Swooping Hawks

 I went back to the old craftworld Eldar and had a go at painting some Swooping Hawks. My eventual plan is to have a (small) squad of all of the Eldar aspects in the first Eldar codex, with the exception of the Shining Spears, who didn't have models back then. 

The Swooping Hawks were lightly-armoured troops who used their jetpacks to fly above the enemy and drop grenades on them, to deadly effect. In theory. In actuality, they were very hard to use, as their attacks were very specific and their armour was tissue-thin. Back then (and probably now) much of Warhammer 40,000 was about covering your men in armour, and the Swooping Hawks tended to die very quickly.

Also, as I discovered recently, the models are top-heavy and fall over all the time. That said, they're also Jes Goodwin sculpts and are excellent miniatures with a remarkable amount of motion for their time. I put mine on slotta-bases, and made some grass and ruined pavements for them to stand on.

As with the whole Eldar project, I tried to use vibrant colours somewhat like those used by Moebius and Roger Dean. I like the Eldar having a slightly retro, psychedelic feel. Here's the whole unit. For some reason, they were very difficult to photograph.

I don't think I've made a bad job, but I did find them fiddly and not all that satisfying. Still, I'm glad the unit is done, even though - if I actually played 40k - I'd never use them in battle.

Dangly Cage Thing

 I've been painting some old Eldar swooping hawks, which are both delicate and fiddly. As a break from squinting and trying not to break anything, I thought it would be good to scratch-build something that I could paint in a rough manner.

A while back I was given some spare bits from the Warhammer Giant model, including a wicker cage that the giant can wear on his belt. I decided to make one of those suspended cages that crop up in fantasy films. I used plasticard and thin dowel to make the basic shape. The "rope" was added with green stuff: I tend to find that real string frays too much. 

I felt that it needed a bit of balancing, so I added some rocks to the end of the cross-beam. They were taken from the top of an ogre's club.

I added the cage and painted the whole thing. It was fairly simple to do. My trick for painting wood like this is to add a bit of grey to the highlighting stages.

Instant storage for monsters and peasants!

Nun Shall Pass!

 And now for something completely different... Well, not completely, since it's the last members of the Sisters of Sigmar warband. I decided to make a larger, more imposing sister to lead the unit.

For this, I used a Novitiate Superior model from the Sisters of Battle Neophyte squad. I took off a few sci-fi details and gave her an double-handed weapon from the Frostgrave female barbarian sprue. It took quite a bit of trimming. I replaced her original backpack with a steampunk-style burner and a symbol from the staff of a Sigmarine wizard person, symbolising the comet of Sigmar.

She's joined by a small mascot-type being that was left over from a set of similar beings that I bought from Raging Heroes ages ago. 

And here's the whole unit. They're weird, but they look good together. 

The Black Beast of Aargh

 Some models seem like a good idea, but take a long time to get round to making. Ages ago, I backed a Reaper Bones kickstarter, and got a large box of varied (but generally not great) miniatures, made of bendy rubbery plastic. Among them was a beholder, a sort of floating eyeball monster from Dungeons & Dragons. I thought that the beholder looked a bit like the head of the Black Beast of Aargh from Monty Python and the Holy Grail.

The Black Beast, which is actually green, is a large monster encountered by the knights of the Round Table during their search for the grail. It eats the helpful monk Brother Maynard, and then goes on the rampage. As they tend to do, the knights run away, and are chased by the beast. The beast is only stopped when the animator suffers a fatal heart attack, at which point it vanishes.

I thought it was finally time to have a go at making this silly thing. I started by cutting unnecessary details off the beholder model. I made a neck out of bits and bobs and plasticard, and an armature for its horns out of twisted wire. 

Then I sculpted over this with DAS clay, and added some details with green stuff.

Luckily, the beast doesn't have much in detail. It has two legs, ending in clawed feet, but not a lot else. Rocks were added with torn corn cut to fit.

I sculpted the feet out of green stuff. I made these separately, using blister pack plastic to build them on. I cut them from the blister pack and stuck them onto a base, and then stuck the rest of the beast on top. It got a little fin on its back, left over from a troll.

After that, it was time to paint this thing. I think that Terry Gilliam used an airbrush to draw the beast: it looks very shaded, but simple. I tried to replicate Gilliam's style, but it was tricky. The end result looks rather like it was sculpted out of cake icing.

The main lesson here is that if you're going to sculpt a model of something, sculpt a model of something that looks stupid to begin with. It reminds me that sculpting is really really hard - at least with clay: maybe it's much easier on a computer. 

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