Goats On The Racecourse

A couple of weeks ago, I went to Colours at Newbury racecourse to meet up with my friend James and buy a load of random stuff. Perhaps it was the subliminal influence of the horse racing setting, but I decided to purchase some animals for the post-apocalyptic town.

My haul ended up with a strange mixture of farmyard and Middle Eastern themes:

4 goats (Magister Militum)

A sheik (Spectre Games)

A camel loaded with provisions (Bitzbox: 2^nd hand GW)

A Tallarn Desert Raider captain (likewise)

2 post-apocalyptic merchants (Lead Adventure)

And

5 berserker-type ladies (Dice Bag Lady: Prodos Games) which were going very cheap.

A slightly unusual haul, admittedly. I was also recognised by some guys from steampunk events at which I’d been selling books. Who would have thought that there would be an overlap between steampunks and wargaming?

Anyway, I painted up the goats. Everyone likes goats, even Satanists, so here they are.

I also painted the two merchants. The guy on the left is an electrician. I’ve attempted a bit of object source lighting but I’m not sure that it really works. The chap on the right is a car mechanic. I hadn’t realised that the Lead Adventure sculpts were so cartoony, but I really like the how full of character they are.

 And finally I painted these two. The woman on the left is a scavenger from Copplestone, I think. I did a small amount of converting on her: I filled in her chest to hide her gigantic cleavage (I think the torn pattered dress she’s wearing looks rather good) and used green stuff to hide the place where the end of her boot had come off, revealing her toes like a comedy tramp (I reckon that a half-feral post-apocalyptic survivor would either have two shoes or none at all).

The guy on the right was a GW chaos cultist with a flamer. I swapped his head with one from a Mantic soldier with a raised visor. He clearly spends his time cutting things up with his welding torch.

Next up, I’m considering tackling the camel (which is surely a euphemism for something very rude) or going back to my old Alice in Wonderland-themed inquisitorial warband. I also really ought to make a workshop for my mechanics to use.

Finished!

Sir Vaylance the Vigilant hails from a minor feudal world on the far side of Scutus Minoris. Vaylance is a man of honour, who ceaselessly guards his people and hasn't trodden on any peasants for ages.

During a battle with ork raiders, Vaylance "rescued" Prioress Gwendoline the Irascible of the Order of Triniana Sanctata, by stepping on the enemy warlord. Vaylance was much taken with the comparatively tiny maiden, and vowed to assist the Prioress in the traditional knightly manner (ie whether she liked it or not). Love, as they say in the grim darkness of the far future, conquers all, and what better way to conquer things than to be in a gigantic robot suit?


Finally, the titan is finished! I'm both satisfied with the result and very keen not to paint anything this big for a long while. To begin with, I felt that the overall colour scheme was a bit busy, but to be honest that sort of heraldry seems to be the norm for these things.

Titan enthusiasts will note that I've left off some of the decorations, including the dangling crotch banner. This is mainly because I didn't think they added much to the model, and I was quite sick of freehand without having to paint his enormous loincloth. I doubt I'll add them later - they'll probably end up in some other project.

I think I'll go and paint a goat or something now.

Almost there...

The epic struggle to finish this bloody titan and not give in to the urge to do a quick, bad job continues. I finished the shoulder pad and I'm really pleased with the result.

I have assembled the body but need to do some of the detail and weathering. Since I don't have an airbrush, the lighting was done with standard brushes and bits of sponge. It's come out well, considering.

I still need to work on the face, and add some odds and ends, but this project is coming to an end (thank goodness!). I just wish I could paint checks a bit better and not have to weather out all the wobbly lines.

Once this is done, I've got a selection of individual models that I bought at the Colours event last weekend. I'm really looking forwards to painting little things again!

Titan shoulder pads

And now onto the shoulder plates. These were rather daunting, since they provide a large open space for me to cock up with hideous daubings.

I was never going to be able to paint anything particularly impressive in freehand. However, I could just about produce some kind of medieval-style drawing which, given the background of the knight titans, could well work.

So, I made this.

It depicts the victory of Sir Vaylance over some sort of chaos beastie and was probably painted on by Vaylance himself after a few drinks.

