So I've decided to start a second army. I've been looking for something that has fewer dang models to unpack, push around, and repack. Something flashy, fast, and fun. After a month of bantering and thinking, asking and deciding, calculating and plotting, I've finally come to the conclusion that it's time to start a khorne army!

Though I'm not totally certain what the list will look like at 1500 points (bikes or raptors?), one thing I do know is that the list will start out with a solid core of 2 squads of berzerkers. One of the secret, cheaty reasons for wanting to go chaos is that I already have a handful of models lying around that I got gifted from a friend. They've been collecting dust in various drawers for the past 6 years, and so I now have the opportunity to try out my hand at modeling before I begin purchasing stuff.

Because this is going to be a low model count army, I really want this to showcase what I'm capable of. I want each one of these miniatures to ooze awesomeness and, as it's a khorne army, reckless hate and unstoppable malfeasance.

We start with one of my old miniatures, which is none of these things...



He may be a chaos marine, but he looks more like he's waiting in line for movie tickets with his chainsword, rather than being an immortal lord of relentless destruction.

The first thing that happens is that I've got to rip this guy apart. As the superglue is over a half decade old, this is relatively easy with much of the stuff (although I ripped off the topknot trying to get the helmet off). In the end, though, I wanted to "truescale" this up just a touch. I said a TOUCH. I'm not looking to make ludicrously oversized movie marines here, but as-is, these CSM models are no taller than my GUARD models. They need to look a little more badass than that.

To do this, I need to seperate the torso from the pelvis, which winds up being incredibly challenging. The domed top of the pelvis provides a startling amount of surface area. I try running the model under the hottest water I can bear. Nothing. I then throw it immediately in the freezer and let it sit for 10 minutes. Nothing. Then I mull over options for solvents. Acetone will do the trick in a snap, but it will also destroy the plastic. Instead, I reach for acetone's younger sister: ethanol. I break into the liquor cabinet and find my half empty bottle of creme de menthe that's been sitting in the cabinet for the past 3 years (if you've ever bought creme de menthe, you'll know what I'm talking about).

I lightly splashed it around, making the whole kitchen smell of spearmint. After yet more tugging and wrenching, the top finally came free from the bottom.

Once everything was disassembled, it was time to get it reassembled. Much of the model went back together without much bother, apart from just putting things into a cooler pose. The only serious work was in the legs. The top of the pelvis got a plasticard spacer with some greenstuff, while the legs were both removed from the pelvis. One of the legs was furthermore chopped up, removing the foot.



Gluing and greenstuffing the CSM into just a cooler pose actually did a LOT to increase his height and make him more badass looking. Given this, I didn't feel the need to do any other truscaling stuff.

But he still wasn't looking bloodthirsty enough. Also, regluing the legs to the pelvis put them badly out of joint with the rest of the model. I either need to fix this problem, or cover it over. I decided on the latter.

This would come in the form of a pelt. Not only would this help work on the trophy aspect of khorne (indeed, I'm wanting this model to NOT overlook the fact that khorne is also "skulls for the skull throne"), but it would let me double these as space wolves if ever I needed

With the bottom of the pelt on, the model looked unbalanced, so I extended the pelt to the top of the model. This saw me with a problem, though. Now, I had decided on a theme, but it wasn't very pervasive. I needed something to really carry it through. I decided that the best thing to go with an animal skin would be an animal skull. Not only would this look khorne-y, but it would also give me something interesting to do with the topknot gone.

With the skull put together (in only 2 greenstuff steps, I might add. It was just the mask and then the horns), This left me with only a nuisance shoulderpad. I didn't want the 8-point star that came with the model, I wanted something that looked more... violent. I decided on spikes. This was accomplished by anchoring a short piece of rod in the shoulderpad and then making teardrop shaped pieces of GS by carefully rolling them in my fingers and then attaching them to the mounting lug. I didn't know if this would look good at the time, thus the somewhat futzy method. I anticipate future spikes to be made by attaching GS to the piece of rod and then cutting it off after the GS cures.

I tried a few other things, but none of it took. It was time to call this conversion complete.



Once this was done, it was time to work on a paint scheme. I agonized over several different options, colorizing my miniature to see some examples of what it could look like:



The problem that I'm going to have is that I'm a MUCH better modeler than a painter. As such, I'm going to want to pick something easy and that can still look good. I'm going to want a scheme that could possibly go somewhere, and work on my skills, but I've got to start with what I can realistically accomplish. I decide to go for the classic brown-red/gold khorne look.

This leads to a lot more fitful planning. On the one hand, after painting on the basecoat, the brown and gold looks REALLY classy. It goes well with the fur, and provides an altogether appealing aesthetic (like leather chairs with brass tacks). On the other hand, there are various red things calling for me. On the one hand, I've got a simple red highlight, while on the far end, I've got putting red patterns into the armor, like the khorne army in the 5th ed rulebook. After what felt like endless failed attempts, I finally settled on what I could do, rather than what I'd ideally wanted.

It may be slightly boring, but it's definitely traditional khorne.



For some reason, my camera didn't pick up the distinctions in shades of red very well in these pictures. I'll have to take more of them outside, or something.

Anyways, this is clearly a monster of khorne, ready to commit unspeakable destruction for really little reason at all.

More importantly, this guy definitely fits the bill of looking bigger, more impressive, and much, much more murderous than a guardsman.



So, after months of planning and weeks of trying to figure out how I was going to model this, and days of actual working with greenstuff and paint, I've finally got a start to my new army. I predict this will go pretty well.

So much so, in fact, that I've already purchased a box of khorne berzerkers (you get TWELVE in a box!), and will start splicing them in with the bitz of the remaining 7 regular CSM I have.

Until I have more to show, here's a poster:

Nicely done. I love the skull mask.

I really like the idea of a skull theme rather than the traditional bftbg theme.

Can't wait to see more.

That is an awesome job in the posing mate. Skull - also top quality.

I think the red paint looks a little flat at the moment,- considered washes?

I too was considering some subtle truescaling if i ever collected marines, you've done the test mini for me! Great work on it, the skull is great just not too sure about the fur poncho i think you should have left his cuirass sans hair. Another thing, though not a direct criticism of the paint scheme i must admit they look rather similar to the folerans.

darkkt wrote:I think the red paint looks a little flat at the moment,- considered washes?

It only looks flat because of my camera, which is seeming to have tremendous difficulty picking out minute differences in shades of red. If you look on the shoulderpad, the gradient goes from bright red on the top to teracotta (brown) on the bottom). Here's a better picture I took outside now that it's light out:

Perkustin wrote:just not too sure about the fur poncho i think you should have left his cuirass sans hair.

So, I have this giant matrix of skull and fur with 7 combinations for both (skull on helmet, left shoulderpad with fur on left and right shoulderpads, for example), that give me 49 unique combinations I'm definitely going to be running out of berzerkers before I run out of fur and skull combos.

Perkustin wrote:i must admit they look rather similar to the folerans.

Well, the armor of the two is 50% in common (the terracotta). I guess perhaps I was preemptively channeling khorne when I started my Folerans?

Looking good sir, nice and simple! I look forward to your deviation into the Chaos Gods realm!

:-) Looking great! Khorne? Planning a foot based or Mechanized list?

Hey Ailaros we al know you are a fan of Hairy heads any chance you could keep the beards on the guardsmen? I say this because no doubt i will be avidly following this blog and the inevitable (I hope) battle reports and am not a fan of bearded non wolves/scars/fists.

pchappel wrote:Khorne?

So, there are a few general reasons, like wanting something that doesn't involve so many models and won't take so long to assemble/paint/unpack/deploy/move/packup, etc.

It's also, in part, a pennance army. For being a competitive jerk with my guard, I'm making an army of competitive jerks. The point is to make something fast and fun and NOT to be about if I win or not. Khorne seemed too ironic to pass up.

pchappel wrote: Planning a foot based or Mechanized list?

Not 100% sure yet. I'm waffling between raptors and bikes.

Basically, I'm getting sick of chasing down skimmers on foot (well, and other assorted fast options). Whatever the main thrust is, it's going to be fast. The infantry are more to play mop-up.

Perkustin wrote:Hey Ailaros we al know you are a fan of Hairy heads any chance you could keep the beards on the guardsmen? I say this because no doubt i will be avidly following this blog and the inevitable (I hope) battle reports and am not a fan of bearded non wolves/scars/fists.

Well, the furry loincloths have to stay. Power armor legs are surprisingly unkind, with regards to how they look once you're done converting them. The only way I can get the dynamic poses is to wind up making a pretty ugly pelvic region. Either I have to get much better with working with plastic, or I'm going to need to keep the fur on the bottom to cover everything up.

The fur on the torso this time was a one-off. I'm anticipating keeping with the theme in general, though, including the occasional fur on the shoulderpads, etc.

I think it goes well with the khorne theme, actually.

Sorry i meant face fuzz, i am fine with the pelts. I.e. please no beards/stashes on any of the bare headed blokes you may include please

Ah, heh. Don't worry about that. I think that space marines who aren't wearing helmets look kind of silly in general (with a few notable exceptions, of course).

In this case, I'm going to try and create the scariest models I can think of with a khorne theme, which means much more skull helmets and much fewer guys that look like regular guys in red armor.

Although, one of my possible incarnation of a biker list includes 2 biker khorne lords. One would be Blingus the Utterly Indescribable, as the most over the top khorne lord I could imagine. The other would be his sidekick, Thorgfeld, the Reasonably Maladjusted. He'd still get the ultra khorne armor, but I'd just use a regular, frowney face guard head, like the guardsmen in the picture above.

As it is, though, I think I'm just sticking with a single lord, so no go.

I really like your Khorne Berserker. Very good idea and nicely done.

So I put in a little bit of work over surprisingly little free time last week to keep growing my Khorne army.

Like last time, I started by ripping apart one of the chaos marines I have at my disposal. Also, I broke out the berzerker sprue. My intention was to splice the two together, but no matter how much I tried, one of my two ideas just didn't work right with the regular CSM parts. As such, my first guy would be a test of what I can do using (nearly) only berzerker parts. The other was also worked on a bit. I think he will become my skull champion once I can get my hands on a power fist.

In the mean time, there was another berzerker to do. Like my first one, I wanted this one to have a dynamic pose, lurching on balls-out crazy. The khorne kit itself would actually help me with this. Most of the berzerkers are put on the sprue in such a way where one of the legs is already split in two. This saved me a great deal of time (though the other leg still needed a great deal of separating and regluing).

This guy would be in a leg-up running pose, like my imperial guard priests. Power armor is pretty bulky, though, so I wouldn't be able to pull this effect off QUITE as well. Once the legs were figured, it was up to putting down the rest, which was surprisingly straightforward (the arms went on nearly without modification, for example).

This left the head. I decided that it would be time to take out one of those obnoxious skull face mask guys. I was intending on heavily GSing over him. Once I got it on, though, I realised I don't have to give them the crappy red paint scheme that GW gives them. I can model the skull mask as an actual skull...

Once all my pieces were set in GS, I assembled it all together, and got it on the base.



While GSing up the mask wouldn't hurt, I'd like to see how good I can make it look without it, as a baseline.

Anyways, once this was done, it was a matter of putting on the fur. The loincloth went on the same as last time, but this time, instead of putting fur on the chest, I experimented with a shoulderpad.

Without messing with the head, this phase went surprisingly quickly. As such, I took the opportunity to bulk up the backpack a bit (the berzerker ones are SO scrawny. I'll have to be doing this a lot), and adding on one of the EXTRA gigantic swords that berzerkers get in case their FIRST gigantic sword gets broken.



It's at this point that I discover something that I'm doing with this army. It's not enough for them to be Khorne berzerkers, they have to be Khorne BARBARIANS. These guys are already pointing to chaos vikings of the far future.

With the conversion done, it was a matter of applying the usual paint scheme. With only 3 colors (more or less), these guys paint up a LOT faster than my guardsmen, even with the futzy gold paint.

The only question was how to paint the extra sword. I went through lots of schemes, and settled on the one I was the least unhappy with. In any case, the end result is once again clearly a Khorne berzerker.



While waiting to figure out how the skull champion is going to end up (he's already like 2/3ds complete), I'll start working on another regular berzerker as well. Time to break out my first chain axe.

And you'll have to pardon my sense of humor, but here is your poster.

Well Im hooked, so to pass on how godly good your green skills are Ill just comment on your general presentation and layout of your blog.

In short I like it.

I lol'd twice at your posters. I really like the reposing, however I think that you should reposition the feet of the next conversion you do as it looks a little awkward from the pictures(then again as you said your camera's a bit funky). Regardless, I have always been a fan of hairy corn(Khorne?) so you have my attention.

Heh. Very nice. Chaos Vikings in the future, but not like those wimpy SW vikings, no.

I think a lot of inspiration and ideas can be gotten from Conan and similar works. You might want to pick up a marauder or chaos warrior box, they have tons of bits that would probably be applicable. I know if I ever went chaos, that's the route I would take.

I much prefer the finish and pose of the first one, it's got a stronger basis on general movement than the second, plus the GS helm and fur completes it more for me too.

How long is each one taking on average?

That second poster is great! :-) love the marines, the first one's pose is spot on, lots of action, I think it may be a time consuming project for you! but i'll subscribe and definitely be watching to see what else you come up with!

this will be very interesting to follow...

i really like the furlook on the khorne marines.
tho one thing that bug me a bit is that the skullhelmets so far look a bit flat and not bonelike...or is that just me?

this will be very interesting, have fun with this new army of yours!

vik

Nice job mate! I really like it!

