I found a Reaper mini with a cool pose and made my own. I wanted that chunky Iron Kingdoms look to the sword so made a new blade from plastic card and redid the cross piece with detail bits. I also swapped his helmeted head for a GW plastic one and sculpted on new hair. I was going for a Siegfried from Soul Calibur look.

Turns out sculpting flames isn't that hard as long as you don't overwork them. You want to keep large areas that you can paint later. Try and keep them looking fairly soft, and keep working in one direction to get the flame tips.

After I'd started painting I decided I didn't like the chisel tip to the sowrd any more so filed it back to a point instead.

Here he is with all down with lots of directional lighting was a bit of an experiment adding flame colour to the armour, I used orange ink to try and keep the colour transparent and let a bit of the metallic still come through.

Here he is facing off against a McFarlane Dragon action figure.

Aegis Defence Line - Arbite Thin Blue Line

2009-07-09T22:46:00.003+10:00

Here's the defense line showing the AA gun and it layed out as a small fortress like line along with my old Adeptus Arbites manning the line.

Warcraft Peggle

2009-07-09T11:21:00.007+10:00

Link
So cool. In mini related news I cleaned up and assembled the new 40K Planet Strike Aegis Defence Line kit last night. It's a great set of 4 large barriers and 4 small one man sized barriers plus a quad auto cannon AA gun with base. I hate cleaning mold lines on plastic kits :( I'll take pics and post them tonight.

Fieldstone Ruin - Hirts Arts

2009-07-06T15:31:00.003+10:00

A couple people asked where the background for the elf rogue came from. It's a small ruin I made on top of a dud CD, they make great bases for terrain. I wanted a small miniature display kind of structure so made it with 2 levels big enough to easily fit a base onto. The walls are from the Hirst Arts Fieldstone mold. It was drybrushed heavily and certain stones stained in various browns to add variety to the wall. The craggly long grass is from a hand broom. The angel statue from GZG via Eureka miniatures.

Terminator Salvation - Hunter Killer

2009-07-05T21:52:00.004+10:00

Not a new paintjob but I picked this up today while shopping for a mates birthday present and I had a dig through the cabinet for the old Space Crusade Chaos Androids to pose with it. I think the toy is a good match scale whise with miniatures. Or you could add a cockpit and convert it into a small Firefly style ship.

Cromwell - Elf Rogue

2009-07-04T21:48:00.005+10:00

Did this one up for our D&D party. The mini is Dilean Softstep 1/2 Elf Rogue, from the selection at the LGS it looked the best match for our dagger loving party rogue, I really liked the smirking face too. I knocked this one over in a day in a very quick paint job for me. Not sure about the daggers in green, maybe I should have tried to make them look more shiny rather than slightly glowy.

Orc Warboss - Golden Demon Entry

2009-07-03T10:44:00.003+10:00

Finally my last entry from 2004, a converted 40K Ork Warboss into a fantasy Orc Warboss. I'll have to look for the WIP photos of him to show off what was sculpted. But basically I curved the horns, added trim to the helmet and a top knot. Sculpted on chainmail. Removed the squig and gun and sculpted on armour. Added a shield and sword and the new back banner poles from an Orc Shaman. Was my 1st time trying to sculpt armour which is quite tricky to keep smooth and get sharp edges with green stuff.

It was very close in the competition but I ended up getting Silver in the Fantasy single category.

Eowyn on Horse - Golden Demon entry

2009-07-03T10:32:00.004+10:00

Another Golden Demon entry from the same year as the Daemon Prince. This is Eowyn on horse back. The really tricky stuff on here was the free hand in the leatherwork of her armour and the shield design. I was using the art of the films books as reference material to get them as accurate as possible to the film version. I had to simplify the shield design a little because of it's complexity. The Riders of Rohan are challenging to paint for competition due to the very similar tones of the browns in their costume, the only strong colours are small touches of red and the green cloaks.

