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i'm happy you like the great marine swap, im sure a great many people would love to trade with you! that marine looks amazing!

I love the Helmets on your SoBs

Always glad to hear people enjoying the GMS. I didnt realize how big a community project it would become when I started it.

Today my pink Necron force came in courtesy of fellow Dakkaite bra'tac (with whom I bartered the majority of my Dark Angels force), straight from the Netherlands, replete and plum with leftover warrior bits, gauss weapons, scarabs, et alia.

So I decided, now that I had some spare parts, to start building myself a few immortals to flesh out my footsloggers. Having asked previously for advice in the modeling forum about converting immortals and pariahs and, having received some excellent advice from seasoned kitbashers, I did the thing any novice in my shoes would do: completely disregarded it.

Looking at my bits bag,



and sifting through it with an extremely excited and chatty 6 year old boy beside me (beside himself, too, for that matter), I quickly determined that I would be able to make approximately 5 necron-y models--probably immortals, with the right amount of chutzpah. I also noted that a few of the monolith weapons cap things:



were in the bag, and not on the monolith, and after sizing them up quickly against the plastic necron warrior body I had assembled, had an idea.

I grabbed a warrior head, and cut it in half (front and back). Then I cut the bottom center piece out of the weapons cap thing. I stuck the back of the head on the back of the cap, and the face on the front.

Front:



Back



Then I cut a very narrow wedge into where the two bottom ridge on the outside caps meet the shoulderpads on the warrior body. When I was done, it slotted in there imperfectly, so I trimmed a 1/4mm or so off the front edge of the shoulderpads to mate them a little better.





So far, that's where I'm at.










Automatically Appended Next Post:
Ok so, long story short is I trimmed a couple of necron arms, stuck a marine scope on the end of one to act as a sort of targeter because I didn't have any arms that I could make useful, and used the other to reach up as a firing mechanism.

Everything seemed to fit into place as far as the head-gun went, so I went ahead and bound the gauss bars to it, and stuck some weird knobbies on the end. This was the only place I made a mistake. I didn't affix one of them correctly so it's sort of pointing downward, but afterwords, the bind I'd gotten from the glue was so strong that I didn't want to risk pulling it apart and breaking the gun or cutting it off and ruining the knobby.

So I made sure everything fit together with the gun, shoulders, and arms going to the right position, and glued everything in place. At this point I'm pretty f*cking happy for a first attempt, and I turn the model around and look at it a bit, and decide to put to little black cylinders (that I cut off the 4xsmall base sprues) on the back of the gun just to flesh it out a little bit, and I think it balances out the weapon nicely.

I slap a quick coat of paint on and a fast wash of prussian blue watercolour, to get it up to tabletop. All together, I'd say from scratch, the whole project took 3 hours. What I have here, I believe, is an immortal model that stands out as an immortal, still giving the impression of having heavy firepower at its disposal, and a unique look on the battlefield. Any C & C welcomed.

Nice stuff, I especially like the SOBs. Also, what are these Water Colour Washes you keep talking about. Never heard of them before.

I am most impressed with the space marine armor. Great work

Grimm wrote:Nice stuff, I especially like the SOBs. Also, what are these Water Colour Washes you keep talking about. Never heard of them before.

just water colour paints. you've never heard of it because it's an improvisation i've made to compensate for GW blue ink being OOP. i'm using windsor & newton, which are an artist's grade paint. the great thing about water colour is you can keep using it over and over in your pallet even if it dries up (just add water!), and for what you pay for a tube, you get a lifetime worth of wash if you're only using it for model painting because the ink is in such high concentration.

So what, it's just a home-made wash? Sounds good, I'll have to try it.

Grimm wrote:So what, it's just a home-made wash? Sounds good, I'll have to try it.

yep and the best thing is, depending on how strong your colour blending is, you can make the wash any colour you like, in any hue or saturation.

And so my Necrons live on

Surely something I have never seen and it looks great!

Subscribbed, keep them coming, and you should paint them PINK!

When I first saw the idea I was more or less 'meh...' but seeing it all done and painted I like it.

My proclivity to go all out buying armies with the idea of painting them to an extremely high standard has gotten me into trouble in the past. The trouble is biting off more than I can chew.

At the end of the day, I want every model I paint to look fantastic. There are times when I don't mind giving a model like a Necron warrior short shrift in order to get them up to tabletop standard, but when it comes to special characters, especially ones with names, I feel it behooves us to paint them slowly, methodically, and to the best of our abilities.

I have numerous character models in my bits box, one of which has been in my collection for going on 12 years: Khârn the Betrayer. I've had him, and intended to paint him for a good 5 of those years; the other seven he spent lonely in storage. The poor bastard was sitting there with black primer and a poor coat of bleached bone on his arm for all that time.

Now that I'm working on a part-fluff, part competitive CSM list (of which Khârn and possibly Abaddon will be at the helm), I want the model to be perfect.

I just completed the backpack. Estimated time: 4 hours. The photo doesn't do it justice.

