Retro Chaos Dreadnought

 Hello! I've had a busy week. I went to Glastonbury to relax for a couple of days, which was great, and then I injured my knee, which was less great. The damage isn't awful, but it does make sitting down to paint uncomfortable, and so I've been chipping away at little bits and bobs.

That said, I have been able to finish a model that I've been working on for a while. Hybrid Miniatures make a range of retro-styled miniatures, some of them quite reminiscent of 40k models from the good old days. They were having a sale of some of their old-school resin dreadnoughts, and I took the opportunity to get one of these.

The old dreadnought was the first dreadnought specifically made for Chaos, and can be seen in the blue Citadel catalogue. It had a very organic, Giger-ish look, with pipes and pincers, and an odd big skull for a head. It looked really cool to my mind and is my favourite version of the Chaos dread. Later versions were either blocky and awkward-looking (the 3rd ed version) or very fleshy (the Hellbrute). 

Anyhow, I went for a similar colour scheme to that which I used on a Necromunda Spyrer a while back. I highlighted the black with both grey and khaki. The weapons and pipes were painted quite brightly, for contrast and as a nod to the old version. I also painted a few pipes to look organic. Anyhow, here we are! It's 90% finished, but there are a couple of bits that I'd like to add to.

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. 

Normal service will be resumed shortly. 

Dreadnought in a Chris Foss style (hopefully)

 Happy Christmas everyone! I've been painting another Eldar dreadnought. 

When I was young, I used to read a lot of Isaac Asimov books. They almost all had covers drawn by the same artist: Chris Foss. He drew massive, brightly-coloured industrial spaceships, often with stripes. They were cool to look at and very distinctive.

Foss also drew some concept artwork for a 1970s film of Dune, which was never made. Here's a pirate ship:

I thought it looked very sleek and Eldarish. Because you get quite a lot of blank space on the dreadnought's head/carapace, I decided to see if I could copy this pattern on its head. The first thing was to shade the head from red to yellow. Here's a WIP.

This sort of dreadnought is the second variety, released in the late 1990s. The legs, head and body are the same as the original dreadnought, as seen in the blue Citadel catalogue. The arms are new (but also made of metal): bulkier and less sleek-looking, with more tubes. The back engine part is heftier too, and has a mounting-point for a heavy weapon. 

To be honest, I don't really like the tendency of later Eldar to get increasingly chunky: I'm not sure that the original models have ever been bested. But I do like this guy. I think his head has come out pretty well: it's very dramatic-looking! I might go on to use this colour scheme on a big vehicle at some point. 

Incidentally, I'm using a different lighting setup for these pictures, after being bought a lamp at Christmas (thanks Ruth!). Hopefully this might improve my dodgy photography...

10mm Knights

 And now for something completely different, or at least much smaller.

A couple of friends (hi James, hi Chris) suggested playing some sort of fantasy battle with small scale armies. That way we could actually get some games in. The old Fantasy Battle took much too long to play, and was too awkward and expensive, while Age of Sigmar doesn't appeal.

(The last time I played Warhammer Fantasy Battle, I had about 12 ogres and James had about 150 skaven. On the first turn, his cannon misfired, destroying about 70 of the skaven. He conceded. The game had lasted about a fifth of the time it had taken to set up.)

So, I bought some 3D printed resin models from ebay. I went for Bretonnians, since, although they've always had awful support from GW, I like the idea of lots of knights charging about, particularly if they don't take ages to paint. Because we're not going to be using Warhammer rules - the current plan is to use Mantic's Kings of War - I can add interesting models like giants and cannons if I want; it's just that the basic look is medieval rather than Renaissance.

Anyway, here are the models. Because they're so small, I used rather harsh highlights to bring out the colours. The sculpts were by a company called Forest Dragon, and they're incredibly detailed.

The standard bearer and a wizard on a unicorn. I think the standard bearer is Repanse de Lyonesse, Warhammer's version of Joan of Arc.

A unit of men at arms:

A unit of scouts on horseback:

Some monks carrying a relic (they remind me of the chanting monks from Monty Python and the Holy Grail):

The whole mighty army so far:

They were surprisingly pleasant to paint. The hardest thing was to get the bases to look right. I stuck the models onto the resin rectangles they came with (these are Warmaster-sized bases, I gather) and used DAS clay and green stuff to blend them in. I didn't bother adding flock, as the scale might make it look a bit weird. 

I'm really pleased with these guys so far: they combine speed of painting with the feel of a great big army. I've ordered some more. This could be a fun project!

Another Weird Rider

 Most of the time, I work on one model at a time. However, sometimes I'll chip away at a miniature a bit at a time, in between making other things. 

I've been making another weird rider for a while. The basic steed was a de-boobed steed of Slaanesh. The rider's lower body and head came from a high elf wizard. The hardest aspect of the conversion was getting the legs to sit on the steed. I had to cut away quite a lot of its hips and thighs - too much, actually, as I had to fill some of the legs with green stuff. The legs still didn't quite meet, and I ended up using Das clay to smooth it all together.

The upper body came from an old plastic eldar, and the arms were skitarri (I've got a lot of use out of that kit!). I had to bulk out the waist with clay and some space marine boxes, as it looked rather spindly and didn't fit the robes. I chopped off the top of the helmet to get away from him being a pure high elf, and as a nod to the big, flat-topped hats favoured by some of the characters that the artist Moebius draws.