Oh and she got me a Gold in the LOTR category that year.

Daemon Prince of Khorne of the World Eaters - Golden Demon Entry

2009-06-26T16:50:00.005+10:00

This is a bit of a long post since I took a fair few pics of this fellow as I was making him. He was entered in the Golden Demons Australia competition back in 2004, the last of the Games Day GD events, and won me a silver in 40K Large.

Here's his start with a fair bit of green stuff. I ground down the left shoulder plate and sculpted on a mouth with a lot of teeth and a new trim with arrow points. I trimmed back his hanging guts and sculpted in a Khorne belt buckle. I sculpted on the large skull on his left hand. I added extra horns to his head and redid the top of his head. I also added grenades, swords in scabbards, the little pelt cape hanging from his shoulder all from the bits box.

The teeth on the ground down shoulder took a couple goes before I was happy with the result.

It took me a few goes painting the planet in the mouth as well. 2nd time worked out much better.

Captain Razig, Undead Pirate

2009-06-25T13:14:00.004+10:00

Continuing the glowing skeleton theme is Razig a very cool Bob Olley sculpt from Reaper. He's a bit huge to fit with other minis but hey he's a captain. I started this mini in an effort to teach a friend how to paint source lighting so he predates the Bonecaller mini by a year or so. He was a lot of fun to paint. It's a bit hard to see from the WIP but I started with the glowing parts and worked out from there. I basically chose the purple for his coat as a complementary colour to the green glow.

Thanis the Bonecaller

2009-06-25T12:58:00.004+10:00

Thought I'd post up another classic mini I did last year. This one was done for a local painting competition. A nice mini from Reaper Thanis the Bonecaller. I pictured her summoning the skeletons from a swamp makeing them rise up lifting her with them. Figured it would look cool if they were glowing too, so lots of lighting effects in the paintjob from her staff tip and from the skeletons. For the water I used many coats of Tamiya clear green and clear to make a deep glossy water surface, with ripples moddled underneath and painted. An old brush made the sacrifice for the long grass.

Empire Noble

2009-06-19T17:11:00.008+10:00

Haven't actually done any painting lately, been a bit too busy with house hunting and Rock Band 2 so thought I'd post a fellow from a couple years ago. Sculpted by the very talented Victoria Lamb a group of painters participating in the Golden Demons decided to do this as a Visions in Colour style challenge off the side to be shown at our Golden Camels post Demons awards dinner at Newtown.

Anyway here's my version.

and a few WIPs

he ended up coming second to Sebastion Archer who converted his mini to a pirate captain with buried treasure. How am I supposed to compete with Pirates :D

Servo Skull

2009-06-10T17:50:00.002+10:00

Small (well very small) spoiler

still working on how to approach the blue.

E.G.G. Painting Day

2009-05-24T18:07:00.001+10:00

I'm a member of the gaming club at the local University, every now and then they try and drum up some effort towards mini painting. Here's a few pics from the last one.

Finally got around to getting the pics off my camera from the last painting day

Thanks to the wonders of Devlin Mud I got that halfling done from a white prime to just needing the base drybrushed and flocked.

Bling Dreadnought, Part 17

2009-05-18T17:49:00.001+10:00

Numbat asked me to take a pic of him primed so he could make sense of how the skull and shells fit in with the whole thing, so here he is.

Won't be any updates for a while, it's down to the painting now.

Bling Dreadnought, Part 16

2009-05-17T17:48:00.001+10:00

Few updates to the base

I followed the tile idea and cut and glued in some textured plasticard.

next is cutting up lots of aluminium tubing for the spent shells. I was going to use plastic rod but none of the stuff I had looked thick enough. So in the end I made my self a lot more work but I think the results were worth it.

after cutting all the pieces I put them in the chuck of my dremel and bevelled the tip down

It took a while I also puttied up the flat end of each shell.