Thanks!

Earthbeard wrote:I much prefer the finish and pose of the first one, it's got a stronger basis on general movement than the second, plus the GS helm and fur completes it more for me too.

Yeah, I'm actually thinking of swinging more back towards the first one with the third one.

Viktor von Domm wrote:tho one thing that bug me a bit is that the skullhelmets so far look a bit flat and not bonelike...or is that just me?

I'm a MUCH worse painter than I am a converter. The bone is being done with skull white and then a couple drybrush coats of white and that is all.

The one thing I have going for me on this one is that actual bones bleach over time, creating a flat look.

Earthbeard wrote:How long is each one taking on average?

Well, the fur comes in 2 GS steps. If you want to count all the GSing I have to do to keep the re-placed joints as a step, it takes me 4. Assuming that I have the time, I could get one of these done in a weekend without too much fuss.

pretre wrote:You might want to pick up a marauder or chaos warrior box, they have tons of bits that would probably be applicable.

I actually have seen a couple of bitz and am impressed. The problem is that I don't have the cash to fork over for another box of dudes JUST for the bitz, though. There might be a trip to the war store in the future...

Dicebucket isn't bad:
http://www.dicebucket.com/servlet/the-1791/Chaos-Marauders-on-sprue/Detail
$22.75

But fair enough, I try not to spend when possible myself, so trade is my main game.

Very nice man. I especially like taking them as optional space wolves- more bang for you buck!

Man... Just looking at these makes me wan to go back to building my chaos army... I've done suprisingly well without greenstuff, given that I'm going for a mutations theme.

Like you, I recieved some models from a friend on cheaps, and now have partly painted and glued models form all walks of chaos... So I decided on a mixed color sheme, sorta like a bunch of rogues uniting under a single banner. Then again, I'm not much of a painter AND i'm a perfections...

But, I finally got some greenstuff, so I can do work! Any tips for a greenstuff newbie?

Your army looks great! Mind posting a new thread on the army list? I definitely like raptors over bikers, but I want to see what you come up with. Termies could be interesting, especially with lightning claws... and all champions... that gives us 6 LC attacks EACH on the charge... gives me shivers.

THis is AWESOME!!

I've enjoyed reading your battle reports since I picked up 40k a few years ago.

I'm happy you've decided to go Chaos! I play Khorne Marines myself, and look forward to seeing your tactics in your battle reports.

Oh, and I would *love* to see some Khorne terminators!

A painting tip which really helped me: do the helmets separately, and glue them on last. There are a lot of finnicky bits in Chaos, and painting them can be a chore if you don't leave some room for your brush.

Gryphonne Sepia, too, can really bring out the shadows on the red armor without diminishing the gold trim.. Mix it 50/50 with 'Ard Coat or another gloss medium, and see if you like the results. The gloss diminishes after a month or so, leaving you with a nice semi-gloss which looks good on marines (imho).

I wish I could paint but I am more of physical in your face, knife in your face type of guy.

Asgeirr Darkwolf wrote:Very nice man. I especially like taking them as optional space wolves- more bang for you buck!

The red is sort of starting to destroy that, though. Perhaps had I gone with gold (I also did a DISASTROUS mock up of space wolves blue which shall never be shown).

Asgeirr Darkwolf wrote:But, I finally got some greenstuff, so I can do work! Any tips for a greenstuff newbie?

Start small, and start with uneven surfaces. The reason that I'm doing fur pelts isn't just because they look awesome, they are also really easy to do. Large, smooth, vaguely flat surfaces (like cloaks) are MUCH more difficult to do than things like facial hair (where I got my start).

Also, if you want to do freestanding stuff, you need to make an anchor for the GS. You can see examples of this on my commissars here.

Arkion wrote:I'm happy you've decided to go Chaos! I play Khorne Marines myself, and look forward to seeing your tactics in your battle reports.

I'll probably do battle reports with these guys, but it's highly unlikely that I'll do them in the same fashion as my others. I've found that doing the battle reports I do is a real drain. Not only is there the roughly 12 hours per week in time and effort, but keeping track of wins and losses puts undue pressure on me to succeed, and placing so much emphasis on tactics makes games where the end result is determined by luck a much more bitter pill to swallow ("well, my tactics were sound, and I'd show you, except I can't roll higher than a 2...").

I've done two battle report series and, while they build cred and a lot of people enjoy them, they definitely contribute a lot to 40k burnout...

Arkion wrote:A painting tip which really helped me: do the helmets separately, and glue them on last. There are a lot of finnicky bits in Chaos, and painting them can be a chore if you don't leave some room for your brush.

Unfortunately, this is a no-go. The helmets are going to mostly have a bunch of conversion work on them. Conversion work I need to do on-model.

Plus, I haven't found painting much of a bother so far.

Arkion wrote:Gryphonne Sepia, too, can really bring out the shadows on the red armor without diminishing the gold trim.. Mix it 50/50 with 'Ard Coat or another gloss medium, and see if you like the results. The gloss diminishes after a month or so, leaving you with a nice semi-gloss which looks good on marines (imho).

I've never used washes, and I'm very reluctant to start them now. It's not only the glossy thing, it's also the fact that I stand to lose a perfectly good paint job by doing washes wrong. I do like some things I've seen washed, but I've also seen a lot of things that just look goopy and bad.

Asgeirr Darkwolf wrote: Mind posting a new thread on the army list? I definitely like raptors over bikers, but I want to see what you come up with. Termies could be interesting, especially with lightning claws... and all champions... that gives us 6 LC attacks EACH on the charge... gives me shivers.

Arkion wrote:Oh, and I would *love* to see some Khorne terminators!

Well, I actually made a list thread awhile ago, and ran some ideas through the ringer.

Basically, the idea was to have a core of berzerkers, and then have a large support element of either terminators, raptors, or bikers.

I was really tempted to go with the bikers for awhile. 2x MoK biker squads, 2x berzerkers in a rhino, and then either a third small biker squad, or a vindicator, or something.

The problem is that, after much thought, bikes are SO BAD. I like the fast, especially the turboboost. And then I read the rules which say that they have to drive in a practically straight line and can't turboboost through difficult terrain. This SERIOUSLY strips away what makes bikes good, because their only other real benefit is the ability to single tap plasma a little further away. Otherwise, they're just a low model count option that does little damage, has cruddy survivability, and loses models by driving through terrain.

I also considered terminators because, let's face it, the damage they put out is OBSCENE. The problem, though, is that they're slow, and I'm already plenty sick of chasing down skimmers on foot with my guard army. Plus, they most duplicate what berzerkers are already good at.

Which is why I'm currently most seriously considering raptors. Great speed compared to terminators, along with the ability to take melta weapons without sacrificing their close combat power. That I can take twice as many of them as bikes makes them more viable, especially since they put out more damage, and don't have to worry about terrain.

I'm still more than open to advice (apart from the "you must bring two demon princes and oblits or you suckxorz!"), but my list currently looks like:

Lord - MoK, wings, LCs, meltabombs

7x raptors, MoK, 2x melta, fist
8x raptors, MoK, 2x melta, fist
8x raptors, MoK, 2x melta, fist

8x berzerkers, fist
8x berzerkers, fist
8x berzerkers, PW

for 1500 points.

I understand the 40k drain. It's why I rarely post these days.

Regarding your list, I like the Raptor option. It's unique and won't play at all like the Guard. I also like your unorthodox choice of commander.

I'm excited to see more of this.

I love the LC lord; You could do some cool stuff with him.

If you're looking to go up in points, I would add:
KHARN
More 'zerkers
Dreads for theme
Chaos chosen are a nice alternative, and sneaky too. I would try a squad by replacing a rapotrs squad; having 5 infiltrating/outflanking plasma or meltaguns is obscene.

Oh, and thanks for the tips!

So, after more work, and a fight against stomach flu, I've finally got my third guy done.

Once again, I found myself attempting to use ripped-apart CSM bitz, and once again not finding anything that was looking like it would go well with the style. As such, for my third guy, I used only bitz from the berzerker set.

With this third guy, I was looking to keep the crazy killy thing of the second guy, but get back more towards the roots of the first guy. More fur, animal skull helmet, general mayhem, etc.

After trying out a bunch of different things, I finally came to the basic pose:



Once I got here, I realised that I had accidentally created this:



What? WHAT!? Did you just sass me boy? Naw, you stay there, I cut my OWN switch.

Riding the high wave of confidence, I got about to starting the GS, starting, of course, with the fur. As has been the case with the last two, this has been useful to cover up some of the gross imperfections that arise when you heavily butcher a power armor kit in order to get it into a cool pose.

I'd also take a moment to share some of the "makings of" for the bottom part. What I learned through doing my commissars is that you can have free-standing GS, but it has to be anchored to something. That something can also be free-standing GS. As such, like with my commissar's coat leads, the way I start this is to put down a base.



As you can see, this is just a plain sheet of GS that's cut and bent the way I want it. Futzing with it as it cures allows me to get the basic shape the way I want it. I can then just put down the fur on top once the original GS has cured all the way. The end result is that I can get a basic shape the way I want, through the GS armature, with the detail I desire.

Once the fur was done, it was a matter of doing the helmet, bulking out the woefully scrawny berzerker backpacks (the only part of this kit that I don't like), and cleaning things up, especially in the joints. The skull mask took a lot of messing with, but I finally got something I liked:



As you may also note, this was my first attempt at making rivets. They were just as obnoxious as I anticipated.

With this done, though, it was just down to the painting. I'm still surprised by how quickly these guys paint up. I guess that's what you get when you have roughly 4-color models. My Folerans, with over 12 take substantially longer. The end result is that, even though I have to do a lot more GSing, I think these berzerkers will take me LESS time per model, once I can really get things going.



I could scarcely be happier about how this turned out. It REALLY gets across the space barbarian feel. Viking helmets + chainsaw axes = pure win.

Also, I've got to take another moment to throw up a scale picture here:



This picture doesn't even do it justice. In real life the belt on the berzerker comes up to the bottom of the guardsman's nose, and the top of the mohawk doesn't even come up to the bottom of the outside edge of the left shoulderpad.

All of this is with virtually no truescaling. All you have to do is unbend their legs out of their crappy hunched over poses, and space marines quickly restore to their proper height.

I've already got the plastic and part of the fur done for the next one so, assuming I can get out of bed for more than 15 minutes at a time in the near future, I'll be able to finish this one more quickly.

Until then...

Looks nice! The effort you're putting into the sculpts is paying off. Makes me want to go back and update my own Khorne Berzerkers.

Are you shaving the "bunny ears" off all of 'em? 'Cause I'm liking the idea of them all having bone helmets. What're you planning for the Raptors?

If you've got anything else, please post it!

This seems interesting. I like the conversions. Consider me subscribed. What will the new Batrep series be called?

it should be called something like "a tale of pain' or 'blood conquers all'....

lol Blood Conquers All would work again.

Wow. I can't believe I'm only now stumbling onto this. Looks awesome man.

Looking good Ailaros. They really look like they are having fun running amok and stomping skulls!

Arkion wrote:Are you shaving the "bunny ears" off all of 'em? 'Cause I'm liking the idea of them all having bone helmets.

Yes, they're all losing the bunny ears and getting bone helmets. I'm actually starting to see the aesthetic of keeping the regular khorne helmets with the fur trim, but it's not distinctive enough.

Arkion wrote:What're you planning for the Raptors?

I'm not going to lie, I've recently taken an interest in the sanguiniary guard jump packs (painting the angel feathers black). The only problem is that if I go down this route I'll be spending about as much on just raptor backpacks as I will on the entire rest of the army combined. What will probably happen will be some sort of conversion involving plasticard tubing or something.

Scrazza wrote: What will the new Batrep series be called?

Well, so far the leader of this war band is slated to be named Blingus. Thus "The tale of Blingus" with one of his many epithets tacked on will possibly be the name.

I've yet to decide if I'm going to do battle reports with them or not, and if I am, if I'm going to do them in the same format or not. I'm proud of what I've done with Public Game and Blood Conquers, but those battle reports took so much time and effort that I was often spending more hours per week making battle reports than actually working...

pretre wrote:lol Blood Conquers All would work again.

... on the other hand...

MegaDave wrote:Looking good Ailaros. They really look like they are having fun running amok and stomping skulls!

Yeah, I'm learning about how I want to do this army as I make it. I'm definitely picking up a strong amateur vibe here. Some people collect skulls for the skull throne because it's their job. Others do it for nothing more than the pure love of the collection of skulls for the skull throne.

Other khorne armies do their duty to khorne, for mine, it's their passion

Anyways, it's time for an update.

At the pace of one model per week, on a 48-model army, well, it would take me about a year to complete. Not to fear, though, as my guard army also started out slowly, and only eventually rose from its starting point of a guardsmen a week to my maximum ever achieved, which was 7 in 6 days. It's all about efficiency.

On that note, I started my first attempt at making batch barbarians.



The problem that I know I have is that I can only do so much conversion work on a model before I burn out. I can get a lot done in a very short period of time, but when I work at that pace, I don't have much longer than a short period of time before I get bored with my lack of progress. For now, I'm going to start with 2. Also, not shown, is the fact that once I got past the fur phase, I actually started a third one which is now nearly through the assembly stage.

