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Alright, so my next skull champ is all but finished. All that's left in the way is a few cleanup things and this damnable power fist problem.

I went in and re-painted both of them in a swap to get fresh eyes on it:





On the one hand, the white is coming out as the color I "should" have. On the other hand, I'm finding myself so distracted by the white that all I wind up doing is looking at the face and the hand, and sort of ignoring the rest of the model.

I agree with you. The white hand is striking enough that it really disrupts the color balance of the model.

I disagree, I think the white hand balances out a lot better than the white helmet alone which looks too stark imo

does the white helmet look too stark on the models that don't have a powerfist?

Surriously good stuff here. Well Done! I think they look great love the color scheme, I might tone the white down a bit, but that's only my opinion. Bleached Skulls are fitting though!

I don't think the helm or the claw are distracting, but I do think they are a bit too "clean". In my mind a Berzerker would not bother with aesthetics and his helm would likely be dirtier. Not saying BLOOD SPATTER GORE or anything close to that, just more... unkempt.

Spatter you say?

BLOOD FOR THE BLOOD GOD!

Yes. Very much yes.

+1 for white powerfist, the gold one simply blends into the model, you hardly notice he has a fist at all.

Characterful army thus far, really cool conversions, and it really has an impressive effect on their size. Might have to try this with my own marines

This guy reminds me of the villain from Willow.

lol.

So, this is it, my last option. It's either going to be this, or the old white.



Basically this is the same as regular white, but the recesses are in brown and red (because I painted the white over the spatter). Basically, it's the white fist, but with those darn blood stains that creep into the cracks that are just impossible to get out.

Fantastic stuff. You're back to working at a really swift pace again as well, which makes me feel a bit useless.

I think for me it's a tossup between the current ones and the spattered one. Neither is quite as stark as the plain white, which is nice. The added color in both cases really helps to break up the white. I don't think the helmets need it as much because they have the eyes and rebreathers already acting as good contrast.

They look great! Keep going!

It all looks great man

okay, so after all this bother, I've finally gotten my second skull champ done.

The story starts a little better with this one. Rather than carrying this model over the entire squad, I started it later. As was mentioned before, I actually did this powerfist at the same time as the other skull champion.

Also, like the other, I raided my CSM bits for one of my good helmets, something that looked befitting of a skull champ.

The only major decision I made other than that was the fur. I felt like it had been too long since I'd made a guy with toga-style fur, so I figured it was time again. That, and I decided to once again add traction to the upturned foot. It made special sense given that the other boot came with traction on it by default.

Also, this one wound up being my second application of guitar wire. The stuff is strangely difficult to work with...



Needless to say, I really liked how the conversion came out. On the one hand, he's got the bull horns and charging stance, and on the other hand he's got the creepy/weighed down by the powerfist lurch going on.

Of course, the painting wasn't quite so easy as you've been noticing. Eventually I settled on my final paint job - the blood-grimed white. I'm so sick of working on these damn power fists, I'm ready to just be done with a good enough option.

Other than that, it was a few failed attempts at putting a nice fade effect on the horns, followed by one decent one. High-gloss makes anything better...


For a larger image of this, click here.

So, I don't think it's too much to say that this is probably going to be one of my favorite models I've done. Just like a couple of my balding, cowardly guardsmen, this model I think really projects exactly what the model is. This skull champion clearly looks both classy as hell and brutally savage, a ruthless fighter filled with unquenchable hate. A person who wins what he wants and isn't afraid to flaunt it.

First you get the power, then you get the galaxy, then you get the women.

Gangsta.



So, I was kind of hoping to get my first two squads of berzerkers by christmas, but I'm not going be able to finish the last guy in a couple days.

That's okay, though. I'll get the last guy chopped up early next year. It's nice to see a slowly growing pile of anger arise on my new workspace...




Once that's done, I'm going to start the real work of this project.

Coming up is going to be 6 scratchbuilds. That's right, 4 obliterators made of GS, and two scratchubilt demon princes.

Challenge accepted...

Merry Christmas, etc., all

Well.

Next year's going to be awesome!

Fantastic work. Each model oozes character.

I especially like those powerfists.

Any chance of a group shot, sans computer and lamp?

Lovely stuff dude, still looking good! I really like the blend on the horns from white to charcoal, really nicely done, can't wait until next year and you do some more!

NF09

Great Marines. Those power fist are awesome.

So it's a new year, now, and I decided to work quickly once I got back from the holidays to finish up my work with the berzerkers so that I can get on with the real new stuff for the new year. Time to get two troops choices done.

