Giant Robot/Gundam/Warmachine conversion!

 And now for something completely different.

I've had a lot of robot bits lying around, for quite a while. I bought some cheap Gundam kits when I made my big Tau walker (see here) and I had some bits left over from a Warmachine conversion that just wouldn't hold together.

I know nothing about Gundam models. They all look rather too much like people for my tastes: I prefer walkers with dinosaur-style legs and boxy bodies. Still, the legs and arms could work well, if I replaced the body and head. I used what seems to be the most classic Gundam robot, which has a white body and red and blue sections. Maybe it's the hero of the franchise. Anyhow, it provided the limbs.

The upper body came from the Warmachine conversion, and the gun was a 40k piece. Having put the basic model together, I added details with all sorts of random bits, including tank parts, Lego, pipes left over from an Imperial Knight, and plasticard sections designed to make it less sleek and more industrial. I wanted to tie the different sections of the model together, and to hide the somewhat crude joints on the Gundam model.

The head is a 40k sensor, with a lower jaw made from plasticard. I like the way that it juts forward. I imagine that it can retreat into the main body. Here is the unpainted body (without head):

When it came to painting, I didn't want the robot to look too medieval or tied to any particular system. I went for a fairly industrial off-white, which could be chipped and shaded to look suitably used and grubby. I added a few bits of colour for interest, and just about resisted the urge to paint hazard stripes all over it. After all those Bretonnian knights, it was quite nice to paint dirty metal again.

The arm is jointed so that the gun can be raised and aimed. Otherwise, it's static.

There we go. I should make more robots. They're always fun projects. I'm quite tempted by some of the GW Horus Heresy robots, but I've got enough stuff to be getting on with right now. As ever!

Back to Blognia - "Napoleonic" cavalry and randoms

 And now for something completely different.

It's been a while since I looked at the charming principality of Blognia and its wretched inhabitants. While there has been a Blognian army for time immemorial, its main function has been to fight itself in an endless cycle of banditry and civil war. Now that the Arch-Duchess has effectively declared war on the undead, the army is having to actually do something useful.

The cavalryman here is actually an English Civil War soldier, with a crest added from a Napoleonic helmet. I'm not sure where the sword arm came from, and I sculpted him some suitably grandiose epaulettes. The horse's head is from a medieval knight.

The Blognian Cavalry has a long history. Traditionally, many aristocrats have either gone into the cavalry or some kind of mental institution. Indeed, few people have the skill or patience to put up with the notoriously foul-tempered horses, and it is said that the heavy armour cavalrymen wear is largely to protect them from their noble steeds.

That said, the cavalry is not entirely useless. At the tenth battle of the River Plob, the Grand Imperial Lancers charged a unit of Swedish mercenaries, thus turning the course of the battle. Although the River Plob was in the way, the lancers drowned so spectacularly that the rest of the Blognian army was able to retreat in good order. 

Also joining this rider is an infantryman - well, an infantry person, really. Blognia operates a "don't ask, don't tell" policy as far as the gender of it soldiers goes: not out of equal opportunities but because it's desperate for absolutely anyone to sign up. This particular soldier is either unusually disciplined or hasn't had time to lose bits of her uniform and acquire more confortable kit yet.

Here is the entire army unit, so far. 

And here are some crazy pagans. The woman with the massive sword was inspired by a character from the cancelled computer game Fable Legends, which featured a Lady of the Lake armed with an enormous sword. The legs of this model were from a dark eldar mandrake. The arms and head are Frostgrave, and the body was sculpted by me. Overall, a really enjoyable little project.

The person with the antlers is an odd kitbash. The arms and head are from Frostgrave cultists. The body is a Perry Miniatures Afghan. I think he's some kind of deranged cultist, perhaps about to do magic with his raised hand. 

Well, that was fun!