Unfortunately, my burnout fears hit, and hit hard. While things got started quickly, they started to drag on in the details step as they always do. There were two other critical problems, though, that hit me like a brick wall.

The first was that I had a friend who introduced me to minecraft. If you're the kind of person who can plot out, assemble, and paint a 40k army over the course of a year, you're a perfect candidate for a new horrible addiction to the best video game ever.

Secondly, I hit a serious bump in the road. Nothing saps the will quicker than failure, and after my first attempt at making a cyborg-animal-fur/skull horror mask, well... It didn't end well...



This required HOURS of doing and redoing, futzing and refutzing. Every time I made a move, I made it like 5% closer to something that I actually wanted to field. After a dozen tweaks and messes, I finally got something I begrudgingly accepted as good enough.



Then it was a matter of painting. A solid coat of paint definitely helped a barely passable bit of GSing. This time I decided to highlight the brown up to an even heavier layer of red than usual, and I really like the results. The end is a vibrant red, without also being orange. That and I also made my first attempt at paint mixing to give the horns a little bit of depth. It's VERY hard to see in the picture below, and I'm still not quite happy with it, but it's not terrible for a first serious attempt.



So I really am learning how I want to make this army as I go along. I had some vague plan in mind, but as I try out new stuff, I learn new things that work, and new directions I want to take everything in. In this case, it was an experiment with really, really big horns, which I'm not certain I'm going to repeat outside of skull champions (who I have real chaos bitz for). On the other hand, I'm really feeling the vibe of the redder red. It's picking out against the gold in a way that is surprisingly pleasing. In part, it's providing a neat, crisp feel that contrasts nicely with the fur and skulls. Also, I'm REALLY liking the fur on the back of the helmet deal. It gives me a convenient way to handle how long the chaos helmets are once I throw a skull visage on them.

In any case, I don't quite like this one as much as my previous one, but I'm still at the point of experimenting and pressing the envelope with my aesthetic, which will invariably result in me trying things that don't carry on in later models. At the very least, I'm now up to a half a squad of khorne berzerkers finished.

The next guy is already done converting up into the futzy details that I don't want to work on, which means that with a little bit of gumption, he'll be finished up rather soon.

Until then...

Very nice work, as always expected from you.

Excited to see more!

Incredible GS work you have done here, Alairos.

It's looking good. Blingus ey? I haven't heard that before for a Chaos Lord.

Very nice. The gradient shading on the shoulder pad is also well done.

The subtle conversion work is really paying off.

You think you could post some of the lords soon?

Scrazza wrote:Blingus ey? I haven't heard that before for a Chaos Lord.

Well, originally I had the name picked out, before I decided what kind of army it was going to be. Just think, it could have been an autarch on a jetbike.

Asgeirr Darkwolf wrote:You think you could post some of the lords soon?

So, I'm still not actually certain what my list is going to look like, so I'm going to spend some time only working on things that I know I'm going to have. Currently, my top two HQ choices are a lash sorcerer with wings, and abbadon. The former because he would be awesome, the latter, because it would take much less time to get up to 1500 points if I have a single 275 point model...

Anyways, work has continued on slowly. This has continued to be a really crappy spring for me with even more illness and minor catastrophe. Thankfully, the weather is finally starting to break, and I can start putting this rotten season behind me.

In the meantime, I've finally gotten my much-delayed second berzerker of the previous pair.

For some reason, I didn't take a picture of this model when the plastic was done, but the basic idea was to have another leaning forward running pose, like my pilot model. In this case, I wanted to use one of the SEVERAL crappy berzerker shoulderpads. This one was one of the ones with the fake face on it, that I decided to turn into a real skull motif. GS was put on to bulk it up, but it still looked pretty bad, so I put some fur around it, which greatly improved it.

This model also had a lot out of joint, so it would up getting more than a usual amount of fur, which, along with some helmet fur saw me wind up the conversion step with one hairy barbarian.



I suppose this is another boundary pusher. Like the last one telling me how long I could make the horns, this one would be a test for the maximum of fur.

The painting went pretty well. I wanted to see how the skulls were going to pick out, which means that I painted them earlier than usual. This invariably meant that I accidentally splattered some teracotta on them. The end result was a delightful blood spray which I decided to expand and enhance. Yes, It does cause the skulls to blend in with the red/brown mishmash more, but I think the ultimate effect was worth it in the end.



In the end, I really like this model. It has recaptured the air of reckless hate that the pilot model had.

Interestingly enough, for how much fur this model is sporting, I don't feel like it's actually too much fur. I could add even a little more to future models, and it would still look good. I guess the lesson is that barbarians can be to horny, but not to furry...

With the next models, I've once again decided to try two at once with a new model of production. We'll see how it turns out. Also, someone asked me how I do the up-scaling on these guys, which I've already taken the picture of, so more tutorial next time.

Until then...

This one looks great! Awesome pose, for one, and I agree that, while there's a lot of fur, it looks good all together. Just so long as you don't start giving them fur legwarmers

I do like the blood-splattered effect too. Maybe I'm nitpicking, but I feel like it might be better placed on the side with the chain-axe. I guess a good berserker could bleed people in a great many ways though. So disregard.

My favorite part of this squad so far has got to be the skull masks. I think they're really embodying the inscrutable, soulless, uncaring aspects of these guys that the regular helmets fail to encompass. Great job on that, and I'm lookin forward to more.

Long time no see. I'd been taking a break from stalking your posts but after reading this one I've reconsidered my options and have subscribed.

As always, stunning work, completely amazing. So far this is the most unique ( meaning done well and in a thoughtful way) warband of Berzerkers I've ever seen. Excellent theme w/ the skulls and fur but also very happy that you chose to stick with traditional colors so far.

Looking forward to seeing what comes next! Death to the False Emperor! Skulls for the Skull Throne!

Looks very nice. Any chance of a vehicle up soon?

Great stuff Ailaros! Love the "finished" pics with the totally unrepentant sayings! Excellent converting and GSing.

Consider me subscribed... ;-)

Great work. I never look at chaos armies usually but this is some captivating work. One question i have, and i apologise if its obvious, but how are they so massive against the guardmen. may have missed something there. Are they just truescaled up?

The sholder pad on th latest dude is really well done, you should have cast it. Great work Ail i for one look forward to your next post. I went ahead and tried some up scaling of my own by placing a tapered 'lozenge' of thick plasticard on the crotch 'tenon' of the space marine hip workd a treat, i think that is similar to your mthod.

Still look forward to more.

Skalk Bloodaxe wrote:Excellent theme w/ the skulls and fur but also very happy that you chose to stick with traditional colors so far.

Yeah, you can see from the OP that I thought about doing different color schemes (especially when I wasn't 100% certain I'd be starting a khorne army). In the end, though, my forte is GS, not paint. With my Folerans, I wound up with a color scheme that not only do I not think actually looks super-great en masse on the field, but is ludicrously overcomplicated to paint (seriously, 12-color guardsmen, what was I thinking?). This time I decided to just stick with what works.

Asgeirr Darkwolf wrote: Any chance of a vehicle up soon?

None. Not only have I yet to come up with a list that I like which includes vehicles, but, more importantly, I've learned that I really don't like converting and painting vehicles. I have all of these half-finished guard vehicle conversions that I still have no desire to work on.

Perhaps if the only thing I had left to do was vehicles, but until then...

Axlbush wrote: how are they so massive against the guardmen. may have missed something there. Are they just truescaled up?

So, for my next minis, I once again tried to do two at a time. This time I was much more successful (as in, I have one done now, and the other very nearly complete). I even took the time to take a couple of truescaling pictures to show how I'm bulking them up a bit. Unfortunately, the truescale pictures are for the OTHER model which isn't QUITE finished yet.

In the meantime, though, you can look at the other one while I finish that one up.

As mentioned, I did them in a pair this time, while I've found I'm not really saving any time, I am slowly building the skills for this particular type of mini to start assembly lining them hopefully relatively soon.

The start of both of them, of course, starts with the assembly. Unbending legs, throwing in a touch of plasticard, giving them a chainaxe to the face load of attitude, etc.



The guy on the left is the next one, the one I've finished is the one on the right.

Because GS requires long periods of downtime to cure, GS projects can take a REALLY long time. One of the skills I really prize (especially when I was doing scratchbuilding) is the ability to do several things in the same GS "pulse". I mean, if I did everything individually, it would take me FOREVER. Instead of doing the skull mask, and then curing, and then one of the horns, and then curing, and then the other, then curing, then the fur behind the helmet, then curing, then one part of the fur, then curing, etc. etc. etc. I'm instead doing things in conjunction. This streamlining process has to be re-learned for each mini, but by now, I've pretty well got the pacing down so that I can convert one of these in just 4 GS steps (or 3 if I'm feeling adventurous). This means that I can convert a pair of minis over the course of a weekend if I push it, rather than over the course of a week, which is how things got started.

This increase in speed, but more importantly, a great increase in productivity has been the most necessary step so far to getting me towards batch processing of these guys.

Anyways, once the fur was on and the backpack un-sucked (still, by far, the most annoying part of this bitz set). It was just a matter of picking the horns. I decided to go for faux viking again on this one.



As you can see, I tried a different method with the horns here, fading them all the way to black, and then applying a single coat of nail polish to give them a little sheen.

I am so happy with how this one turned out. This is my 6th berzerker, and as I've been going, I've been trying to really find the soul of my scheme, and I definitely think I've found it here. This gets the fururistic baroque of a chaos space marine army, and combines it with the berzerker barbarian of a warrior of khorne. Brutal space viking, thy day is neigh.

As mentioned, I've got the other nearly done, and should have it finished by the end of the weekend, along with more info on truescaling, ailarian style.

Until then...

That pose is sick! Did you use a motorcycle hubcap for his elbow joint? Or is that like WoC arm instead of a CSM one?

Actually, that's a stock khorne berzerker arm with the forearm cut and slightly repositioned.

All berzerkers wear biker gloves, and there is a heaping helping of extra spikes. How many imperial citizens this dude has killed with just his elbow spike may never be known...

Some beautiful stuff here.

Keep up the good work!

I love to read your posts Ailaros. You battle reports are awesome and you make me so jealous with your modeling.

Nice, man. I can actually see the painting improving with each one!

nice conversions

Thanks!

So, as said, my most recent two dudes came in a pair. This is the story of the other one.

More importantly, after a few requests, here is a little more detail about how I get these guys bulked up a little more, without relying on ridiculous truescaling.

The first thing that you're going to notice is that most minis that GW comes out with have bent legs. Even khorne berzerkers have the legs designed to have the model crouching slightly, as if to brace himself for an explosion, or to carefully shoot a non-existant boltgun from the hip. This crouching of the legs does a lot to reduce the height of minis, especially in power armor, which seem to crouch more than minis from most other lines.

As such, just hacking apart the legs from squatting to running makes a HUGE difference. As such, the first thing I do is hack apart the legs, depending on how I want the model to be running (which leg forward, at what angle, etc.)



Then it's a matter of gluing things back together. With some idea of what I want, I usually just start by following my "rule of 45". By that, I mean that a default, natural looking pose has the front foot facing wherever the model is going (or whatever its attacking), with the back foot off at a 45 degree angle from the front. If the back foot is too wide of an angle, it looks like they are recklessly jumping forward, and you really have to get the torso twisted not to make it look REALLY wierd. Too far forward up to parallell, and it makes the legs look like they're creeping (as in my second model in this series). Even further over, over the axis, makes the model look like it's tripping. I can only think of maybe one way of doing this so that it still looks good.

The "rule of 45" also extends to the hips compared to the legs. In general, the hips should be about 45 degrees off of perpendicular (so 135 degrees from where the shin points). This is a stance that's open enough to look like a run (rather than a hop or standing still), without being so open so as to have the leading leg be way off at a strange angle.

Of course, I like to mess with these and take slight exceptions to them based on what I'm looking for with the overall model, but I always start by gluing the upper legs to the hips by the 45 (and then spread apart as far as I want based on how fast I want the model to look like it's running), and then make sure the feet are also following the rule of 45 (which is why, in the above picture, one of the feet was cut off - most GW crouching feet are parallell to each other, or only slightly off).

With the GS still uncured, I carefully place things on the base to get the amount of leaning and twisting I want. At some point, things get glued down. Just by doing this leg unbending, you can already see a big change in height, even with just the same set of legs.



The blue lines on the left show this. The bottom is foot level, the middle one is how far the legs come up by default, and the upper blue line is the new height now that the legs are in a better pose.

Once I've done this, I also do just a touch of real truescaling. In this case, I cut out a VERY tiny piece of plasticard and glue it (with the help of a little GS) to the top of the hips. Because I'm putting down a straight piece of plasticard on a curved surface, this causes the torso to sit deceptively high above the hips (what the red lines in the above picture show).

Because the plasticard interrupts a clean rounded surface to rounded surface gluing, I invariably have to cram a bunch of GS in there to get the torso to attach to the hips. After that, it's just a matter of assembling the rest of the model.

You can see that this has a marked change on the height of the model, without also looking silly.



In this case the middle two lines are the height of the waist and the top two lines are for the top of the head (blue for the model on the left, red for the model on the right).

Not only is the model on the left clearly taller, but is also WAY more badass looking than the guy on the right, who looks like he's trying to fight off constipation while shooting his firearm...