This last khorne barbarian, however, was going to require a little bit of extra work. By now, my bitz available were basically exhausted. Worse, I had somehow managed to lose both a helmet and a shoulderpad.

The helmet was fixable by using one of my precious old-tymie ones, but the shoulderpad was basically a loss. To make matters worse, the one shoulderpad I did have left for reasons unbeknownst to me, did not actually fit on the remaining pistol arm I had. There was nothing to do but to scratchbuild.

As anyone who has tried to GS GW-style pauldrons can tell you, they are more than a little tricky. As such, I decided to make this model the second with a fur-covered shoulder. With this model, I would basically make it like he was wearing a super-toga.

The torso I used was also one of the old ones. This particular one had a giant ring on the belt, and I decided that I just HAD to use it somehow. I decided that what this ring should have on it is a pair of grenades dangling off it in a disgusting show of violent manhood that I would expect from a minion of khorne. Unfortunately, after I got the grenades on there, you couldn't see the ring anymore. In any case, it does at least manage to break up the fur a bit.

The shoulderpad went easily enough with me first putting down a rough approximation of a shoulderpad, and then just putting fur over it like everywhere else.

The last major piece of work on this model was the backpack. I only had one of, by far, my least favorite power packs left - the really gangly one with a bunch of wires awkwardly poking out. I did some GS work to bring the bottom of the backpack up to cover the gap (instead of bringing the top down, like I'd done with others of this type). I also shortened the vent arms by nearly half. Unfortunately, I wasn't paying close enough attention when cutting off the second one (turns out cutting something exactly in all three dimensions simultaneously requires some focus), which meant that I needed to do a LOT of GS to get the two sides even.

In the end, the result was a berzerker:



Painting went as usual with nothing particularly to-do about it. Having the drybrushable fur covering more than a usual amount of the model definitely cut down on the amount of detail (and thus time) that I had to spend painting.



So it's kind of hard to see, but I'm really impressed with how the backpack came out on this one, especially given how awful it started (this one was slightly miscast to boot).

It's interesting to see this culmination of all the work I've done so far on these berzerkers. I think what strikes me most is the subtle change in style that these models have been undergoing.

For comparison, look at this last berzerker compared to the first one:



The original idea for these berzerkers was sort of a lurking, seething malice. Pagan rites collecting skulls with chainsaws and sacrificing the blood of your children while they sleep, one innocent drop at a time. Over time, this has slowly evolved into a more bombastic, professional, and flamboyant hatred. The new guys don't creep into the window at night, they bust in the front door and let you have a good look at their staggering awesomeness before they serrate you to a bloody pulp.

It's sort of the difference between this kind of evil:



And this kind of evil:



But still with plenty of this:



Next, as promised, it's going to be some scratchbuilding. The first thing up is some obliterators. The fluff I think I'm going for is that the more fur and bone a model is, the more demonically corrupted it is. I think for my oblits, I'm going to go with hoofs, and more obvious mutation, along with that kind of tech-creepy thing that obliterators are supposed to have.

This is a really great thread for me, a newbie really interested in Khorne Berzerkers. I'm especially thankful for the truescale post on the 2nd page of the thread, which really helped me understand the overall process a little better. But unfortunately I'm a total GS newbie, so I still have to ask a simple question: From the pictures you posted on page 2, after you cut the legs to get rid of the GW "crouch pose" it seems like there should be a really big gap right behind the knee that I wouldn't know what to do with. What do you do? Do you just glue the two pieces of the leg together at a single point, then fill the hole with GS or do you fill it up with some small sprue pieces and then use GS or do you find you don't need a lot of GS? Or is it something completely different?

So, if you look closely, whenever I hack apart knees that are bent, when I glue them back together, the knee is still bent - it's just bent at a better angle. While I think on occasion I've had to cut down some of that ribbed back of the knee joint thing, I don't think I've ever had to bulk it up before. If I have, it would have been a matter of gluing in a little wad of GS, and once that was cured going back in with a second bit of GS and making it look nice, and adding the ribbing.

Much of taking the crouch out of legs isn't to unbend the knee, but it's changing the angle of the hips, and lifting the model up off the base so that the feet don't lay flat on the base.

For the feet I have to gouge them out (which is just sort of a pain, but there's no real way around it). Then I glue in a blob of GS between the foot and the leg, sort of making a new ankle. While the GS is glued (so it still connects to both plastic parts), it stays malleable so that I can twist the foot around until I get it at the angle I want it relative to both the rest of the model, and to the base. Then I dab in a bit more glue to form sort of a superglue crust over the GS, and then let it cure.

Sometimes I've had to go back in and clean up the top of the foot, or the back of it, but usually I can get the foot in the right position and still be able to smooth it out on the initial GS stage so that it looks nice.