Even More Random Space People

 In the wider world, sadly, John Blanche died this week. There isn't much for me to say about this that hasn't been said elsewhere: Blanche's influence on Games Workshop and miniature painting on the whole was immense. His grimy, low-fantasy style has inspired and been imitated by thousands of painters, 

Personally, a lot of "Blanchitsu" isn't for me - and Blanche himself made some nuanced comments on it. But he was undoubtedly an artist with a distinct style and, importantly, he was one of the first people to turn painting model soldiers into an art. His influence lives on, but he will be missed by the community.

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I've ended up with quite a lot of plastic historical miniatures, mainly because I've wanted to use them for conversions. I wanted some US soldiers to put on the bases of my Tau, as well as some Men In Black type operatives, and so on. The upshot is that I've had quite a few sets of leftover arms and bodies.

I've assembled more weird space people from these, using the historical bodies as the starting point for odd conversions. I've found that historical models are often slighter than SFF miniatures, and they work well with female heads and arms. Of course, this moves them away from their historical roots, and painting them in bright, usual colours further hides the fact that they were originally supposed to be peasants, GIs or whatever. 

I make these models as a sort of palate-clearer, between more serious projects. I've got about 50 of them now - I have no idea what I'd do with them, but then I don't know what I'd do with a lot of my models. Here are some recent ones.

These models were made with the bodies of medieval pikemen. The left-hand model has Stargrave arms and head, and a WW2 backpack. The steampunky guy has arms and a head from Wargames Atlantic Grognard models, and a cloak that I made out of milliput.

The lady on the left has Stargrave arms, a cultist head and a GW Kroot bag to balance her outline out. The guy on the right has a Stargrave head and Wargames Atlantic Agent arms. 

These guys were made with various historical bodies. From left to right: US marine, Boxer rebellion, WW2 Russian. Heads and arms are Stargrave, apart from the middle guy, who has a Pig Iron head and Frostgrave Cultist arms.

Next time, it's either scavvies from Necromunda or old Privateer Press miniatures. Watch this space...

Random Space Weirdos

 Just a few weird space randos this week.

The crocodile man is a Mantic orc body with Frostgrave demon arms and a Stargrave head. The base model isn't great and I'm not sure why I've got it, but as ever, removing the head helps a lot.

The thug next to him is based on a Wargames Atlantic Boxer Rebellion body, with Games Workshop arms and a Ghost Archipelago head. Getting the arms and head to sit properly with the body was quite difficult. 

Then we've got a lady and robot, vaguely inspired by Jayne Cobb from Firefly and K2SO from Star Wars. "James" has a Bolt Action US marine body, with arms and head from Stargrave.

The robot is based on a model from the Warlord Games Terminator Genysis game. I know nothing about this game, except that the film was apparently awful, and that Warlord were virtually giving the game away. I've got a few sprues of these T-100 models, and they're pretty darn ropey. I gave it new arms, including one from a Perry armoured knight, and a GW Skitarri head. It's come out alright, really.

Nothing much else to report for now. I've got a couple of smaller projects on the go, and progress continues on the Bretonnians. They're looking quite decent so far!

Peasant Progress:

Men at Arms: 20

Archers: 18

Foot Knights: 15

Squirty Bottle Moon Buggy Conversion

 So, new year, new picture, or something like that. The photo at the top of the blog is actually the Stanley knife (or box cutter, if you're in the US) that I use for most of my cutting and conversion work. I gather that you're meant to use a craft knife, and maybe I'd get better results if I did, but I've found the Stanley knife to be very reliable and robust over the years. And I've wiped my brush on it so many times that it's starting to look like a work of abstract art in itself. I'm sure the Tate Gallery would love it...

When converting (and writing, for that matter) I often find that I have an idea kicking around in my head for ages, and it just takes the right moment for it to come out and take form. To be more precise, you know those trigger-activated, squirty bottles that you get for shower cleaner, disinfectant spray and the like? Ages back I thought that the head of one of those would make a good cockpit and I've been trying to work out how to do it ever since. 