I went for a good random look by putting down a fair bit of super glue and just sprinkling them on, then placed on the ones that didn't fit bellow up top.

For the other side of the base I got the idea to have a servitor skull floating just off the edge.

I started with a resin skull and just went with the flow and stuck on wires and plastic rod and card and stuff.

I drilled in a hole and there it is

Well that's it modelling wise. I've primed it today.

Bling Dreadnought, Part 15

2009-05-13T17:46:00.002+10:00

Back again. A normal person would have had this thing painted by now, but I keep adding stuff.

I took advice from you guys and glued on some plastic card to the back of the base to get a smooth finish. Then had to putty it up a fair bit and file back since the curve wasn't quite the smoothest due to the bricks behind it.

So after a few days of putty it, wait to dry, sand back, putty it again, etc. I'm happy with the finish now. So decided to get it over with and glue down the legs.

Figured it was best to be extra secure so used some thick floral wire and drilled all the way through to the bottom of the base rather than risk only being glued to the plaster. I glue the feet down 1st then put some green stuff in the sockets and then superglued on the legs so I got a very secure feeling bond.

After that I finally got around to adding the actuators I mentioned ages ago. These are all made from plastic rod and plastic tube. I had to have the legs and feet fixed in position 1st to get these right.

and here's what it looks like with the leg armour back on.

Finally all the parts pulled apart into subsections ready to get primed.

And yes I still don't know what else to put on the base. The dozens of shells idea is still my current fave. The dead bullet riddled body idea though good often looks incredibly tacky and frankly there isn't that much space on the base to put a body.

1st post :)

2009-05-12T12:43:00.000+10:00

Hi everyone, finally caved in and started a blog page. Seems much easier to maintain than a website, and hey my old one on Geocities is about to go RIP.

Following the advice of Numbat I've redated all my posts to their original dates rather than have that info in the header, and add tags to everything. I'll try and make the pics smaller if I can too.

Bling Dreadnought, Part 14

2009-05-10T17:45:00.002+10:00

I detailed the ammo feed and the place the feed comes out.

I added a detail strip with a heap of rivets around the wrist

and I added grip bits to each finger and then trimmed them flush

I also put some effort into adding some angle to the arms from the body. I'd been posing the left arm a certain way since I 1st put him together, but it relied on a heap of blu tac to get the arm in that position so I had to make some spacers. I could have done it by just jamming putty in there and setting the arms but I figured this was was neater.

I started by cutting out a circle of plasticard roughly to size then drilled a hole in the middle essentionally making a washer that fit over the arm joint.

this was cut in half and then the edge ground down while holding the bits in forceps

then sanded smooth

and here he is with the spacers glued in place and locating pins holding the arm in place. Just widens the pose a tiny bit but takes away that clenched in elbows look of a stock dread.

I also cut plasticard and glued them in to fill the hollow insides of the AOBR dreadnought. The one very cheap looking part of that dread.

Bling Dreadnought, Part 13

2009-05-08T03:39:00.001+10:00

I think I've been infected by those crazy guard scratchbuilders. I went nuts with hinges and rivets and stuff detailing the ammo drum.

and the gun a bit more

I finally got around to drilling into the base and seeing what he looks like in position. Considering his tendency to still tilt I think I need much thicker pins through his feet holding him down. He sure is a top heavy bugger.

Here he is with his buddy Jnr.

and some dramatic closeups from up close and low

Man there is an insane amount of gribbly junk back there. Painting his unarmoured back concerns be. Most people do all the details in straight metal. Numbat suggests putting in little hazard stripe areas to break it up but there is so much of it.

I think I should still put actuators from his ankles to his toes, the ankle joint is insanely skinny looking considering his bulk. Some detail to fill out the area might help. Apart from that I might put some rivets around his hand arm but can't think of much else to add. Well apart from more stuff at the front of the base. It needs something, not sure if the hiding chaos guy is it.