And don't use sprue pieces. GS cures just fine without needing to be a concrete. The only time I might ever consider doing this is in a scratchbuild where I can't get the armature the way I want it, and I need to bulk up a lower layer a LOT, and I don't have milliput. Perhaps I might need that coming up soon, but GS in the kind of fine detail work I've been doing so far should always be unadulterated.

Layers of superglue and greenstuff should be all you need. Think of it more like fiberglass than like plywood.

Great answer. Subscribed to this thread to come back to when I start building my army. I love the effort you've put into making your army yours. It's one of the best aspects about the hobby, I'm beginning to realize.

The skull champion looks great, i love the blending on his helmet horns.

I will hazve to try out your method of super glue over green stuff joints. Mine have come out ok so far, but i have notreally handeled them since they have been ribbed and cured. (but i did pin them first and just fill in the gap with GS. )

M0rdain wrote:Mine have come out ok so far, but i have notreally handeled them since they have been ribbed and cured. (but i did pin them first and just fill in the gap with GS. )

Well, pinning them is actually going to be stronger than my method, so If you're doing that, then feel more than free to continue. The only reason I'm not pinning is becuase it makes everything more difficult to work with (and I want EXACT poses), and because it's faster.

Perhaps if things start falling apart once I actually start playing, then I'll pin stuff down. Once you've already painted something, it's a lot easier to see where exactly the pieces fit back together.

Great stuff! I'm looking forward for the Obilerators

Subbed. Suuuuuuubbed.

So, as promised, it's time for some scratchbuilding. First it's going to be some obliterators, and then a pair of demon princes.

This part of the story starts at the hardware store. I need something for the armature, and I'm going to go with my tried and true thin (as in like .35mm thick) aluminum tubing. Aluminum tubing is cheap and, more importantly, easy to cut. I decided to go with a length of 4/16" for the narrower parts of the obliterator, 5/16" for the wider parts of the obliterator and the narrower parts of the demon princes, and 7/16" for the wider parts of the demon prince.

I also know that the most difficult part of any scratchbuild is the details at the end. Not necessarily just because details are tricky, but by the time you get to the details stage, you're already horribly burnt out, and don't want to continue, much less do something MORE difficult. As such, I went to thewarstore.com and picked up one of each of the chaos rhino accessory sprues, one set of terminator spikey bitz, and a set of terminator heads (for the horns/tusks), along with my necessary order of 40mm bases to put them on. I already have a pair of 60mm bases from my guard HWTs, so I was good there.

Of note, this was the first money I've spent on this project so far. Up until now, it's been using a box of berzerkers that I won from my last tournament along with a few old CSM models that I inherited. I was even using old GS. So far with the bitz, the tubing, and a new amount of GS, I'm up to $56. In the end, I'll have 996 points of CSM, which really isn't too shabby, given that if I were to have bought everything new and just painted it, that same amount would be $230. If course, what I save in money, I lose in time and sanity...

Anyways, the first part of this project is going to be the obliterators. There are a few things I know I'm going to want to do with the demon princes (like hooves), that I'm going to want to try out on smaller models first. Once I have the technique down, it will be time to scratchbuild the princes.

As is usual for me with scratchbuilding, I have a vague idea where I want to go with the models, but no real specifics. There are a few guidelines that I'm going by:

- The current obliterator models are terrible. Fleshy globs everywhere? Time to replace that with fur. As I said, skull and fur is what represents the demonic in my army, so these guys, being nearly totally demon, are going to have a fair bit of shagginess to them. Of course, I don't want to go too overboard - they're not actually demons yet, so they should still look sort of like berzerkers/terminators. There must still be red and gold somewhere on the model.

- The current obliterator models are terrible. Each one looks like they're struggling deeply with constipation. Yes, the models are slow, but they're purposeful, rather than clueless, and they're relentless, which means they can frikkin move while firing - so they should look like they're moving... Once again, the dynamicness of the pose is going to be what sells these models, and what unites them with the rest of the dudes. These aren't just obliterators, they're obliterators OF KHORNE!!!

- The current obliterator models are terrible. What the hell is with all those random guns blobbed on to the end of their arms? Not only does it look AWFUL, but it doesn't even necessarily match the fluff. The codex says that they use arcane and chemical powers to shoot globs of stuff that have the same effect as a plasma gun or flame thrower, NOT that they literally have a plasma gun and a flame thrower awkwardly smooshed into their flesh. What I'm going to go for here is something that looks more like an omni-weapon, and justify that whatever the obliterator needs at the time just comes poking (or shooting) out.