I saved one, cut it down a lot, and wondered how to make it work as some kind of vehicle. My first thought was as the front of a flyer, but I lacked parts to really make that work. I also had a bit of plastic tube that had probably been to top of a pot of glue, which fitted nicely behind the "cockpit" and could be some sort of engine...

After that, I rubbed the whole thing down with fine sandpaper, so that glue and paint would take to it more easily, and added wheels. Two were old Ramshackle tyres, and I've no idea where the smaller pair came from. It began to have a smooth, slightly retro moon-buggy look.

I added lots of details from thin plasticard bent to shape, and leftover model tank bits. GW provided an aerial for the roof, from a Tau part. 

Then it was time for painting. I went with a basic off-white, with red panels and a black front canopy that is presumably made of some kind of two-way glass. This helped break up the shape of the squirter a bit more. I don't often wish that I had an airbrush, but getting a half-even coverage and some kind of shading was really hard. I ended up using a mixture of glazing, conventional painting and sponging, and it's still far from perfect.

That said, I do rather like the end result. I kept the weathering fairly minor, but added a few chips to suggest use. Here is the end product.

And here's a picture with a couple of space adventurers for scale. Broom!

House Escher: Spares, Repairs and Very Big Hair

Who remembers Necromunda? Not the recent one, which I've never played, but the mid-90s skirmish game. It came in a box with cardboard terrain and awful plastic models, and involved odd-looking gangs fighting it out in the depths of a hive city. It was complex, interesting and probably an inspiration for Mordheim, which had a similar basis but removed some of the more awkward rules.

Several years ago, my friend James and I played quite a few games of Necromunda, and we enjoyed it a lot. It's got some weird features: like Mordheim, it's designed to be played in a tournament-style campaign, and a winning gang quickly outstrips the gang it defeats. Also like Mordheim, most games end with one gang running away, and the rules as to which of your minions survive are pretty crude and arbitrary. Unlike Mordheim, Necromunda puts a lot of emphasis on pinning your enemies with gunfire, and making them lose their turns. It's an interesting mechanic, but a potentially irritating one too.

Necromunda certainly had its problems as a game, not least the needlessly complex and so-random-it's-unfair dishing out of territory at the start. You could just award each player $200 every time they fought a battle and have just as much fun. One of the things I do like, though, is the comparative lack of detail in the backstory. Most of the details are, unsurprisingly, cloaked in shadow. I really like this, as it gives the player the opportunity to make up pretty much whatever they like.

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Gangers of House Escher, by Mark Gibbons.

One of the six big gangs (like Dune, Necromunda calls them "houses") is House Escher. Escher is an unusual organisation, as almost all of its members are women. They're basically amazons in space, and their skills suggest that they are fast and good at close combat. Escher fighters have an odd visual style, as if someone decided to make them "sexy" and changed their mind at the last minute. As it is, they look like a punk band about to do some kind of yoga class. I suspect that their design owes a lot to Tank Girl, who was big in the 90s.

That said, the old metal miniatures look much better than the modern plastics, which all have weird metal clogs as if they've just removed a pair of skis. One of my pet hates in miniatures is female soldiers in high heels - I can almost understand some maniac running into battle in their underwear or even barefoot, but heels just look silly even by the silly standards of Warhammer.

Anyhow, I've been avoiding these models for a while, or more accurately summoning up the courage to attempt to paint them. The amount of detail on the Escher miniatures - designed and, I think, sculpted by the excellent Jes Goodwin - is incredible. They're very slight, and there's a lot of opportunity to paint detail and get it wrong. Unlike orks, they've got human faces and, unlike eldar, they don't have the decency to wear helmets. That's just not on. 

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All of this week's models are repairs of some kind, because it was cheaper to get the models broken off ebay and to tidy them up myself. Also, it adds variety, as I've got some duplicates.