Bling Dreadnought, Part 12

2009-05-07T03:35:00.002+10:00

Back again, was busy seeing movies and stuff last few days. Wolverine has good action bits but a dumb story, and a complete PG lack of blood totally not in keeping with the fights happening on screen. Star Trek on the other hand was awesome, a time travel story that made sense, good action, good acting, nice effects that fit in. Go see it

OK enough movie reviews, back to the Dread. I spent a heap of hours last night cutting up little bits of 3mm x 1mm plastic strips and gluing them onto the ammo feed. I initially was cutting strips by eye but soon realised what a dumb idea that was and measured it all out instead, scoreing the plastic across then down. Then methodically snapping apart the bits with pliars.

then with a pool of liquid cement I started sticking the pieces and gluing them on starting at one end and working my way down. I don't have to really say this took a long time

This of course drove me nuts, and not just on the glue fumes so I added some other random details around the gun and on the body for a break, like adding a bunch of rivets to the hull

Also stuck on a spare Ultra logo I'd made a bit too big to use on the dread onto a plastic Terminator, seems a good fit. Now I'll have to make enough for the squad.

I eventually got all the belt done then started on the feeder thingy on the ammo box. Wasn't quite sure how to do it till I just plain made it as a box over the belt attachment. I worked out what shape to go with, keeping the angled lines of the shoulder piece and drawing it on the plastic card, then I cut 2 pieces and sawed in a couple grooves along the sides of the ammo belt into the drum. This is much easier than filing a perfect curved edge into the side pieces to match the drum. I then glued em into position.

Then glued on the lid and an edge along the bottom, and puttied the edges where I had snapped/bent the plastic card.

After some filing this morning I got sharp edges. It still needs say a line of rivets, maybe some hinges and at least a skull or something on the lid.

Bling Dreadnought, Part 11

2009-05-02T18:34:00.002+10:00

Did some cabling detail tonight, still need those little linkages between all the belt segments like on a heavy bolter ammo belt. Those will take me hours, ah well I have a weekend

Arithorn painting the beasty has been on my mind. I was very inspired by that awesome large scale Ultramarine on CMON by Giganticdark but I doubt I'd go that faded or weathered but will try his way of doing the banner to look like it's embroidered. As for the rest of him I've been searching the web for ideas, the recent gold place by Anna Machowska is a daunting example to look at, but it's so not my style of painting so trying to think what ideas from it I can incorporate.

Some new conversions

2009-05-02T15:49:00.000+10:00

Converted these guys just so they wouldn't look the same as the stock one since I have 3 of them.

made a swivel gun for the brief time my pirates visited Mordheim. (GW)

More civies for the town by Reaper and one by Megaminis that needed to be made taller. She was more a 25mm than a 28mm but I find that pretty much all the difference in old minis compared to new is the hunch of the neck and in the height of the legs.

Also some angry pygmy natives in the back from Eureka which I was quickly painting with GW washes.

Bling Dreadnought, Part 10

2009-05-01T04:32:00.002+10:00

So onto another update, damn this thing is taking a long time or I'm working slow, hard to say which.

Here's the banner I've been slaving over, filing down a resin base then heating it twisting it, reculpting most of the bits I've ground off in trying to make it flatter. The whole back of it is pretty much filler putty. For the rope I tried using a long bit of copper wire looped over my desk handle then I put the other ends in my dremel and turned it on at low speed, it did a great consistent twist the full length of the wire in like 2 seconds, sure beats doing it by hand.

I'm not sure if I should hang some icons off the middle bit of the rope over the banner or keep it clear to just paint the banner.

I sawed off the corners that went over the edge of the base and filed and sanded them back then gooped over the gaps with plaster filler, man it looks like cake frosting in the photo. I'll sand this back tonight then try milliput or the basic putty to fill it up more and get a smooth edge. How do other people do these cut off bases? should I wrap some plastic sheet around the edge to get a clean surface or is the putty and a lot of sanding the way to go?