You guys may or may not know that during this year's trip to Beijing, I went to some lengths in order to document my experiences and thoughts as well as practice my photography ( insofar as an amateur can learn in four weeks' time).

The idea was to create a travelogue/photo-journal that might give westerners a better idea what it's like in China, because, believe it or not, our media is slanted against the Chinese and really, nobody here has the faintest fething clue what life is like over there (or how good we have it here).

It's a long read. So be warned: It's the length of a small novella. I'm hoping that the interspersed photos will keep you interested. Also be warned I make no attempt at impartiality. My view is that of a westerner sympathetic to the conditions and facts of life in the world's most populous country in a city of close to twenty million people.

Almost every link hides a photo (and some of them are good!). I try to keep the prose active and lean and lucid and occasionally funny. It has been a labour of love and about two hundred hour of walking, composition, editing, cropping, and interneting, and I humbly invite you to share my experiences as well your thoughts.

The story starts here:

Part One: Steel, Glass, and Concrete

http://wuthitz.livejournal.com/110341.html

If you're not interested in reading, and just want to look at some of the better photos I took, you can see a few of them in this gallery:

http://wuthitz.imgur.com/best_of_beijing#01shf

If you want to see a more complete gallery, there are a few hundred photos on my photobucket page. Just pick a sub album:

http://s216.photobucket.com/albums/cc21/wuthitz/Beijing%202011/

Best,



Ian

So, having bartered and haggled and cajoled my way into the army that I'm settling with for the long run, and being dismayed at my lackadaisical painting priority, I've decided to take on the "one squad" rule.

That is, I'll paint one squad at a time until my whole army is done. What we don't need is to hop from squad to squad without finishing what we've started.

And so, since I'm a khornate cultist to the deepest part of my bones, I thought it fitting to design a colour scheme and aesthetic for my mostly Khorne based army.

Since one of the things that attracts me to khorne is the concept of martial honour, these guys take care of their equipment, They spit shine it, baby it, all their gear works the way they want and they take pride in not letting themselves become scummy chaos marines like the other fallen.

The usual color scheme for zerkers is some kind of blood red with bronze or gold, but since I've painted Kharn with the scheme of scab red and boltgun, and highlighted up, I think I'll stick with the scab red base with boltgun trim for the zerkers.

These models arrived to me primed black, and while I don't usually like painting black primed models because it's more work, and I want to get my army to a solid, striking tabletop + in as short amount of time, I prefer less work, but these wound up looking ok.

Base colours: Scab Red, Boltgun Metal

Washes: Baal red on Scab and Azurmen on Boltgun

Highlights: Mithril on boltgun, none on scab (this was a calculated decision)

Trim: Burnished Gold, Ice Blue (on plasma pistols)

Estimated time invested: 30-40 hours. More than I wanted to get tabletop level models, but I'm very pleased with how the red and silver and gold work together.

On to the next squad.

look very nice i like that bases.

Second squad of Zerkers done. A huge pain in the ass, a huge learning experience vis: pinning, different glue, basing, basecoating choice. I wrote a nice article but I lost it on a preview refresh. Fakk. Enjoy the models.

very nice! the bases go well with the red armor

As per my poll, I've started work on a squad of Thousand sons.

This is not really a reasonable thing to do because I have an almost fully painted Kharn model and I need transports painted for my bersekers. That said, I'm pretty happy to paint 1k sons because they are beautiful models and I've wanted to do them for a long while. So it's a nostalgia thing.

At first I wasn't even considering using them in the force. They'll be so pretty though, I'd be hard pressed not to, and I'm not known for putting utility ahead of style in matters of aesthetics.

This particular model is a guinea pig of sorts. I've putzed around with the blues trying wet on wet blending and shading to various degrees of sucess, but my love of working with red, orange, and yellow is such that I'm pretty happy with how it's coming along so far.

The usual lemon yellow 1k sons get painted isn't really for me. I wanted something a little deeper, that looks like they just walked out of the ahriman's rubric.

Here he is in the early game.

Love that yellow you've got going. That headdress looks amazing.

I've picked up some eldar wanting to explore a new theme. I have a hobby of painting bamboo in the Chinese "spontaneous" brush and ink style which I lean towards in phases.

Thinking that bamboo is a nifty parallel to the ghostly Iyanden craftworld, I designed this theme with intransience and the numinous in mind. This model is in many ways an experiment that will sort of guide me as I work through this army.

The choice to paint the bamboo leaves in greyscale reflects the art of brush and ink as well as the empty silence that one would face from the implacable rustle of wraithlords and wraithguard as their spiritseers guide them through the ephemeral and material. I considered seriously painting the leaves in a green monochrome, but as it happens, the black and grey worked out much better with the bamboo stalk shading than I think the livelier green would. Thematically, there is no comparison. The brightlance is going on soon, but I didn't want it to get in the way of the freehand.

I suppose I should mention that this wraithlord has an upside-down head. This started out as a mistake on my part, but I think it actually looks better and makes for an easier, cleaner freehand than the other way, so I decided to leave it.

C+C welcome. Enjoy.

Very nice. I think you should plant bamboo on the base.