The ganger on the left was missing her left arm, so I replaced it with a dark eldar arm. The woman on the right didn't have her right foot. I made a bionic one out of a skeleton foot and a cut-down necron arm, using the elbow joint as a metal kneecap for her. I think it's worked pretty well. 

The next pair are juves: young members of the gang who are weedier and less reliable than the seasoned fighters. One thing I really like about the old metal juves is that they tend to look worried and frantic. Necromunda has a much better range of expressions than 40k (space marines have one face per chapter). Neither had a head, so I replaced them with Stargrave heads, which were small enough to look right on their scrawny bodies and had some suitably extreme haircuts.

Finally, we've got two models built from the same body. Bear with me here. Each Necromunda gang had access to heavy weapon soldiers, imaginatively named "heavies". Most gangs had two or three heavy models, one of which would be armed with a stubber (a clunky, WW2 type machine gun). The Escher stubber body seems to be easy to get hold of, while the other heavy model, who has a plasma gun, goes for silly money.

I found what seemed to be the plasma gun variant, but wasn't. I ended up with two spare copies of the stubber body, and so I converted them both to be doing new things. This model was given pistols and a mechanical arm from Stargrave:

And this one got a new arm, a gun cobbled together from various bits and bobs, a backpack from some kind of Mantic robot, and some sculpted armour to cover the gaps:

After all that, here they are painted!

While there's no uniform here, I've tried to use a set of reoccurring colours. The outfit designs are vaguely inspired by old GW paint schemes and Tank Girl comic books. I've tried to introduce variety by varying the skin tones a bit, although it might not be obvious.

So, join me next time for more brightly-coloured Necromunda loonies. Or possibly not. I've got a lot of fantasy miniatures stripped and ready to go, and I've just bought some goblin green paint...

The Minions of Mark: Dark Age miniatures

 Over the years I've accumulated a lot of random miniatures. Among these models was a blister pack of strange little guys that my local games shop was selling for £5 in a bargain bin. 

They're actually from a game called Dark Age, which I think is now defunct. It was a skirmish wargame based on the pictures of an artist called Bron, and seemed to be about small warbands abandoned on a desert planet. The guys I bought, if I remember rightly, were the followers of someone called Saint Mark.

What they look like, to me, is a cross between the War Boys from Mad Max and the Cenobites from Hellraiser. I put them in a drawer for a long time, and was rather intimidated by the prospect of painting them, especially because they would need a largely monochrome paint scheme, which made me nervous. I don't really enjoy painting black, because the highlights often come out as chalky or too stark. 

Well, I finally dragged these guys out, painted one as a test, found that it worked, and got going on the other four. They're strange designs but really well sculpted, with loads of detail. They seem to be holding guns that fire circular saw blades, as well as truncheon-type weapons that might be electrified. I doubt that they're the good guys of the setting.

Making the skin different to the clothing was quite hard. The clothing is highlighted from black to light grey, by adding more grey and white. The skin started off as light grey, was given a very thin wash of purple, and was then highlighted by adding first bone and then pink to the mix. The skin was eventually given a thin glaze of pink to suggest that it is alive. I'm not sure how well this comes out in the photos.

Here they are.

Weird, aren't they?

Converting Old Mantic Models: little space soldiers, a demon mercenary and The Thing

I had a bit of free time over the weekend. Here in the UK, it was unpleasantly hot, and I spent as much time as possible indoors. I opened the big box of random sprues, and found a bunch of old Mantic miniatures.

Mantic have made some decent stuff - their skeletons are particularly good, and used to be dirt cheap - but they have produced some... less fantastic miniatures. Their plastic goblins are pretty awful: they've got very little detail, they're made from some horrible plastic-resin material, and it's generally quite hard to tell what the heck is going on with them. However...

I've long been of the view that the most important bits of a miniature (unless it's some insanely complex GW sculpt with books, banners and the like) are the head and the weapon (or at least the hands). What this means is that by attaching a good head and arms to a ropey body you can distract from the bad parts enough to end up with something acceptable. In this spirit, I waded into the goblins.