The only problem with this method is that it hacks things up pretty bad. Usually the running puts the joint between the upper leg and the hips BADLY out of place (as far as the original plastic is concerned), and the torso really just doesn't fit on the hips at all. It is precisely because this area of the model is so messy that I decided to add fur.

Anyways, on to the actual model. As said, this came in a pair.



There were a few things I was thinking of coming into this one. The first was this was the very same helmet that created the near disaster of the ultra-horns guy from earlier. I wanted to do something that used the helmet a little better without going so damn insane. The second was how to take the awkwarly sticking out right sword arm and make it look a little more sane.

The conversion here went pretty well, and I picked a more conservative helmet type. The only problem with it is that it's still too big. I think what I'm going to have to do with future helmets is cut them down and then add on the skull mask, rather than just adding on the skull masks, as these helmet sizes are still pretty out of control.

With the conversion done (once again, I forgot to take a conversion complete set of pics), it was on to painting, which has slowly been going easier. I'm starting to get a better feel for how to use the otherwise awful GW gold paint, and I came up with an improvement to the brown-red fading technique.



In the end, I don't think it's my best berzerker, but it's definitely solidly within the realm of what I've been working towards this whole time.

With this guy complete, I'm now down to just the skull champion to finish my first squad. I started working on this guy after the first of the series, but I've been waiting on it because of the huge futziness that's going to be required to get the powerfist to work (if only I could come up with a reasonable alternative...).

Once this is done, I think I'm going to lay into it a little thicker with my next squad. I'm talking more fur, more skulls, more mindless brutality. Some severed heads as close combat weapons, for example, and perhaps more blood spatter.

In any case, it's more work to come. I still haven't even finalized my list yet...

Until then:

Those are some great poses! Many berzerkers end up looking silly when they run, but you've really nailed it, great job!

Yep, really looking good. Badass is the word for these guys.

Fantastic post Ailaros! As one who also has a tendency to disarticulate my models before assembly, the way you laid your system out is very helpful.

So Ailaros, what do you use to cut the legs on said minis, and get a clean cut/ hold them still?

Since I've begun miniature work, 100% of what I've done has been done with an exacto knife with a #11 blade.



So far, I have yet to come across something in either plastic, styrene, or greenstuff that can't be done with a regular old pen knife blade. Sometimes, for certain things, I've used old blades that have already had the tip of the blade chipped off (it's good for certain things where you purposely don't want a sharp edge, like on fur or hair, for example).

Like most projects, I cut things with my hands and xacto knife blade. With thicker cutting things, like with these legs, I just have to be more careful. Also, when there isn't any detail that I have to worry about smushing on the other side of the model, I'll sometimes smush the model against my workbench and cut from the other side (like chopping carrots), using blade angle leverage as necessary.

This usually makes nice clean cuts. When they're less than clean, they can be cleaned up with, you got it, the knife. If things get cut wrong or too deeply, that's what greenstuff is for.

These things are absolutely bloody brilliant. I should really do some of the stuff you have here for my Chaos army, especially the leg cutting. If I could make a suggestion load-out wise, give your lord a combi-flamer. Its only 5 points and great against GEQs, especially if you take him with wings, LCs and MoK.

I should practice using green stuff. And as always I am jealous.

Thanks for the "how to" on taking the "squat" out of your Berzerkers. I really enjoyed it. I've taken a break from doing any CSM for a while (especially Plague Marines) because a few months straight out of just CMS has made me just plain sick of them. I can't even play CSM right now. Ha. But all my roads lead to Chaos. When I start up my CSM projects again I'm going to try this.

So, It's been awhile. After being done playing 40k this march, and falling out of community this may, it wasn't long before my 40k run was complete, and I stopped modeling. After a roughly 5 month break, though, the siren song of modelling called out to me again. Once sprues start getting broken out and greenstuff kneaded, the process of re-40k-ing (which is the same as de-40k-ing, but in reverse) began to commence.

Where I last left off, I had a nearly completed first squad of my new army. The final straw was a failed attempt at crafting a power fist. Once I finally get that model finished, I'll regail you with the story.

Rather than getting back into things by pounding my head into the wall where I'd left off, I decided to start working fresh with some brand new berzerkers. It was time to start my second squad.

Starting back in, there were a few things that I wanted to make sure were true for this new round. For one, this time it was time to start doing my models assembly-line style. This time wasn't going to be another 1 or 2 weeks per model single shot. This time, I was going to make models 2 at a time, and, after I'd get a pair converted, I'd already be working on another pair while I painted the first. After all, I learned all of these mass-model skills with my guardsmen, it's time to put them to work with some chaos models.

The first two models I decided were going to be nothing particularly fancy. All berzerker bitz off the sprue, a regular amount of converting. While my skills hadn't really faded at all, I still don't want to hit the ground with something too hard.

The models were assembled as per usual, and the fur went on the same as before. For the skull masks, I decided to keep things a little fresh, going with one with a rhino horn, and another with more stereotypical small-demon-horns.





Then it was back to the painting. I'd forgotten just how long these guys take to paint. While the color scheme is MUCH more simple than my guardsmen, the models themselves are just so huge and so much more detailed per model, that it takes much longer to paint per painting step.

In the end, things went pretty well with only limited after-primer-sculpting. The main problem I had, however, is that one of my skull masks looked much better at the GS stage than once painted white. There was just too much detail and too many creases, making the end result look insufficiently like a face. However, I remembered my lessons from earlier, and applying a liberal dose of bloody gore fixed up the problem quite nicely.





Unfortunately, I'd forgotten how very little justice my camera does to these models. For some reason, the glowing red of the armor just gets washed out to a really flat color. At some point I'll have battle reports of some sort with these guys, and game store lighting, for some reason, is always more flattering to my models.

In the end, though, I'm very satisfied with how these came out. I think I've also rediscovered why I like these models. On the one hand, they're skull and firs makes them look evil and barbaric, but the red and gold in crisp lines makes them look SO classy. It's sort of like how darth vader looks evil, but the kind of evil that projects so much seductive power and style that makes you want to BE that kind of evil. These guys don't just talk about what they want. They conquer and take and DESERVE what they want.

The one other strange thing I found, though, is that I got a new pot of codex grey in the new, soft-plastic containers. For some reason, the color grey is lighter than it used to be. Am I the only one who has noticed this or did I just happen to get a strange pot?

Anyways, once these guys were done, the next two were all but painted, followed by the next two who are nearly done with being converted, and the final two which are nearing completion of the assembly phase. Look for more updates soon.


Automatically Appended Next Post:
Once the first two guys were done, it was time to take stock of what I had for the final push. Unfortunately, in the process of moving things about, I'd lost a shoulderpad and a helmet. Even moreso, there was no way I'd have enough berzerker parts to finish a second squad of 8.

This meant it was time to dip into my old, regular CSM models. By ripping apart a few regular CSM and mixing them with khorne parts, as I'd done before, I'd have enough bitz to go around with a little creativity.

The next two berzerkers saw a 50-50 blend of these two parts. A head, torso, and backpack (the superglue just refused to let go) went to one, while the legs and shoulderpads went to the other.

I wanted to mix things up with the fur a bit, making one of the guys less hairy than usual, and the other moreso.

With the first guy, I'd wanted to do make my token shooter. After all, these guys all get a bolt pistol, it should look like at least a couple of them are actually using them.



I wasn't going to give this guy a sword originally, but miscalculations in the fur-under-GS-layer wound up with a comically poofy fur bottom, leaving me little choice but to cover up shoddy work with more bitz (yay for 40k).

With less fur, this guy made the classy red-and-gold come out in all its brutal glory.



And the terrifying old-tymie helmet didn't hurt either. Of the first three that I've done, I think I like this one the most. It's dynamic in pose, with a clear intention of malice. I hope more of them come similarly cool.

I did fall behind a little bit with painting the second of this set, so look for a posting for the next berzerker soon.

Glad to see you are back! Hope to see more.

Yes, you're back! Fantastic work so far, looking forward to more.

Hey, welcome back! Good to see you working on these again. I'm really really liking those first two. The poses are really dynamic, and the helmets especially are really well done. The added cheekbones on the second one really make the eye sockets look very recessed and menacing. Very nice take on an otherwise pretty standard helmet.

Dang it, how did I miss this blog? Good to see you again and awesome work on the sculpting! Made me wish there were purchasable copies of some of those

Great stuff as usual! looks like some part of your subconscious didn't let go of the 40k mania! you've bounced back from the dreaded fugue of 40k burn out with a vengeance! and i must say i'm glad, that last bezerker is fantastic, i love the old school helmet on him, in fact that helmet is one of my favorite helmets across the entire range! and with your reds and golds so crisp and the poses so dynamic, i'd love to see a shot of the ones you've completed all charging at the camera! :-)

keep it up, we all enjoy your work!

Nerdfest09

Welcome back! I took a 4 month break form all of this as well, just got back into it about a month or so ago again. Glad to see you back, I've shown people this thread as inspiration and all around your work is well received.

The GS fur still sells itself very well, and the dynamic pose on every model is a huge visual draw for me, and your painting is very clean and crisp. Sorry the pics aren't coming out the way you would like. They are at least awesome enough to impress upon me how amazing this project is.

nerdfest09 wrote:Great stuff as usual! looks like some part of your subconscious didn't let go of the 40k mania! you've bounced back from the dreaded fugue of 40k burn out with a vengeance!

So, this is actually chapter 4 (or, depending on how you want to cut things, chapter 5) of my 40k experience. I've been modeling and playing off and on for some years now.

For whatever reason, it's always the modelling that gets me back in. Then, once I spend several dozen hours working, well, why not actually do something with them?

Skalk Bloodaxe wrote:Welcome back! I took a 4 month break form all of this as well, just got back into it about a month or so ago again. Glad to see you back, I've shown people this thread as inspiration and all around your work is well received.

Wow, thanks. I'm touched.

Skalk Bloodaxe wrote:The GS fur still sells itself very well, and the dynamic pose on every model is a huge visual draw for me, and your painting is very clean and crisp. Sorry the pics aren't coming out the way you would like. They are at least awesome enough to impress upon me how amazing this project is.

I suppose what I think my greatest strength as a modeller is is the overall effect. Getting poses to look simultaneously natural and dynamic, without looking over the top, while at the same time being able to start from the beginning of each model to get the overall statement down (in this case, I want to brutalize you, and I'm going to, and with style) is probably my biggest strength. I've also gotten rather good at GS over the years, although I'd hesistate to call myself great at it. As you say, "sells itself well" is as good as I'm going for right now.

Unfortunately, I'm crappy at painting, which is funny, because that used to be my relative strength, before picking up the blade and the greenstuff. Crisp is about as good as I can go for nowadays, enough to at least get out of the way of the rest of the model.

Anyways, I've got the next one done and ready.

As mentioned in the last post, this was another kitbash, and was designed to be a bit furrier. On top of this, I wanted to give myself a little bit of a challenge, picking out the bitz that I'd most struggled with so far. In part this was to force myself to do a really different pose. In part, it was to give myself some choicer bitz as things got scarcer.

for some reason, I forgot to take pictures after the GS step, so I'll just throw down the final picture.



So, the pose took a lot of agonizing over. On the one hand, I wanted it to look like the sword arm was actually in the process of swinging, unlike the usual pose of the model just sort of holding onto their weapon. Getting the arm in such a way where it looked like the sword arm was just starting to come forward from the wind-up was more than just posing the arm nicely. WIthout the rest of the pose looking like it was just in the process of uncoiling, the model just sort of looked like a guy running forward with a broken arm, or a guy who was trying to hi-five someone with a chainsword.

In the end, I think this part of the pose was worth the great deal of futzing. Unfortunately, the slight alterations to the mask really came off poorly once the model was under paint, and I might well have been better off just chopping off the bunny ears and leaving the skull plain like the second guy of this series. In the end, I was forced to do the gore splatter to cover up the crappiness. I guess it's not too late to put some horns on it or something, but I don't know. I guess I'll just have to relegate it to one of my somewhat less good ones and let it be that.

Anyway we can get a family portrait and a cool family poster. Something with a caption like the family that slays for khorne together stays together.

Your poses are really dynamic, and unlike anything else I've really seen. You're doing some great work with those old berserker kits. My favorite is the third one in your first new post, with the "old tyme" helmet. I've always liked your conversions, and these are no exception. The painting isn't quite as exciting as the poses, but it's not as bad as you say it is.

Also, as an added note - I missed your battle reports an awful lot, Ailaros. I hope you don't mind that I totally ripped off your reporting style for my own reports!

Nice and chaosy khorney! I'd like to see more done to the feet however, they dont look right, maybe make them into a more natural running pose and either greenstuff or paint a sole on their boots?

cool stuff.

Tortured-Robot wrote:either greenstuff or paint a sole on their boots?

I agree the sole on your current Berzerker looks too smooth, but putting things in perspective (literally) these are tiny little army men and the chances of someone other than the people reading this thread looking at HUGE high-res photographs on a monitor noticing that detail is slim.

If it is a modeling aesthetic then go back and do it. Other than that aspect I doubt anyone would ever notice, or care if they did.

First of all welcom back Ailaros!

These new warriors look great, the fur really sells it for these guys, they look great. Hopefully we'll get some good bat reps out of this army too.

Great thread, really enjoy your models and descriptions of how/why you are doing what you are doing.