On top of this, there are a few rules I'm going to make myself follow. The first is that the model can't look too shaggy. Yes, there will be fur, but I can't rely on that as a cop-out. Secondly, the models shall not look too much like terminators. These guys are supposed to be huge hulking monstrosities, not up-armored berzerkers. Thirdly, I have to avoid making the model too large. This is a traditional problem for me, as I really like to fill up the base of my models (cf. the berzerkers, which barely fit on their 20mm bases). I still have to make demon princes which are even bigger than the obliterators, and I HATE it when people make demon princes WAY bigger than their troops. They are possessed chaos lords, not greater demons. As the oblits are in the middle of the size spectrum, I've got to keep a lid on how big I make these. Finally, I want these guys to have at least a little of the mech-crazed mania that the fluff assigns to oblits. They should look like they were once techmarines, at least decidedly moreso than, say, the berzerkers.

Other than that, I don't have any more specific plans for them. Giant, shaggy, tech-nightmare monsters, barely clad in armor designed for mortal flesh. I'm also going to try to make them look creepy as best I can. Sort of like this guy:



But we'll see.

Once all of this was planned out, it was time to go to work. I actually have an old, beat-up terminator in my small collection of inherited CSM (I got 10x assembled marines, and a terminator lord). I decided to use this as the beginning. I chose to take each of the dimensions on the old termie and add 50%, in part because oblits are bigger than termies, and in part because these old metal models are decidedly smaller in stature. I started by cutting the large tubes at 3/4", but was shocked when I saw just how big this would make the leg and ultimately the model. I'd be already breaking one of my rules. Instead, I made some that were 5/8", but those looked really stubby. I was beginning to dispair, until I realised something - the old termie models are REALLY small.



In fact, looking at the termie model closely, he doesn't have a chest AT ALL. If there was a guy in that suit of armor, his nuts would have to be rubbing up on his nipples. Of course, I also realised that what's really important here is how the oblits compare in size to my truescaled marines, not to old metal minis. In this light, the 3/4" made a lot more sense, so I decided to go with that.

The way to cut these with a hobby knife is pretty simple. You just put down the tube on the table, measure out how long you want the tube to be, and put your knife down. Then you carefully rock the tube back and forth on the table, using your other hand to help twist the tube from the other end, and keep things generally stable. Make sure that you have the knife directly perpendicular to the tube, and that you're applying pressure straight down, or else you will get something that looks like you're threading a screw (you'll see this in some pictures perhaps).

At some point, the knife will go through.



At that point, you keep going back and forth, widening the cut. If you've been rolling it sufficiently, you should have nearly the entire tube scored (a little tough with 5/16" and a regular exacto knife blade, but still...), which means it should go through pretty easily. Avoid just pushing down until the very end, or else you will smush the tube on one side.

I've decided to do 4 obliterators at once, as that's as most as I can ever reasonably conceive of needing (plus, I got a lot of bitz in groups of 4), this meant cutting out 8 pieces for the lower leg. When that was done, I decided to use my shorter pieces of the large tubing erroneously cut for the legs as my omni-gun, which meant that I just needed 5 pieces of the 1/4" tubing for the upper legs, the upper arm, and one lower arm.

This was achieved in little time.



So, no two pieces are exactly cut the same, and some of them have minor errors on the ends, but that's not really important. These are just going to exist as armatures, so they don't have to look neat, or even necessarily be exactly the same length (you won't notice when it's all put together).

The tricky thing about this, though, is that some parts are going to be power armor, so they need to keep a smooth, unmarred appearance. Because power armor is basically tube shaped, this meant that some of my armature would actually be exposed, which meant that, while the edges could be a little ragged, the actual face of the tube couldn't be.

Usually once I get to this point, I glue and greenstuff the pieces of tubing together, and put the whole thing on a base. I figure I can't do that this time, though. This time, the lower legs are going to be really complicated, I can already tell, which means I'm going to have a hard time doing the correct work if everything's already glued down (it's going to be tough to get my knife in there). As such, this time I'm going to do some of the work on the tubes themselves and then assemble them later. Only once I'm certain that I'll be able to work on the legs once they're glued down will I glue them down. The torso and arms, however, should be much easier.

While I don't know what exactly I want to do with the legs yet, I'm pretty sure that the top is going to be pretty shambly, so I'm going to want to make the legs look more like normal legs. How I'm going to tech it up, I'm not certain, but the first thing that needs to be done is the lower legs.

This looks like it's going to be very educational and something exceptionally interesting to watch as you work on them! I can't wait to see you start to flesh them out, i'm looking forward to picking up some hints, tricks and learning where to start with something like this!

Nerdfest09