More impressive (hopefully) is the other shoulder pad. This depicts an angelic Sister of Battle. The wings came from a Blood Angel flying guy. The face was cast from a Reaper Bones model with putty and tidied up somewhat with green stuff. The rest of the sculpture was made from green stuff.

I'm planning to paint this as old bronze, to hide any flaws in the sculpting (of which, left's be honest, there will be many).

Knight Titan Pilot

The next step has been to work on the pilot: specifically, painting him and getting him into the body of the titan without all the paint coming off. This was surprisingly difficult to do.

I made the pilot out of a sentinel driver's legs, a space marine scout's body and the head of a Brettonian knight. Given that the background says the pilots are generally medieval-type guys, this is Sir Vaylance the Vigilant, last seen in Warhammer armour about to invade Frostgrave.

As the back of his chair/compartment, I used an old door from a Rhino, which by chance fitted really well. I built a control panel at the front of the cockpit and glued him in.

The rear of the body, which presumably contains the engine, was made from plasticard bent to fit in, with a panel cut away to reveal part of the machinery. I find it hard to imagine the circumstances in which anyone will ever see this, but what the heck, I like it.

He's just about to press a button to activate something - possibly the CD player. I expect it to be full of "Classic Jousting Moods" and records by the Medieval Baebes.

So, here's where I've got to so far...

Further Developments in Titan Construction

Work continues on the titan. I have assembled its guns and got quite far in painting them. Because they are quite boring to look at on their own, I have added a robot that I made earlier to the pictures.

The item being modelled in this picture is a rapid-fire battle cannon. It's basically a big lump of machinery with a shield and a barrel. To make it more interesting, I've added a sort of barber's pole decoration to the barrel (done with a spray can and the sticky strip cut from a post-it note) that hopefully looks a bit like a medieval lance.

Here we see the big machine gun, which is a mega gatling cannon or something like that. I added some bluing to the end of the gun, which seems to have come out bizarrely pretty.

Also, the battle cannon fits conveniently on a small wooden cart, in the event that I take up Napoleonics in a hurry and have to improvise a wheeled gun.

L'Howitzer

Being unable to resist the urge to muck about with the original kit, I decided to add a pilot. I happened to have a model lying around from a failed attempt to build an LRDG-type buggy from an ork truck, and I removed the steering wheel and added some extra bits. To be honest, I expect that the driver would be wired into the machine by a neural link, but what the heck, he's got a gearstick instead.

The next step will be to finish the rider and paint/assemble the body. I'm not looking forward to painting the canopy, especially as I don't have an airbrush. And after that, it'll be time to put on all the fiddly bits.

Knight Titan Legs

This week, I finally started on a model that I've had gathering dust in a cupboard for a couple of years: a knight titan. I was given this ages ago (thanks PM!) but up till now I've been put off by its sheer size. However, I've now got the time to chip away at it and try to do a decent job by constructing it in stages.

Stage one consists of the legs and base. I didn't really like the static position of the legs and tried to reposition them to be clambering over some wreckage. This worked, but it meant that a lot of the bits of cabling running between the legs would no longer fit (how does this thing walk?). I left them off. Actually, it makes the legs look rather more realistic not having important wires hanging loose.

I used bits of a scenery kit to make the base, along with tubing from drinking straws and plastic biros. I tried to add some bits of detail to stop it looking too much like a heap of off-cuts.

The standard policy seems to be to paint the legs in bare metal, which looks a bit strange to me. For one thing, I would expect them to develop a brown patina very quickly. For another, it seems more likely that the engineers would slap a thick coat of some kind of drab, protective paint over the top. I went with a dark grey and tried to make it look sufficiently dirty.

The base was painted in fairly dull, neutral colours, as I intend to make the plates of armour on the knight quite jolly and heraldic. I put a few bits of colour on the base for variety and to make it look more like an actual set of objects.

There's still painting work to do on the base - quite a lot of it - but I think this is a reasonable start. Now onto the guns.This is going to be a difficult project: I'm used to small models with a lot of conversion, and I simply can't paint a titan as well as an awful lot of people. I'll have to think about how to make it distinctive.