I threw the original heads and arms away. Instead, I used Perry Miniatures Afghan arms, and the WW1 style heads from the Wargames Atlantic "Bulldogs" sprue. A little bit of cutting was required to get the heads to go on properly, but nothing elaborate. The only problem with the guns was that it wouldn't be possible to arrange them so that the models were taking aim. No great issue there, as you get loads of guns on the Afghan sprue.

I really, really like the positions of some of these models. That's largely down to the excellent Afghan arms, which allow for a lot of interesting options.

I painted the bodies brown, and highlighted with successive drybrushes. I didn't bother to pick out any details, as it's not worth the bother. The heads were painted bright green: partly to fit in with another batch of goblin conversions I did a while ago, and partly to get away from the idea that these were short WW1 Tommies. The hands and exposed flesh of these little chaps was painted blue.

The end result is quite decent, I think. The goblin bodies are always going to be a bit rubbish, but the new arms and heads really improve the models.

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The second part of today's post continues the "random Mantic models" theme. Again, I've got no idea how I ended up with these miniatures. 

First up is a plastic orc, who was thankfully made out of a much nicer and more normal material than the goblins. He's a neater, crisper sculpt, but still nothing special. I gave him a horned head from the Frostgrave demons sprue. His arms and gun come from a Mantic "plague" warrior, who has a lot of spikes on his arms and shoulders, which went well with the head. I painted the whole thing red: he reminds me of the trolls from the Shadowrun game. I imagine him as some kind of thuggish mercenary.

The final creature is the most interesting, I think. This was made from the body of the plague soldier who provided the red chap with his arms. The body has a stretched, twisted quality, and looked as if it was about to turn into something else. All of this made me think of The Thing, and so I got some bits together and turned him into a warping, shape-changing monstrosity.

I liked the idea that his head wasn't needed anymore, and would just flop to the side while horns and tentacles burst from his body. Having the big tentacle and the spikes all pointing the same way gives the model a sense of movement. I sculpted an eye to replace his head and act as a focal point.

The model was painted in flesh tones, with a lot of washes to vary the colours. I undercoated in black and then painted a variety of odd colours to sit under the flesh: bright red, camo green and blue. Hopefully this makes the flesh more unwholesome and variable. The head was deliberately left rather lacking in detail: it's no longer important to this creature, after all.

I left the clothes in drab shades and painted the eye with a bright blue pupil, to draw attention. I've got to say, I'm really pleased with how it turned out.

Horrid, really.

Space Marine Whirlwind Conversion (and bonus rhino)

 Last time, I made a whopping great cannon to go on the roof of a space marine Rhino. I also promised further silliness. And I've been hard at work to do just that.

Back in the days, I purchased a plastic Empire hellsturm rocket launcher, a sort of multiple firework array on a cannon chassis. I put this onto a Rhino to make a very medieval Whirlwind tank.

The basis of the conversion is one of the plates that goes on the back of the Rhino. The Vindicator cannon lifts off, and I used the plate with a hole for a hatch in it. I put a Lego cog into the hole and stuck it in place with plasticard, to be the part that the launcher sits on. Here's a picture of a normal plate and my version.

The rocket launcher went on top. I added a piece that holds some extra rockets, in case the marines get excited and fire all their fireworks at once. 

It was painted in suitably jolly and heraldic colours, to match the overall scheme.

Whoosh!

Now, I thought it would be good to finish this project off by making a flat panel to go on the top, for when the marines just need nothing fancier than a Rhino. I found some doors and glued them together.

I wanted to decorate the doors, but I know my limits. There's no way that I could do the sort of freehand that wins modern competition. But I could draw as well as a medieval monk who's never left his cloiser, and so that's what I did. Hence this:

That looks suitably antiquated. Here it is on the tank.

That was fun!