After a lot of hours while watching TV I hand drilled each link and threaded em on a bit of wire. This can't have been the best way to do it but it will be sturdy at least. I'll start gluing it on tonight then detail up the links.

Here he is with the banner on and I finally got around to that extra gun detailing, I also added a sensor thingy to the top of his shoulder.

Bling Dreadnought, Part 9

2009-04-29T04:30:00.002+10:00

New updates:

Making an Ultramarines U for his chest from plasticard. Start from the hole and work your way out.

Andrew brought over his Forgeworld dread, so I did some comparing. My head needed to be rounder and a bit smaller and the hood area needed to be a bit wider and a lot deaper. This took a lot of grinding and fileing but it all fits together now. He needs new rivets on his forehead though.

He's got a bit more detail on the gun, ammo feed still needs putting together though. I'm working on the banner as well.

This will be his display base. I'm considering what else to put on there. He may have a blood pack hiding in the corner.

Bling Dreadnought, Part 8

2009-04-24T16:48:00.002+10:00

Sculpted a big marine head for the dread while watching Heroes, now I either have to hack the back off it or grind into the dread body to make room for it.

Bling Dreadnought, Part 7

2009-04-24T11:57:00.002+10:00

I worked on cleaning up the numerous gaps. 1st I tried green stuff with a bit of brown stuff mixed in for the big areas and to try and get sharp edges, it mostly worked

oh I took off his head too, I'm working on sculpting up a new one bigger like the forgeworld ones.

Today I bought some Tamiya basic putty for an easier time getting smooth surfaces

Lastly I've started on the ammo feed, this is going to be complicated

Bling Dreadnought, Part 6

2009-04-24T11:53:00.001+10:00

I decided after the initial feedback to try shortening the gun, which went kinda awry and started to come apart so I went what the hell and pulled the entire thing apart and rebuilt it a little different. I moved the spacer rings back a bit, added a 3rd ring. Added a thicker back plate at the back of the barrels and then added a band around the middle of the barrels. Lastly I cut the tips of the barrels down a tiny bit to get them looking snubby.

Next up on the to do list was pinning the body to the legs properly and grinding down the waist joint a bit to take away that too thin middle feeling the stock build gives. I only took off a few mm but it made a difference.

Next up I made an ammo hopper

Blood Bowl Coin

2009-04-23T18:14:00.000+10:00

Forgot to take pics of the coin, I finished it a while ago, wish I could say the same about the team

I hacked the hell out of the edge to make it more coin like.

Bling Dreadnought, Part 5

2009-04-21T05:24:00.002+10:00

More progress on the dread, got all the parts cleaned up and a bit more of it glued together. Also found an old auto launcher in the bits box, not really sure if it's too chunky a detail or I should make a simpler one of just 3 tubes. Also started building a banner pole. Andrew suggested that an arch was needed over the head like the forgeworld ones so I cut the rim off a plastic shoulder pad, it looks the same as the hood detail on a terminator.

I still think the head looks too small though so may resculpt a new one.

Bling Dreadnought, Part 4

2009-04-19T07:59:00.001+10:00

Back, I put in a late nighter and built the new barrels for the gun.

Here was the start point

I cut at the very base of the barrels.

For the new barrels I cut 6 barrels from thin aluminium tubing then some shorter sections to go over the base of the barrels and to also space the barrels apart at the front. I very much wanted the look of spaced barrels at the front like a modern gatling gun rather than have the barrels touching.

To acheive this I needed spacer rings at the front to hold the barrels. I scratched a circle onto a sheet of plastic and then worked out the barrel placement by drilling the center then working out the rest while test fitting the barrels.

I then cut the plastic sheet into 3 parts and layered them together with a clamp so I could use the 1st one as a jig to drill the next 2 rings.

After that I clipped the sheets down to circles and filed them smooth.