As with the other riders, I used a similar colour scheme to that in Moebius cartoons. I wish I'd kept some work in progress pictures of this model, but I'm pleased with the outcome. 

Home On The Strange: Weird Riders

 A lot of the time, I'm making models for a specific army project: at the moment, Chaos and Tau. But every so often, it's a matter of looking at the bits boxes and thinking "What would be fun to make now?"

This was definitely one of those moments. I'd had some steeds of Slaanesh knocking around for a while, and, while I like the models, I'm less keen on the daemonettes that ride them. So, I decided to use the steeds as the riding-beasts of some other models, in some kind of weird science-fiction way.

The first step was to carefully de-boob the steeds. I cut their tongues off too: too many Warhammer monsters have their tongues out. Otherwise, they were put together as usual.

I made two riders. The first had the legs of an eldar guardian (not much else would fit around the steed's body!) and the upper body of a long-trashed Mordheim soldier. The arms came from a Skitarri ranger (I really wanted the ornate scrollwork on the gun), and the head was from an old Warlord Games Russian soldier. 

The second rider would be a robot, slightly like IG-11 from The Mandalorian TV show. His lower body came from Necron parts: specifically, the broken necrons on the Ghost Ark. I got them ages ago in a sale of other bits, and at last I've found a use for them!

His upper body was all kinds of stuff. The arms came from an Imperial Guard stormtrooper and an old Eldar; the head was some sort of Tau device, and I've no idea what the chest and backpack were. With the help of a wheel from a 10mm tank, they looked reasonable, as if he'd been in a few fights and done a few repairs to himself.

The paint scheme was very much inspired by the pictures of Moebius, who I've mentioned before (HERE). I used bright orange and red contrast paint on the steeds to distance them from the usual pink and purple of Slaanesh, and used blue, white and purple normal paint on the riders, along with some fading. They're weird, but I like them!

And now with added drama...

 After the surprising results of the black box photography for the turnip soldiers, I've been mucking about with the camera, trying to capture the same effect on other models. As my photography skills are pretty much non-existent, it's mainly been a process of trial and error. Here is the converted bounty hunter I made a few posts ago, in "dramavision":

That's, er, quite good really, for me at least. At any rate, it's the first time I've shaded something grey (her trousers, in this case) and they haven't looked grainy and stark. 

Flushed with success, I thought I'd have a try at using this style on the Warband of the Seasons I made a while back, which is one of the "darker" set of models I've made recently. Here are the members of the warband without the "auto adjust colours" option being applied, which I sometimes have to use to make pictures presentable.

They look quite cool, probably because you can't see all the godawful mistakes I've made in painting them. They've got a certain "painting in a house where you wouldn't want to stay overnight" quality. This is how they look with the "auto adjust colours" feature activated:

I'm not quite sure what to make of all this. I like the moody style, but it doesn't show the details terribly well and I think my own models are usually more cheerful than this type of lighting. I don't think I'd use it for the 1950s Tau, say. Anyhow, it's interesting, and I'm pleased with the results. On with the turnippers.

Antares Leader a la H.R. Giger

 After last time's harlequin in Moebius-style colours, I dug an old Warlord Games model out and tried to paint it in the colours of H.R. Giger.

Just in case you were wondering, Giger was the chap who designed the Alien and painted a wide range of rather odd pictures in his signature biomechanical style. Here's the Alien:

And here's one of the dead spaceship pilot from Alien:

(Finding a Giger picture that wasn't obviously depicting a load of melted willies was difficult. The things I do for this blog...)

The miniature I used is a leader for the Isorian faction from Gates of Antares which I bought in a sale ages ago. The Isorians have a very biomechanical feel, and the ridged armour of the leader, which seems to be part of her as much as something that she wears, felt as if it would work well with his style.

I'd always assumed that Giger painted in black and white: in face, he uses quite a lot of blue and sepia tones, so I tried to incorporate those. I used washes of black contrast paint, Strong Tone and Dark Tone over white and bone-white undercoats, to get subtle differences, along with some (probably invisible) pink glazes on the flesh. 

Unsurprisingly, the face got the lightest shading, which is good as the eye should be drawn there. I don't really like the space pinapple/cactus that she's hovering over, but otherwise I think it's a really cool model that grew on me the more work I did on it.

Harlequin a la Moebius

 During the summer, while a combination of heat, semi-lockdown and noisy idiots was driving me slightly mad, I bought a copy of this book by the illustrator and comic writer Moebius:

Moebius, among other things, did concept illustrations for Alien and the unmade 1970s version of Dune, and I'm sure some of the Rogue Trader models are influenced by his work. Anyhow, the book contains a lot of very nice pictures, like this:

and this:

It's all rather trippy and slightly surreal. I really like the colours and the shading he uses, and I thought it would be interesting to try to paint a miniature using similar shades. I chose a metal harlequin I had in the bits box - or at least, the upper half of one, as I'd used the legs for something else a while ago - and I added some dark eldar legs. 

In painting I didn't go for anything too fiddly like checks, but tried to copy the colours and colour fades from the Moebius pictures. Here are the results.