Brother SRM wrote:My favorite is the third one in your first new post, with the "old tyme" helmet.

So, I found the original CSM model I ripped apart to make this one. This one already came to me assembled with a fair bit of attitude...



He originally had an antenna on that little box he was holding in his hand to look like a detonator.

Brother SRM wrote:Also, as an added note - I missed your battle reports an awful lot, Ailaros. I hope you don't mind that I totally ripped off your reporting style for my own reports!

I certainly hope you do. I didn't write battle reports in the way I did because I wanted to copywrite the way I did battle reports. I wrote them because basically all other battle reports were unreadably terrible. It pleases me to know that my influence has increased the quality of the batrep pool even in my absence.

Tortured-Robot wrote:either greenstuff or paint a sole on their boots?

Skalk Bloodaxe wrote:I agree the sole on your current Berzerker looks too smooth, but putting things in perspective (literally) these are tiny little army men and the chances of someone other than the people reading this thread looking at HUGE high-res photographs on a monitor noticing that detail is slim.

You're both correct here. Only a few of the berzerker boots come with traction on the bottom, and while you absolutely can't really notice it in person, I've been considering more and more making that a part of the conversion. The only thing tricky about it is that putting these legs into pose is tricky, and I'd hate to GS a sole on only to have it warped or smushed while posing the model.

Brother SRM wrote:You're doing some great work with those old berserker kits.

So, I've noticed that the berzerker set really is the converter's set.

On the one hand, you get more models for you buck, and can easily be converted (even to loyalist marines), with a little work. Also, there are some things which are GREAT for conversions, such as some of the legs already being separated at the knee joint, saving me work. Plus, some of the bitz in this kit are absolutely excellent, and really convey a lot of attitude.

On the other hand, some of the bitz are absolutely wretched, and you need to already be a good converter in order to make them look passable. For how good the legs and arms are, for example, the backpacks and pauldrons are awful, and need a fair bit of knifework and GS not to look really lame.

So, onto the next update. This pair would see me doing another regular berzerker, and then tackle this project's arch-nemesis...

First the berzerker. I wanted to put this one together with a more usual running pose, but I had so many right-foot forward, left foot up in the air behind that I really had to do something different. Specifically, I went for the opposite.

The more I worked on this, however, the more off-balance and really awful the pose looked. After much futzing, I wound up switching which leg was on the ground, and getting sort of a duplicate of the previous leg pose. This definitely looked better.

As well, given my disappointment with my previous model, I decided that this one would definitely have horns again. To class things up a little, though, I put down the horns and then GSed a thin ring around the base, so they look like they're actually attached to the helmet, rather than just stuck on there.



The painting went smoothly. Originally I did the horns white like usual, but wasn't completely satisfied, so I took a risk and did them white-brown-black like I'd done once other. In the end, the more "natural" horn look came out nicely.



And now, let me regail you with a tale, 6 months in the making.

Long, long ago, when I started my first army (eldar), I made the mistake of buying a vehicle first (a vyper), and then basing my color scheme on what looked cool on a vehicle. It turned out that said scheme decidedly didn't look to great on infantry models. As such, when I started my guard army, the first thing I did was to make certain that I put my scheme down on my infantry first, which I would undoubtedly have more of.

This carried over to this project. My first model would be a regular foot soldier. My second model would be a aspiring champion. With the sarge and grunt down, I could be certain of having it come out well.

As such, this miniature was supposed to be the SECOND of this series, all the way back in April.

Like my first berzerker, I started with a model from my pool of assembled CSM that I'd inherited.



And then re-assembled him with the truescaling, and did the touch-up work, and put down the base of the fur.



Then it came time to do the powerfist. As you can see, there was already a plastic core to the fist (an actual CSM arm, it would help ensure that I made the powerfist long enough). On top of that, I wrapped around a small amount of GS to make the part in the back look nice where it connected near the elbow, and to give a round, smooth surface that I could start mounting fingers and such on later.

The next step was to form the body of the fist:



For the next step, I hooked up the power source (this would take WAY more futzing than it was worth, and would ultimately plague the model to the end), and finished off the non-fingers part of the glove:



Then it was time for the fingers. To do this, I drilled into the GS slightly, and then glued in some tiny pieces of aluminum rod. This gave me an anchor around which to start the fingers.



Then it was merely a matter of fleshing them out.





What I had now was a pretty darn close approximation to what the actual CSM powerfist (currently residing on my Melchoir model). But this wasn't a project to simply make some minis, this was a project to make a work of art. To really expand my sculpting repertoire. Oh how must come pride before the fall.

I was trying to figure out how to make it a "power" fist, not just a gauntlet. I wanted all of my armor-ignoring stuff to have the same effect, and I thought it would look really cool to have said stuff be on fire.

So I went about sculpting flames on my powerfist. This was an endless battle of attrition between me and the aspiring champion. After undergoing more burnout than I thought possible, I finally got something good enough:



But this was it. After burning out on playing (leading to this article), and burning out on dakka (in part due to the fight over this article, this was it, I was done with modelling.

6 months later, I came back and painted the power fist. While I may have gotten to some degree of competence sculpting fire, I found myself nowhere near competent in painting it. I spent hours trying and re-trying. It turns out, though, that painting something that is supposed to glow with something that doesn't glow is nearly impossible to get to look nice. I've only ever seen it done on very scant occasion, and that's only been in cases where you can strictly control the lighting, which I can't.

It was almost enough to stop my re-entry, a burnout bounce if you will. Instead, I did what I felt I had to do, cut off the hand to save the body. With the flaming fist gone, I was free to start work again, resulting in the last few models. The time was drawing neigh, however, to actually friggin get the skull champion done.

Once again, I pondered how I should do my power weapons. One idea was to make a power fist that was basically a giant fur muff with bones covering the top, and with bony claws for the fingers. Another, far more conservative option, was to put down some more red and gold plating with a plain, boltgun fist at the bottom. The problem is that neither of these were particularly satisfying enough for power weapons as well.

The problem, though, is that red and gold is really hard to match to, as far as glowey power weapons are concerned. In the end, I decided that the color was going to be black with just a little bit of a faint purple highlight, heavily glossed. That way power weapons would look like obsidian, or like nightmares and shadows, taken corporeal form.

With that decided, it was time to put the fist together. On top, I actually liked the red and gold plate, as I didn't want the fist to look too gaudy (my problem with the way most people do power fists). On the bottom, the stupid power lead was still causing me problems. Plus, even after 4 scratchbuilt power fists, I still couldn't get the underside of the knuckles / palm to look anything like I'd wanted. The only way about this was going to have the underside continue the fur motif.

So I started on the powerfist again. Like last time, it started with a nice GS anchor blob. When that cured, I put down the beginning of the back of the glove. After that, I put down some of the border.



Once the concept was proofed, it was merely doing this on the other side to finish the top. I also then put down a knuckle guard in the same style.



Then it was just putting on the fingers, same as last time. I had forgotten the lesson of putting down anchor pins, though, so this time was decidedly more futzy. At least I got the pose of the fingers more like what I wanted.

I also learned (or re-learned) that I needed to do the ends of the fingers in one single piece of GS, rather than cutting out the individual fingertips and then gluing them on. As I'm sure other sculptors out there know, there is little more difficult than making freestanding fingers...



Then it was just a matter of painting the powerfist, and then finishing up the rest of the model.



Once again, the camera has sort of failed me, and the fingers are actually more discernible in real life, rather than looking like a shiny off-purple blob.

That said, I'm still not completely sold. My next skull champ already has the fist GSed in this style, but perhaps I should go over to a bone motif for the fingers instead, especially as I'm no longer convinced I'm going to have power weapons at all in my army.

As such, I'm still plagued by this nearly 9 month problem, but at least now I have something I can put down on the table.

Great blog. It's fascinating to see the stages you go through with each model. I often see pictures of awesome conversions but when you know exactly how much work and effort has gone into them it makes them even more impressive. I look forward to more updates.

That champion is a boss. You don't see reasonably sized powerfists on Space Marines of any flavor very often, and it's refreshing to see. I like your point about the Berserker kit being a converter's set though; it's great for its age. I loathe the gorilla hands and the backpacks require some work to get on, but otherwise it's a solid kit. I'm working on my squad of vanilla Berserkers right now.

So, I've got another one done. This is one of two minis at the end of my bitz, thus the old-tymie CSM sword and legs.

I wanted to bring back a little more of the steel-and-bone face look, so I GSed a respirator. Also, when I quit playing this March, I used my downtime to pick up the guitar. Now that I actually have lots of spare guitar wire hanging around, I thought I'd use some. It's not very obvious from the pictures, but it adds a nice touch, I think.



With this one I put on a little more red than usual, making this berzerker much more clearly a red and gold model. As usual, though, my pathetic camera can't tell the difference. In real life, the shoulderpads fade from Dark Flesh to nearly full-on red. Not that you'd notice by the camera...



And I'm sorry I missed the poster the last couple of times, I've had some good ones, but not the time to put them up. Here you go, now:



Also, breaking news. While working on my other champ (look for another post very soon), I decided to abandon the obsidian look for the other champ's powerfist. I'm now set: the fingers are either going to be gold colored to complement the armor motif, or will be bone colored to continue the bone motif. I'm still struggling to determine which one I like better, so the next champ will probably be with the gold fingers and I'll make them uniform after I decide which one I want.

In the meantime, this is what the other champ looks like with bone fingers:



I don't know if I like it better than metal fingers, but I certainly like it better than the obsidian. I think the biggest problem is that it might just look to an outside observer like he's wearing a padded white glove, rather than segmented bone pieces.

Will my bother over this mini never end?

Bone looks great! I prefer it too, I don't think it looks like a padded sport glove, it looks segmented and bone enough to work well! and you can then easily distinguish him in a squad as it's bright and different enough, if it were gold, I feel it would blend in to the armour too much and not even stand out as being a conversion! which would be a shame as all of your work to date is amazingly good and even a small piece like the fist should be recognized!

Nerdfest09

Ichewawa. These are some amazing conversions here... Your green stuff wizardry is amazing...your running poses are great. Paintjob is clean.. Just kudos all around, very inspirational berzerkers. I will be borrowing some ideas from here in the future i think.

Once again, helluva job, Ailaros.

I like the bone coloration for the hand. It stands out better than the black does and serves as a pretty well coordinated tertiary color.

So, a mini-update.

I'd forgotten that I'd made a change recently to one of the minis that I hadn't posted up yet.

After the success of a recent polished horn model, I went back to one of my other recent ones that I just didn't like and gave it an upgrade to include horns.

I decided to go all-out with the polished brown/black look, and because these were ram's horns (and thus much of them is anchored to the head), I decided to spice things up a bit by putting some ridges in it.

That and, as recommended, I put some traction on the guy's feet.

Here's the original:



And with the update:



Also, as to the gold v. bone problem. I'd thought I'd show you my nearly-complete second skull champ to show the comparison. The pic makes the gold look a little worse then in real life, but, with some changes to my camera settings, at least things aren't as bad as they've been over the course of this project.



Obviously they both look okay. The problem I'm having with the white is that in darker environments (so, not directly under my lamp), the white fingers look wierd, because you have this red and gold with the offset helmet, and then these random white things popping out one side. On the other hand, the metal looks great because it makes the whole thing look like a giant armored gauntlet, which is basically exactly what I was looking for.

However, while there's nothing I dislike about the gold, and something I do dislike about the white, there is also something I like about the white (which is untrue of the gold). The thing I like with the white is that what the model looses in pure red and gold classiness, it gains in barbaric witchcraft savagery. The bone LOOKS more like sorcery which, given that it's surrounded by a disruption field, it basically is. The gold, on the other hand, just looks like metal.

So back and forth I go... back and forth... I might just have to have mismatching fists until I get it straightened out, as my second skull champ is getting pretty close to done.

So, I just went up and did a mockup of my options, actually...



For a more comprehensive list of the options, click here.

You might have to view in a separate tab to see it at a large enough size.

The bone-white Power Claw totally works.

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

This is such an amazing thread. The gs work on the coats and stuff inspires me a lot for when I do my plague marines I think. but of course their coats will be covered in goo and filth. The poses are great too and the sculpted fist with flames?! Skills man. I would love to play against this.

Whoa. Okay. The oblits are sounding pretty cool already. Your first pic wasn't showing up for me, but I copied and pasted the pic address and it worked. God warrior from Nausicaa, right? Not what I envisioned from your description, but I think it'll end up being pretty awesome all the same.

Looking forward to the oblits. I've seen youy sculpt before (well, the pic sof the results anyway), so I'm curious. I still have 6 unassembled oblits, mainly becasue I don' tlike the minis, so maybe I'll be looting some ideas for them here

Cool army you should show everything with the fur even the raptors that would look awsome

"If there was a guy in that suit of armor, his nuts would have to be rubbing up on his nipples."

lol

I would put this in my bio thingy but i have no idea how.

Cant wait.

Have you considered pipe cutters for the alluminium tubing? Not certain you would get one that goes that small but you would have a perfect cut every time.

omgitsduane wrote:The gs work on the coats and stuff inspires me a lot for when I do my plague marines I think.