Next was the very fiddly process of getting the barrels into place, and more importantly get them even and showing just the right amount of barrel at the front.

Eventually I got it all glued together (after prying the 1st 2 rings apart that accidently got glued together )

And here it is bluetacked into place. Kinda wondering if I made it a little too big but it should look right once I've added the detail of the motors and a new chain feed or ammo belt, I'm still trying to work out how to make that. I've sculpted ammo belts before but never had to do 5-6cm of it. A chain feed may be easier to make. I'm going to make a new ammo hopper on the back of the powerplant rather than use the dinky box at the back of the arm. I'll make the current box look like a battery box instead.

Bling Dreadnought, Part 3

2009-04-18T04:40:00.001+10:00

Next up is what has been the biggest hassle of this kit. (Sorry I didn't take before shots, my bad.) The torso halves joins horribly, I'm not talking gaps but gross misalignment. I think the molds distorted the original pieces or something because every painted version of the dread I have seen has this problem.

The solutions were fairly drastic to try and get this sorted out. 1st I had to remove all the locating stubs then file the joining faces smooth. Then on the shoulder tops since I knew I would be doing a LOT of filing to smooth out the plates I had to clip off the raised edges detail along the sides only leaving the front and back edges. Then I eyeballed I could at least get one shoulder to match up, so glued the parts together using zap a gap. I probably should have pinned them but hopefully I won't drop this fella sometime down the track

Now the left shoulder had about 1-1.5mm of panel sticking out at a funny angle where it should flat joining the rest of the panel. To fix this I had to dremel it down.

damn I really should have taken a before shot, oh well. Anyway you can still see on the edges how it's going to need some putty work to get them in line.

Here it is after a couple hours of hand filing it smooth from various directions to try and get a flat plate. I recut the panel line after it was smoothed down. I'm still not totally happy with the panels, hopefully puttying the edges will fix that.

Next up is redoing the assault cannon arm. On regular dreads the cannon looks quite snubby compared to the other gun options but on the venerable it looks totally out of balance with the large powerfist arm so I've cut it off at the base of the barrels and will be making a proper vulcan gatling gun in it's place.

Bling Dreadnought, Part 2

2009-04-18T04:21:00.001+10:00

Next bit to work on was the hand, the 2 thumbs is dumb. That was at least easy to fix since the thumbs are separate. For the fingers though they looked boring so I put some pressure on them using the edge of the cutting mat so I didn't dent them in the process and splayed them out and then bent the top finger back and the bottom finger in. After that I pinned the thumb in a natural position. Then went about detailing the hand with rivets for joints and some detail in the palm.

Bling Dreadnought, Part 1

2009-04-18T04:10:00.001+10:00

Another repost of a thread from Oz Painters chronicling the crazy detailing of the GW Metal Venerable Dreadnought:

Ultramarine Bling Dreadnought

I've been eyeing up the metal venerable dreadnought for a while, it's full of bits that I hate but also lots of lovely detail. After getting it though I kinda wish I'd spent bigger and gotten a forgeworld one

Anyway onto the hacking and grinding and stuff.

Starting at the bottom the 1st hideous thing to go was the ugly chicken clawed feet. I assume they were going for a Robocop 2 Kane feel with the hydraulic claws on the tips of the toes but bleu they look horrible. So I decided to replicate the forgeworld venerable feet using some sentinel ones hacked up.

it added a few mm extra height to the legs too which was nice to balance out the overly tall waist section, though I may grind that down a bit later (the waist that is not the feet)

still need to add the ankles to one foot, I think I'll add some hydraulics to them joining them to the round base area the leg hydraulics attach to. Depends how much shin armour gets in the way though.

