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.

Meanwhile, in Khornwall

I have returned from holiday in Cornwall and, in a truly awkward attempt at a segue back into model painting, I have been working on some Khornish miniatures.

These were the Blood Warriors from the Storm of Sigmar boxed set. Like the other Khorne soldiers, I thought it would be good to convert them into post-apocalyptic types. A basic Blood Warrior looks like this:

The rabbit ears would have to go. I was slightly nervous about this, but simply hacking them off and filing down the result left the warriors with interesting plates over the sides of their heads, like a neckbrace. At any rate, it looked solid and a darn sight less silly than the original outfits.

I removed the slightly weird shield-things and replaced some of the axes with less medieval-looking weapons, including a couple of guns. Likewise, the strange stomach-mouth on one of the models was filled in. In the model shown above, I cut off the silly beard, which even ZZ Top would regard as excessive, and replaced it with a roll of cloth (that probably looks like some kind of mutation, now I think about it). So here we are:

This guy is in charge, as much as anyone could be.

This one is my favourite.

It's actually a ball and chain.

The painting looks a bit rough and ready, largely because it is, but I think it suits the miniatures. I went for a rusty, daubed look. Presumably these guys smear red paint on their armour or, failing that, Chicken Tikka Masala. In fact, painting things with curry is beginning to look like a theme of this blog.

In other news, it's exciting to see that a new version of Necromunda is being released. The models look pretty good, although I've never been very keen on House Goliath, and high heels on models is (are?) a pet hate of mine. My only concern is that they might be a bit big. Everything from GW seems to be getting larger, and it would be nice if they scaled against the original models.

Old Lead

In my continuing efforts to work through the vast heap of stripped lead that I've acquired - I've got a whole Cadbury's Roses box full of metal models, which weights about a ton and reeks of Dettol - I had a look at two of the oldest models I own and tried to make them look at least presentable.

The first one is an ancient metal termagant. Termagants are the lowly footsoldiers (hoofsoldiers, technically) of the Tyranid hive mind, and have gone through several iterations over the years. Personally, I think that the old metal models capture them best: small, fast, vicious and nasty, scuttling down pipes and through the underhive, looking for things to shoot and jab.

In keeping with this image, I based the termagant on a cast-off piece of plastic and painted the base to look like a metal walkway rusted by the toxic sludge below it. The termagant itself was not converted, and was painted an unhealthy fleshy colour, like a mixture of the facehugger from Alien and the last chicken in the rotisserie section of a large supermarket, spinning sadly on a long-neglected spike, avoided by all but the very drunkest customers.

Not for human consumption, but good at consuming humans

The next model was a Squat "living ancestor". Apparently, this guy used to sit in a sidecar, and was propelled into battle by his biker-dwarf brethren. I have no memory of buying him and I certainly don't have his bike and sidecar. I gave him a pair of Ramshackle Games robot legs and the engine/exhausts from a tractor.

Since I couldn't cut him off his resin base (as I quickly discovered), I broke the edges of the base off to make it look like rock. He then got a red paint job.

I like this guy: I could see him as some sort of guildmaster or other important, but physically feeble, type. Perhaps he represents a merchant guild. I could see him having a Dickensian name like Jedediah Clench. He's probably really good on the local football team, assuming that he doesn't die of old age mid-game.

A shotgun and a bottle of beer

About 25 years ago, I bought a few gangers for a game called Confrontation, which was the forerunner to Necromunda. I never played it (it looked incredibly complex) but I did paint the models - badly. I stripped one of them down, and started again.

He reminded me slightly of the bartender Ratz in William Gibson's hard-to-follow cyberpunk novel, Neuromancer, who is described as having a mechanical arm and keeps a riot gun behind the bar. I gave my guy a bionic arm made out of plasticard, sprues and bits of spear, and a shotgun from the excellent genestealer cultists set. His beer bottle came from a set of bottles made by a company called Meng, who I think do bits for historical dioramas. I stuck him on a base from the Sedition Wars game.

And then time for painting. He got a fairly standard jeans-and-apron look. Neuromancer mentions Ratz's bionic arm as being made of "grubby pink plastic" and I tried to reflect that in the paint job, which I'm not sure comes across very well here. I also added some warning stripes to his shotgun. It's a popular look on Necromunda and reminds potential enemies that shotguns can be dangerous.

I'm pleased with the painting, and I like the variety of fairly bright colours. In particular, the shading on the apron and the jeans has come out well. I can imagine him being a suitably disreputable addition to the post-apocalyptic drinking scene.

Lady with a banner

At the moment, I am ill. I have some sort of virus and, to quote Kris Kristofferson in one of the Blade films, I feel like hammered shit. Concentrating on much more than shooting aliens on a screen is proving tricky. Anyway, I've got one model done this time, and I think it's come out quite well.

It's the Sisters of Battle imagifer that I built last time. The paint scheme was pretty obvious, really. Amusingly, this model is about a head taller than the rest of the Sisters. Perhaps the main qualification for carrying the relic is that you can hold it up really high. After all, prowess is generally measured in the 40k universe by (1) hat size, (2) proliferation of skulls and (3) sheer physical bulk. Not wearing a helmet also seems to help.

Have I ever explained my theory that skulls grow in the ground in 40k, a bit like turnips on Earth?