So, dirty little secret, the gs work on these models was also designed to look good in a nurgle army. I knew straight away that I wouldn't be making a slaanesh army (best fluff, awful models/rules), or tzeentch (I wanted a choppier army). I hadn't yet decided by the time I was working on my first model, and only finally came to a decision right before it was time to paint him. As such, while I was modelling, I wanted something that would go well with either khorne or nurgle. Skulls obviously fit both of them pretty well, and I figure that fur would make a nurgle model look GROSS, while still looking brutal on a khorne model.

Zefig wrote:God warrior from Nausicaa, right? Not what I envisioned from your description, but I think it'll end up being pretty awesome all the same.

Yeah, shows me to hotlink. I've got it up on my server now.

Basically, I was thinking of making tech-monsters, which is what that picture is in reference of. We'll see how much of that I actually pull off, though.

Olenos wrote:I would put this in my bio thingy but i have no idea how.

Click on your name in the large orange block letter menu near the top to adjust your settings.

Perkustin wrote:Have you considered pipe cutters for the alluminium tubing? Not certain you would get one that goes that small but you would have a perfect cut every time.

I have a pipe cutter from when I once accidentally bought stainless instead of aluminum (oops), though I don't like it for aluminum tubing. Firstly, as you note, these tubes are small in diameter, and even a small pipe cutter is a rather cumbersome instrument, and I'd like to see what I'm doing. Secondly, it's not necessary - aluminum is soft enough to just use a knife for. Thirdly, and most importantly, pipe cutters work by applying normal stress (by winching the little knob to lower the blade), and then using torsion to turn that into shear stress to cut the tube. Basically, you have to twist the rest of the pipe with enough force to get the blade to cut it. The problem with this method is that thin, small diameter aluminum tubing can't really have any torque applied to it, or the rest of the tube will just bend and mangle horribly.

As such, I need something that applies shear force without also requiring torque on the fragile tube itself, thus rolling it under a hobby knife.

So, the saga continues...

The first thing I was going to have to do next was to get the pieces of large-lower-leg tubing into some sort of shape that's a close approximation to what the end result will be. This means that I'm going to need to make two cuts. The first will be at the top to accomodate the knee pit. The second will be at the front to accomodate the front of the foot. Basically, I'm trying to turn a tube into a regular CSM lower leg.

For the top, I started by wanting to make a cut that came JUST in from the absolute front of the tube down at a roughly 45 degree angle towards the back. I didn't go all the way to the front in part because that would have made it more difficult to cut, but also in part because I actually want a partially flat face on the front (looking at the terminator armor again).

Interestingly enough, to make this cut I didn't actually have to have the knife perpendicular to the tube. I guess perhaps because I wasn't scoring all the way around it. In any case, I just needed to put the knife down and gently rock the tube left and right until it punched through.



Once I got to here, I did do the no-no of just pushing down a bit to lightly score the inside of the other half of the cut. Once I had it in a bit, I actually cut along the line with the tip (like cutting plasticard) until it was scored enough that I could just peel off the remainder with my fingers.

The front cut was much the similar. Instead of going from nearly the back to a cut up the front, I went from about halfway to the front. I want there to be more bulk in the back of these, and the ankle pit needn't be so large as the knee's.

The end result was something that doesn't look terribly dissimilar to penne pasta:



Looking at this at this point, though, it was clear that I would be needing to do more work. All CSM power armor flares out at the bottom, and these legs don't. I came up with a few concoctions to make a faux-flare, like having pistons attach at the bottom or something, but I just couldn't quite see it in my mind.

At this point, I fell off the sanity wagon. Surely, there must be some way to just add GS to 3/4 of a tube in such a way where you still get the nice front curve of the tube, wile also having a flat, even, smooth curve over the rest of the tube in the way that I wanted it, right? Of course, if I mucked it up, I'd basically be restarting this whole project, and I hate restarting things.

But, of course, this project was designed to make me a better sculptor, to show what I CAN accomplish, not just what I'm currently capable of. Flaming power fist debacle be damned!

I broke out the GS and applied roughly equally portioned blobs onto the backs of the legs in roughly the shape I wanted it.



Of course, this looked awful. Not only is it not smooth due to the finger prints, but it was also lumpy, which simply wouldn't do. I did a little knife work, using the flat of the blade to smooth out the most egregious breaches of smooth. The problem, though, was at this size, my xacto knife blade just wasn't big enough to handle everything on its own. It was time for my secret weapon.

What I did was to take a pristine piece of plasticard that I knew would be smooth. Then I put down the leg on it's side and ROLLED it. Just like a blob of dough on a rolling pin. Not only did the smooth surface of the plasticard obliterate any fingerprints, but the flatness caused the lumps to get smushed out, leaving me with a perfect arc of greenstuff on the back of the leg.

Believe me, though, the whole time it was me going between "why do I possibly think this will work?" to "how can this possibly be working?"

Once done, the front where the GS gave way to the aluminum would need a little work (and probably will until this project is completed), but the end result was gold. 8 little shakos on my desk.



Once that was cured, I went over them and cleaned them up some. I also noticed that they didn't quite look right. Looking back at my berzerkers, I quickly discovered the problem. CSM power bell-bottoms not only come up in the front, but they also come up in the back. I quickly got to work with my knife (which had been RUINED by cutting the aluminum), and cut up the heel of the lower leg.



Once I got to this point, I felt I could safely put some of the armature together a bit more. I'm still not at the point where I can glue it down without a bit more work, but I'm close enough to do more assembly.

While putting the rest of the leg together would be easy, they needed to attach to something. As I don't have tubing nearly wide enough to build the pelvis, abdomen, or chest, I usually make crude plasticard frames for the GS to sit on top of. This case was no different.

I started by screwing in a fresh blade and cutting a strip of plasticard 1.5cm wide (my crappy ruler has had the imperial side's numbers all but rubbed off), and then out of that strip cutting pieces 2cm long. I then measured about how tall I would want the pelvis, and cut that out, leaving a thin strip left.

Then I cut down the front and back pelvis pieces to an angle that I wanted. In picture form, this looked like this:



At this point, I realised that my pelvis would be way too wide. Not, perhaps, for the legs, but because I've also got to put fur on the outside, and then a second layer of hip armor (a la terminators), which would make the model way too squat, or way too big in general. Remember, you can always bulk up, but you can only ever cut down to the armature.

As such, I actually narrowed the with some to about 1cm. After that I cut off a few more strips at how wide I wanted the pelvis to be on the balls to butt axis. This was actually something that I could make rather wide as it would be bulking out the model against the legs, rather than making the legs too far apart. Oblits need junk in the trunk.

Once those pieces were chopped up and glued together, I got a basic pelvis onto which I could attach my legs.



You will notice right away that these are pretty crude. Firstly, I've never claimed much skill with plasticard compared to GS. Secondly, and most importantly, this is going to be structural. No one is ever going to see this. I used to be that guy who was so meticulous that I would paint the bottoms of my model's feet, even if the shoe would then proceed to be glued down flat to the base because "I would know" if I cut corners.

Firstly, I can't remember which models I did this for, and secondly, you really can't take this attitude with scratchbuilding, at least not at this stage of it. Burnout is your enemy, and your sword speed and your shield efficiency.

Once this was done, it was a simple matter of gluing the two parts of the leg together. Basically, I put in a big blob of GS, dabbed lightly with glue, and smushed the small tube into the lower leg at the angle that I want. Of course, I'd like not to have to do this, instead waiting until I can do a better job with the pose, but in this case there are just too many uncontrolled variables. I have to curb the chaos before I can start doing meaningful posework. As such, I just bent the legs at common angles, and figured that it would all just work out from there.

Once done, I now have the beginnings of assembling the lower part of the model.



Of course, before I put things down on their bases, I've got to do some finishing work. The base of the legs looks nice, but the ends of the tubing still look awful and need to be cleaned up, which I figure will be easier before the model is glued down. Once that bit of detail work is done, I'll be able to put down on the bases, and start working on these models in my more customary fashion.

This is way out my league but I'm following along closely, I have seen your work on other threads and know this will be as amazing.

No pressure or anything. It's not like you have any sort of rep on Dakka as a premiere scratch-build sculptor or anything. Just relax and have fun!

lol. No pressure at all.

Actually, I've found over time that working with GS is mostly mental. Once you've gotten down the basic skills, whether or not you can do something is more based on intimidation than on actual difficulty. Something looks insanely challenging, and then you actually do it, and find out that it isn't.

Anyways, more work to show...

As mentioned, now that I've gotten the structure of the lower leg down, I feel like I can assemble everything below the waist now. Having more bulk around will make things easier to do the details with, as it will give me more to hang onto while I work with my knife. I'm still not gluing them to the bases yet, though, because I'm not certain that said detailing will be possible (or, rather, easy) without being able to have free range with the knife.

Aluminum tubing, plasticard, and greenstuff, when they're all superglued together, are pretty tough, especially when you have a couple of layers. You can't do said layers, though, without the layer beneath it being strong enough to resist the stresses put upon it when you're smearing GS around. As such, when assembling the armature, you've always got to have an extra sharp eye for stability.

What stability means in this case is making sure that GS is combined with other materials, rather than being freestanding. What it means is that plasticard gets glued with lots of surface area to other plasticard, and aluminum tubing.

To start with, I've paired up my legs and then spent some time thinking about how I want to attach them. It's still not as good of posework as when working with plastic, but I still sort of don't have a choice. I've just got to go with posing intuitively, remembering how other things were assembled that also looked good.

Once I know how the piece of tubing is going to attach, I first start out by carving a notch in the plasticard. This will give me a little bit of surface area of tubing directly on pelvis:



Of course, the location and shape of the notch is dependent on where the leg top will be, and at what angle. The point is to make sure that it's not just the rim being glued down to plastic.

Once that's done, you need to have some sort of a way to really put some support in there. In this case, I'm going to be using little pieces of plasticard and GS to act as the "head" of the "ball joint".

To start with, I put down a whiff of superglue, and then put in a glob of GS. Then I put down some superglue on the piece of plasticard and jam it in there, right through the GS. The point is to have the plasticard piece actually make contact with the aluminum, with the GS to hold it all in place.



Then I basically do the same thing on the pelvis, putting down some GS, putting glue on the other side of the plasticard piece, and then jamming it into the pelvis piece, making sure that the plasticard piece actually touches plasticard, with some glue in there



Then it's a matter of getting the legs into the pose you like (adding more GS as necessary), and then laying down a light amount of superglue. The superglue does not cure the GS, but it doe sort of "fix" the outer surface, preventing distortion from things like gravity, but still being pliable.

Then you just do it with the other leg and let it cure.



And then do it 3 more times, in my case...



Once the GS cures, the joint will be strong enough to pack a lot more GS in there to really fill it in. Once that GS is cured, the joint will be stable enough for me to do whatever I want without the legs just sort of ripping off at the hip.

While the second round of GS on the hips was curing, I also did the ankle. All of these models will be in such a way where one of their legs is sticking up off of the ground. That means, like with the hip, you've got to do some work to really anchor that stuff in, or else the model will just flake right off the base the first time you drop it.

Like with the hip, I'm going with plasticard and GS, but that alone isn't going to cut it. I don't have any aluminum tubing that I particularly care to use for this, so instead I'm going to use steel wire. This will mean I'm basically pinning the model to the base.

To do this, I cut more small pieces of plasticard. I couldn't find my usual steel wire, so I just used some guitar wire I had lying around instead.



As you can see by the picture, you basically use GS to attach the wire to the plasticard. Not shown is that I also wrapped the GS over the wire after taking the picture. Once done, I lightly glued the ends of the plasticard piece and put on two little blobs of GS. A bit more glue on the GS balls, and the whole thing was crammed into the bottom of the leg.



Because I cared less about how the wire sat than how the hips sat, I just went ahead and packed it with more GS, pulling the wires back out when they got too far smushed in.

When it comes time to attach them to the base, I'll just bend the wire in a bit and drill out a hole(s) in the base and stick the wire through. More glue and GS, and the model will be firmly anchored to its base. As for the other foot, well the wires will still help that sucker stay on there.

Said attaching to the base will come soon. What's next is putting on the borders of the armor, and then putting in some general detail work on the leg. Once that's done, I'm not going to have nearly the same need to get in there at strange angles, so it will be time to finally put the things on the bases. After that, things will be much easier to work with.

Now that the base of the legs was complete, it was time to do the detailing. Usually I do all the detail work at the end, but as said before, I'm not sure how much detailing I'm going to be able to do once I don't have full access, so the details are going to have to go on before the model goes to base. Time to get cracking!

The first thing to do are the coarse details. Time to turn the bellbottom-shaped tubes into some armor. As this is the part that I want to make sure has the most contiguity with my berzerkers, I had no compunctions with basically ripping off the way the berzerker legs looked, except in plus scale.

To start, the leg armor needs edging. Not only will this make it look more like armor, but it will also plug those holes still gaping, and cover the overall ragged appearance of the ends of the tubing. The edging was actually as straightforward as you'd think it would be. Put down GS, smush into the rough shape, use knife to cut clean lines.

We begin where we left off:



First went the bottom edging:



And then went on the top edging:



When I explain it like this, it looks so easy, and while it certainly wasn't complex, this took a lot more work than might be let on. It may have been straightforward, but it still took me 45 minutes per edge. If I would have played it slightly smarter than I did, I would have done all of the lower left legs, followed by all the lower right legs, etc. In that way, by the time I made it back to the first model, the previous work would have had 3 hours to cure, and thus been basically proofed against smudging. Unfortunately, I didn't do it quite this way, which meant that I had to go back and redo some of my work after it took an errant thumbing.