Ork Warboss & the Apprentice

2009-04-17T18:28:00.000+10:00

Here I have yet another project on the desk a AOBR plastic warboss I picked up off ebay. I've been working on detailing him up. I'll find the rest of the WIP photos and post em over the weekend. So far I've hacked off his jaw, closed his mouth, reset his big teeth, resculpted the jaw then stuck a bog old metal jaw in front of it covering up all my work

I've been working on detailing up the claw too but so far it's mostly been filing it back to make the blades have edges to them and remove the odd angles caused by the molding process. I'll take more picks as stuff gets detailed.

now the vexing part is what to do about the banner. I've sketched up some ideas, let me know which ones you like the most

Found the pics of the head mods

here it is all hacked up cause I hated the open mouth

and pinned back together

and now all green stuffed up the missing bits and the metal jaw jammed over the top

mods to the shoulder, where I had cut off the little skull on a spike and the strap between the shoulder pads which had perfectly followed the mold line, new one is across his shoulders instead.

and completly unrelated apart from I think I did the green stuff work at the same time

Sebastion's jedi in Jedi Adventure Robes. I thought the hood looked too much like a hoody rather than a robe hood so sculpted it out a fair bit.

D&D Minis with a bit of help from Photoshop

2009-04-17T18:02:00.001+10:00

I finally got around to finishing off Tim and the Dragonborn, it's been so long since we played D&D they kinda got left on the side of the table. I took some pics with a bit of terrain to set a scene, shame the flash killed the look, oh well will set up lights properly next time.

got some prepainted victims BWAHAHAHA

bit of progress on the dwarf, still all the detail work to go

and finally after a bit of fun with photoshop

Bloodbowl Playboy Bunnies con't

2009-03-04T20:12:00.001+11:00

Took Paintploddy's advice and added feathers to the front of the neck, think it has much improved the look

also added a bit more lip since I had left over green

Got the star player glued together, now to get back to painting (gah there's so many of them)

and here is a Bunny I prepared earlier (3-4 years ago)

now I just have to paint up all the rest of them.

Bloodbowl Playboy Bunnies

2009-03-03T20:11:00.001+11:00

The gaming club over at UTS has gotten interested in Blood Bowl since one of the members bought the box set so I've dug out my old team of neglected shadowforge playboy bunnies and hit them with some primer. Looking through the latest version of the rules I noticed they brought back a bunch of the old chainsaw wielding loonies and that the Amazon team (which I planned to use for the bunnies) can have one of them so went about converting one of the bunnies.

I went with the come here pose bunny for a start

1st I needed a chainsaw, I started with a chaos marine double sided chainsword, and joined it with a resin cast of some gribbly with gears and stuff which I cut the back corner off to get a chainsaw body shape. The grips are wire bent around, I bulked up the back grip a bit to get it looking square.

I then started on the mini. I cut off the head to get it facing the right way so pinned it in the right position, then started bending the arms around to where I wanted them, this required some cutting and extending considering the shoulder position on the right arm. While sculpting in the new upper arm I also sculpted on some long hair to fill the back of the neck. The left arm i initially cut from the hip and lifted up but after a while I realized what an awkward pose it was so bent and twisted it around with some pliers to get a more natural pose.

Last night I cleaned up all the mess left by the pliers and filled in all the gauges and details like elbow and shoulder blade with more green stuff. The hand needed fixing too since they'd been squished a bit during all the twisting into the right pose.

Now it just needs gluing together and maybe some detail on the back of the chainsaw.

While I was working on her I used up the extra mixed green stuff to make a Blood Bowl coin from a poker chip. Considering the lame cardboard one that comes with the box I thought this would be a bit nicer.

I think the orc side came out better than the eagle side but it will have to do. I may make a 2nd one anyway.

Golden Demon Entries - Finished Ork

2008-10-12T01:51:00.000+11:00

Well it's 10 to 2 and this is as finished as he's going to get

Golden Demon 2008 WIPs

2008-10-11T23:49:00.001+11:00

Been painting all night, here's the occasional WIP pics

hard to see but I darkened the back of the base