After this, it was time to do cleanup. Several things need to be fixed as you go. For one, you will notice that there wind up being little globs of GS everywhere where they shouldn't be. As well, GS is only SO tolerant to being worked. Overworked GS will kill you every time. As such, sometimes it's better to just leave a mistake, and then cut down or build up later, once the GS is cured (and thus more manageable), and once you've had a chance to refresh yourself. In all, I spent about 20+ hours this week working on this, and by the end, my hands were starting to cramp so badly that I was starting to put down shoddy work. Once you get to the point where work will have to be redone, rather than just cleaned up, it's time to stop.

Anyways, the third, and probably most important part of cleaning up GS is that the stuff has a tendency to "mellow". As GS cures, it attempts to reduce its surface area, and sort of shrink back down into an orb as best it can. This means that flat surfaces become bowed, and nice crisp angles become soft and round. One way of handling this is to let the GS cure a bit before you start working with it, or to keep coming back every half hour or so as it cures and push it back into shape. With the sheer scale of what I'm doing though, that's impossible. Instead, I just let it mellow and then go back in and file down domed surfaces flat, and actually cut out new corners with the blade of my knife wherever I want a nice crisp angle. Of course, with models and curves and angles this friggin huge, that makes more of a challenge, so I sometimes cut something wrong and would have to fill it back in (and then re-cut it).

Anyways, once this was done, it was time to make this look more like fancy berzerker leg armor. This meant putting on some familiar patterns as applique. Some triangles here, some arrows there, a skull made it in there, as did a khorne symbol. Compared to what I did before, this was actually pretty easy. Just put down a thin layer of GS and cut it. Easy peasy.



And voila, khorne berzerker legs that are 50% larger than your regular berzerker legs. After this, of course, was more cleanup. Much, much more cleanup.

Because once I got this done, it was on to the fine detail phase. Though the most futzy, it's what separates medium quality models from nice ones (and also is usually what separates blatantly scratchbuilt from something that looks converted).

Now that I've got the basic legs, it's time to make them look like tech-monster legs. The most obvious thing that came to mind was ridiculous tubing going everywhere. I'm talking like under the olympic stadium in Akira. Actually, I'm talking about where my wife works, come to think of it. Until I can find a better picture, here's one of her adviser.



Except in a dark room, with several of these MBE systems and an endless nest of tubing descending from the ceiling.

For this, it was time to go to guitar wire. Now, I did not know just how frustrating this stuff would be to work with. Guitar wire isn't one of those things that you just bend into place and leave it at that. It's made of steel. That and it has all of this bronze wound around it, so it behaves like a spring. There is no way you could glue this stuff down on one end, and then work with it. Instead, you have to bend it into the shape that you want it, and then put the whole thing down in one go (still with GS required to get the darn stuff to stay on).

Needless to say, this was HELLA futzy, and it definitely caused some hand fatigue crimping all of this metal with pairs of needle nose pliars. In the end, though, it was done.

Once the wire and its anchors were down it was time for one last cleanup (it won't be the last cleanup, even on these legs - there's just too much room for minor improvement), and then put on the rivets. This was done with a little bit of VERY small scale plasticard rod, along with some narrow gauge aluminum wire (which thankfully didn't just smush into ovals as I feared it would) as I didn't have more of the plasticard I wanted. The "open" ports were done with brass tubing.



These legs (except for perhaps a little more cleanup) are now friggin done. This means it's time to put them on the base. The wire I had put in on the ankle will do a good enough job keeping the leg attached to the foot, but it won't be enough to attach the foot to the base. For that I would basically need to to the same thing as the ankle again.

I GSed a piece of plasticard to the wires on both legs:



And then drilled the holes in the base and smushed it all down into a big wad o' GS. Unfortunately, this caused it to ride a little higher than I'd wanted, and I'm not sure that there is a solid connection between the base, the plasticard, and the bottom of the leg, but in this case I'm just going to have to get what I get.

Which is certainly good enough.



You can see here by this picture already how my endless wrangling over making sure the model wasn't too big is justified. I'm up to the waist here, and already these models are head high on regular berzerkers. I'm going to have to keep a tight lid on height going forward.

Speaking of, the next thing is to finish off the rest of the other 4 legs (which are nearly done, but not quite), and the feet. Once that's done, I'm going to move onto the torso. Now that I've got things on a base, it won't be so bad to leave the armature still somewhat unfinished, as once again I'm going to want to make sure I have the space to do things under the arm. Certainly this project is winding up being a lot more complicated than my ogryn, where I could just assemble everything and then just work the GS directly on.

Of course, complicated doesn't necessarily mean more difficult. With the exception of the guitar wire, everything I've done so far is something that I've already done at some point on some project (if not all in the same place). Really, this complexity is just adding time. So long as I can keep things up and keep putting the hours in, this should finish out as a pretty straightforward project.

I'm sort of burnt out a bit on the legs, but as a whole, I'm still pretty eager about this project. Look for more updates soon!

That's some amazing attention to detail, and I like how clear your explanations are. Will be lurking/following/commenting!

Nice stuff - they are going to be huge. Look for to seeing more.

Fantastic work! they are really going to look awesome! and bloody huge! :-) I can't wait to see them birthed into destructive beauty!

NF09

I cant wait to see your terminator next to a guards man

Well, it's an oblit, not a terminator, but you request, and I provide:



bwahaha!

Amazing work. Genuinely inspiring. 'Bout time I picked up my daemon prince project again...

Wow your obliterators are looking amazing so far.

Thanks!

So, I've got my second oblit on its base. This one had the super-triangles for the coarse detail. For the fine detail. the lip on the top of the armor stuck out so much, I figured I could put something bigger in, so I decided to go for a pair of pistons. Very steampunk.

Those are some sexy lookin' legs, Ailaros! Really coming together nicely.

Ailaros wrote:Well, it's an oblit, not a terminator, but you request, and I provide:



bwahaha!

lol

Cant wait for more

^ me neither

Damn thing is going to be as tall as an Ogryn. Scary stuff!

I enjoy your threads so very much. Not only do you do amazing work, but you show your work as it progresses and give detailed explanations about how you have been able to do what you've done so far. Even "smaller" details like the tendency for GS to want to reform into a shapeless blob or realizing how you could have done something differently for better results are what makes -stalking- following your work worthwhile.

The scale you have achieved here is exactly what the fluff has been about the entire time but stock models rarely represent. That Oblit looks massive but not OTT by any means. I'm always impressed by the work you do and appreciate how you share the process as well as the finished product.

So, I just got the last two legs done:



This one I actually wanted to have the other leg up in a run position. Not only would you be able to see the right leg better, but it would also prevent me from having two legs with the same pose. Unfortunately, I just couldn't make it look good this way.



This one also obviously had problems. The back leg is back at a pretty sharp angle, but if I brought it up to normal, then the other leg would be really high up. That or put the other leg down, and then I'd only have two leg poses for four models...

Not only does it look a bit odd, but some of the detail is lost as well. There's actually a GSed skull on the right lower leg that you basically can't see at all...

In any case, I'm now finally done with the legs, and I can start getting on with this project.

What's coming up next is doing the feet (hooves), and chopping up the pelvis a little bit. I've been having problems with size as I'd feared, so things are going to have to be a bit more low-riding than I'd have liked.

To demonstrate, here it is compared to one of my ogryn. Now, these aren't real ogryn models (which I suspect are smaller by a fair bit), but already these things threaten to tower over this already large unit.



Ideally, I was going to make sure that these models had a real abdomen, rather than the chest-into-nuts problem of other GW models. Unfortunately, I don't see how I'm going to be able to pull this off. I don't want the model to be any taller than 50% more than its current height, or it will be too large. In fact, I wanted these models 50% bigger than my metal terminator, and the hips are already as high as the top of his head...

The legs look amazing, the final product is just going to be outstanding at this rate

Fantastic work! I was always very impressed with your guard, but look forward with to seeing more of your stuff.

So, after spending a week battling a triple digits fever, I finally got back to working on my oblits. There were only a couple of things that needed doing and the legs of these models will FINALLY be done.

The first was to do the foot. As mentioned, I wanted to do hooves for these. This started out with just putting down a hoof-sized/shaped blob of GS down to get it out of the freestanding stage.



Then I cut a notch out of the front to make the hooves cloven. I then went on and put some applique texture on. It looked great, like really old, rough hooves, heavily grooved and textured.

Then I had to put something at the back of the heel, as hooves really don't fit well into this armor. I decided to just continue with the fur motif:



Of course, it wasn't until I was done that I found I had a serious problem. Firstly, the texture of the fur looks a LOT like the texture for the hoof. They will be different colors, but this has really shaken me. It's to the point where I'm glad the hooves will be black (I'm not actually sold on the texture itself all that much anymore).

It's to the point where I'm considering either redoing the foot to be armored, or redoing the fur to be either tubes, or armor. Plus, this all makes the feet look HUGE, which is yet another example of me screwing up on the scale of something on this project. As tempted as I am to redo them, I know that if I do, I'll be broken on this project. I have to either take them more or less as is, with only one change, or I'm going to get so burned out on the detail work I'm not going to be able to continue well on the non-detail part. I just wish I knew what to do.

Oh, and it's kind of hard to see, but I've rounded off the edges of the pelvis plasticard piece and drilled some holes in it in anticipation of accepting a torso.

It will be the torso next. I'm hoping I can get going quickly enough to get my morale back in place after doing all this leg work just to end on a low note.

Glad to see you're feeling better, Ailaros. I think you may be a little harsh on yourself. I think the hooves look pretty solid, even with the fur. If you wanted, you could smooth the hooves down and then paint on the details. That may prevent having to do the whole thing over again. Excited to see you get to work on the torsos, though.

After "finishing" the legs. I fixed the hooves a bit by slathering a bit of superglue in the creases and then filing down the ridges a little bit. Now that the legs were done, it was time to work on the torso.

My plans for the torso are, like the original models, to look more like terminator torsos than berzerker torsos. The one real exception to this is that I still want to have the power pack vents coming out the back. I've got 4 sets of dragon head bitz from my vehicle acessory sprue that I'm just dying to use on them.

Also, I have an idea for how tall I want them. In order to keep their height down, I don't want them any higher than 50% their current height.

This wound up being sort of tricky, though. On the one hand, they can't be too tall, but on the other hand, they can't be too squat, while on the mutated third hand, I also have to have the torsos riding up from the pelvis a little bit to ensure that I get the fur in underneath the belt properly.

In the end, I went through three torso designs, with the first two being too wide and too tall, and the second being too tall. In the end, I got a torso with dimensions that I thought would work.



Note the measurements in millimeters. Anyways, the point is that this is going to fold up, leaving the top and bottom, but providing a nice bit of volume that will wind up getting covered in greenstuff eventually. As such, I wanted to make especially certain that the torso wasn't too wide, as I might be putting a fair amount of fur on it.

Anyways, after tapering the edges a little bit, the whole thing glued together nicely.



As you can see, I also added a couple of horizontal struts. The first support bar was put at the very bottom, flush with the bottom edge of the torso. The other was put about 2/3ds of the way up. I don't want to have it at the top because I need a pit in the torso to stick a head in later.

Once this was done, it was time to make the front of the torso smooth. For this, I repeated my technique of flaring out the legs. Some GS went on the front, and was smoothed down with the knife. Then I rolled it around on a sheet of plasticard to get it smooth, and then fixed it exactly how I wanted it with more knifework. Easy peasy. On to attaching it to the legs!

If you've been following since the beginning of this scratchbuild, you'll know I'm sort of obsessed about structural integrity. In the case of connecting the torso to the pelvis, though, this isn't much of a concern.

The biggest reason for this is surface area. There wasn't much between the lone attached foot and the base. There wasn't much between the aluminum tubing and the pelvis (indeed, I actually had one fracture while working on the leg). Between the bottom of the torso and the top of the pelvis, though, I've got two large, flat surfaces. Furthermore, this is going to be packed in with at least a couple of layers of GS, both internally, and externally once it's done. That and the higher up on the model you go, the less stress load it needs to bear.

As such, the way this is going to get attached is with a few holes drilled in the top of the pelvis, and in the support bar. I then mixed up blobs of GS, and kind of teased out a "hook" on one side. This I used to go over the torso support bar and link back up with the main GS blob, making it so that the torso bar was entirely wrapped in GS. I also made sure to poke some GS into the holes in the bar from the top.

Then I put some glue on the bottom of the blob and smushed it into the pelvis. In this way I have GS through the holes, the pelvis plasticard, the blob of GS, the torso support plasticard, and then more GS through those holes to a small amount on top. This kind of layering of plasticard and GS along with a superglue will give it a tremendous amount of surface area, and thus connectivity.

Once this was down, it was just a matter of twisting the torsos into the positions I wanted them and then applying some more surface superglue to set it for curing.





Not too shabby, actually. I overshot on height by just a little bit, but the rest of the dimensions are just like how I want them.

I know that attaching the torsos makes these models look sort of tall and skinny, but once I fill out the torso, and especially once I get the arms on, it's going to take a lot of the lankiness out of these. Also, just for reference, these minis are now just a little shy of 2" tall, making them 4/5ths the size of the current demon prince models. I would take more angst from this, if I didn't know that I'm going to be "truescaling" the demon princes up in size, so the oblits won't tower over things too badly.

After how messy the legs got, I'm glad that the torso is starting out so smoothly. My only problem from here is that I have only a very vague idea for what I want to have going forward. I guess I'll just sort of start working on it and see where I end up.

Awesome.

The stuff here is amazing! I'm totally subscribed!

Some realy nice looking mini's in this blog!!

Torsos are coming along nicely. I'm ready to see them bulked out and fully equipped.

Now that the torsos have their base down, it's time to start fleshing them out. There actually isn't a whole lot more structural work that needs to be done with this (torsos are relatively easy, I guess), so I started by doing a mix of detail and structural work. Really, the only terribly complicated thing, now that all of the "sides" of the torso are done is to figure out how to do the tops and bottoms.

I decided to take it from the top, beginning with something that I've been looking forward to this entire project - spiky bitz! One of the few things I KNEW I'd want is to have a trophy rack coming out of the top of this model, but moreso than the way terminators have it. As such, the idea was to put a pair of terminator spikes on, and then put on an extra rack of vehicle-sized spikes to really drive in the spikiness.

To start with, I took my first vehicle rack spiky bitz and cut them off the sprue. Then I divided them out into groups of three. It wound up that this was too wide for my torsos, so I had to cut out some of the plastic between the spikes. This, however, wound up being impossible to just glue back together, so I mounted it onto a small piece of plasticard which I then cut to shape.



The tricky part would be how to mount this to the torso. Eventually I decided that the spikes would go on as far forward as they could, having the back of the spikes mount flush with the end of the highest point of the torso before it began to taper. This would mean mounting these spikes to thin air, though, so I decided that I'd provide the backing for the head in a single stroke.

I cut a piece of plasticard to the right length, cut out some notches (so that it wouldn't bump into the angled part of the torso), and glued it on to the mount, covering the hack job I'd done on the spikes themselves. From the front, everything would look nice and clean.



Then it was just mounting it on with a couple little blobs of GS to fill in the triangle-shaped gap between the bottom of the spikes and the angled side of the torso.

Because this was putting the head so far forward, this meant that most of the torso was now in the back of the model. This meant I felt that the torso extended far enough back, so I pulled out my secret weapon for the backs of these models. More bitz off the sprue. I don't know where they go on a chaos rhino, perhaps they're hatches or something? Doesn't matter - makes great backing.



As you will notice, I also stopped up the gap in the top of the torso with GS. No, I did not literally stuff GS into the gap until the torso was full. Instead, I made a thin piece of GS, cut it vaguely into shape, put down just a touch of glue, and then carefully laid it across the gap, sort of like laying a tarp across a tiger trap. All I needed to do was to have the edges smoothed out.

Of course, the GS sank into the huge gap underneath it somewhat and generally looks like crap, but that's going to be fixed in the next stage. All it needs right now is to be structural later.

Once the basics of the top were done. It was time to focus on the bottom. This started with me doing this same GS method (which for some reason, I want to call "bearding", but I don't know why. Is there a woodworking term like this or something?) to cover over the yawning gap. Once Again, I just needed something there that I could work with later.

As for the front, this was once again one of the few things I'd planned out well in advance. I wanted these guys to have belts, or at least belt buckles, just like their smaller berzerker buddies.

To start this, I cut out some sections of a medium diameter aluminum tubing I just so happened to have lying around (about the width of the flash suppressor of an autocannon), and packed it with GS. I actually pushed it down into a thin film first, sort of like cutting sugar cookies with a cookie cutter. Then, I packed the rest of it with GS from behind. When it was cured, it peeled off nicely, presenting a round, flat surface.



Once they were cleaned up a bit, all I needed to do was apply a little applique sculpting. I decided to go for two khorne symbols, and two skull motifs, one of which was put in an arrow to make up for the fact that the skull-in-arrow on the legs is practically invisible due to posing.



Once cured, I cleaned up the edges a little bit, and got ready to put them on.

Now, at this point, I still don't know what the fur is going to look like on the torsos. As such, I can't assume that you will necessarily be unable to see the gap between the belt and the torso.

I start with the front bottom of the torso:



and then do my cover thing that I was just doing before, and then jam in some small segments of guitar wire:



and then put a wad of GS on the back of the buckle, dab on a little glue, and then jam it in there:



Now, it turned out that I needed to push the guitar wire WAY up into the torso to get this to fit in. This was mostly because the buckle couldn't rest on top of the wire, because the buckle is way too thick (though the thinnest cross-section of tubing I could cut without warping it). In the end, the buckles still stick way too far out. I was going to have them flush, or slightly recessed, like they are on berzerkers. As it is, they actually stick out past the torso. As there's basically no way I'm going to be able to fix this, I decide to just run with it. Once the fur goes on, how far it's sticking out will become much less noticeable.

The end result is some dapper soon-to-be tech-monsters:



With the torso now structurally complete, it's going to be a matter of putting on the remaining coarse details and finishing it off as much as I can before I need the arms on to continue.

This means putting on the power generator intakes, and outfitting these guys with heads. I'm also going to put down the bottom fur, and get the torsos prepped so that those parts which won't have fur will have something else on them, at least some edging or rivets or something.

This should all go pretty quickly, once I can decide what I want to do about the fur. I'm thinking that I might just get lazy and use the same basic design for the berzerkers. A fur poncho of sorts, but that leaves a stripe of armor showing. I'm just having a hard time visualizing how I'd pull off something furrier, while my mission statement at the beginning of this project explicitly forbids me from going light on the fur. We'll just have to see where it takes me...

Fan-bloody tastic! these guys rock! you are making some exeptional progress with them so far, I love the poses and the execution of your ideas, they certainly will be something different and eye catching as they tear up the battlefield! i'm really excoted as i see them take shape, as for the fur, I reckon you should decide how little or much once you've worked on the arms, you might decide they look sharp for a night out with just a stole around the shoulders or if it's chilly perhaps a full coat of waist length jacket? depends on how warm their pistons need to be! ;-)

They are looking stunning. I cant wait to see what you will do for thier heads. They are true Giants

You sure know how to captivate an audience with your talent! This is absolutely brilliant! One of the best blogs out there no doubt. Thank you for sharing! Exalted and subbed!

Also, that MR hobgobblin remark wouldnt happen to be a hint at a certain Metalhammer podcast episode, would it?

Just WOW!

Subscribed a LOT!

I think the hooves are fine. They actually "tie in" with the rest of the model / models you've done fur on, and the paint is truly what will define the hoof and make it distinctly different from the fur.

Ailaors once again you have blown me a way with your creativity and skill. These oblitorators are turning out absolutly amazing. I can't wait till you get the army done and hopefully put up some of your amazing bat. reps. The commentary always gave me a good laugh.

This just gets better and better. Keep on truckin' Ailaros!

Thatguy91 wrote:Also, that MR hobgobblin remark wouldnt happen to be a hint at a certain Metalhammer podcast episode, would it?

Heh, no, I don't listen to any podcasts. Well, ones that aren't Market Fool Money.

DeadGaurd wrote: I can't wait till you get the army done and hopefully put up some of your amazing bat. reps. The commentary always gave me a good laugh.

We'll see. I already know that the leader is going to be named Blingus with a variety of epithets (such as Blingus the Recklessly Malfeasant and Blingus the Indescribably Violent), or perhaps just Blingus Khan...

Anyways, on to the work. As mentioned, one of the few things I knew I was going to want was power pack intakes, just like regular power armor. I went through several frustrating tries to get the "arms" of the intake to look right. I had one design that was too big, one that was too big, one that was too big, one that was too big, and one that was just right. And you wonder why I've made it a rule not to make these guys too big...

In the end, I finally settled on the dimensions I wanted. I'm not very good working with plasticard, and this stuff was going to show, unlike my armature stuff. As such, even though I want a thicker strut, I'm making it out of two pieces of much easier to cut thinner plastic, which I'll then glue together.



Of course, I had to make sure to lightly file down the corners which flare out when you cut the plastic. Then it was just gluing them together and sticking on the intake. I could have just put a ball on the end and worked with that, but I had something more fancy in mind. To the vehicle accessory sprue!



And then gluing them on.



It wasn't flush, though, so I had to smush it into the triangular gap with some GS. Knowing how I wanted these after the fact, I could have cut the plasticard for the torsos rather differently to make this all a bit easier. I guess I'll know for the non-existant next time.

Because this time, I have a lot of gaps to clean up, some of which required two layers of GS - one to fill the gap, and a second to make it flush. I had to make the top flush, with proper lines between the intake arm and the back of the torso. I also had to fill that triangle-shaped gap on the sides where the intake arms went in.

Once that was done, it was time to start with the details. In this case, it's the struts on the arms. I went to the hardware store and picked up some brass rods for this. On the one hand, the hardware store didn't have plasticard rod. On the other, brass cuts like plasticard (well, like tubing). It's tougher, but I actually like that. It's harder to make mistakes because you actually have to put some work into the cuts, rather than chopping through in a single swipe.



This actually nearly finishes off the top torso detail. All I'm going to do now is to throw on some rivets and a bit of guitar wire tubing. The rest is only going to happen when I start putting the arms on.

Which leaves basically the fur as far as the torso is concerned. To start on this, I put down my usual fur armature of a flat piece of greentuff cut to shape and then glued on with the wrinkles that I wanted. I had this idea of first putting down GS strips and then putting the underskirt on top of that, but it wound up that freestanding strips were too effected by gravity. With the mutual support of a single piece, and a little bit of superglue draped on, I got a pretty sturdy piece of GS.



The next step will be finishing the fur, and the parts of the torso that aren't fur, and get things ready to put down the head.

Looking good and aggressive!

Man, this is amazing, they're looking so good! I still can't fathom how good you are doing these guys it's so fiddly and yet you are doing a superb job of making them look so cool, i can't wait to see you finish them up and of course pop some paint on them, I'm intrigued to see how you approach the arms?

Nerdfest09

Rivets for the Rivet God

I like the way you are doing the fur 'skirt' its a nice idea.

amazing stuff!

There is a game company out there that should hire you for design / master work. It's in England I believe.

Stunning as always. I'm always impressed with how you take putty, plastic, and metal to make a miniature that equals (or rivals) current production of the same model.

I imagine because of the size difference you're planning on sculpting the helm and arms / weapons as well?

So firstly, I've got to note a correction to my previous post. I wanted to go with GS strips that I put a GS skirt over. This wound up being really dumb, and instead I wound up going for my usual method of doing fur with a solid under-layer.

nerdfest09 wrote: I'm intrigued to see how you approach the arms?

In much the same way I'm going to do the legs. Aluminum tubing will go down with special concern for structural integrity at where the tube meets the shoulder at the torso. While the ungainly hip joint will be covered over with fur, the shoulder will be hidden by a shoulderpad.

Skalk Bloodaxe wrote:There is a game company out there that should hire you for design / master work. It's in England I believe.

lol. You put in a good word for me and we'll see.

It's kind of a moot point, though, as GW does all of its design in 3D computer drafting and then use 3D printers to get the base model that they then cast. Nearly gone are the days when GW has people pick up a blade or color shaper and break out the tubes of GS. If I really wanted to get a job at GW, I'd learn 3DS Max, or Blender, or something.

Skalk Bloodaxe wrote:I imagine because of the size difference you're planning on sculpting the helm and arms / weapons as well?

I'm going to try and make the heads the same size (no cheating to make the model look bigger by making the heads smaller like they do on terminators), but don't have any helmets, so that will be scratch done. Also, I don't have any arms, so they'll be scratch as well. Going into this project, I knew that these would be sculpts with bitz glued on, not a kitbash. It will be interesting once I get back to doing conversion work (instead of scratchbuilding).

Anyways, on to the work.

With the skirts and intakes on, top and bottom of the torso were nearly done. On the top, I'd just need to finish off the part behind the spikes, and on the bottom, I'd need to throw down the fur and get the bottom edging where the torso fur wouldn't be to look nice.

I started on the top. The first part was to get my open-ended tubes closed off. These would close off in rectangular prisms, which means ideally I'd use plasticard for nice, crisp lines. Unfortunately, there's alll these tubes in the way, which means GS. I guess I'd just have to do a lot of extra work to prevent these from mellowing into blobtangular prisms. Once these were down, I thew some rivets on. Hopefully the detail will make the unterparts less noticeable.



I then started going back and forth over how I was going to do the tubing on this thing. In the end, I decided that I wanted something coming up the middle from the power back itself, so I chopped off some guitar wire and mounted it on.



Then I spent bored hours in a waiting room looking at the backs of these guys trying to figure out how I wanted the tubing. Then it struck me - I don't have to do that part now. Nothing is going to sit in front of the backpack, so I can always add those details on later once I know what the rest of the model looks like. That meant that, apart from the tubing, everything was now done.

Over the previous few days, I'd gotten an idea into my head. The original idea was to make these models with an ubercannon on one arm, and just a power fist on the other. I started to think that perhaps I'd want to mount one of my guns on the other arm so that it would have something a little more to do (and I'd have more modelling options). Of all of the weapons, the least similar ones are the flamers, so I decided to mount a flamer underneath the powerfist, and leave the plasmas, meltas, and lascannon on the big arm.

One of the other reasons for this is that I wanted to put a guard flamer fuel tank on them. Originally, I was thinking about taking one of these tanks with the big "toxic" logo on it and make it something connected to a respirator (so they breathe in toxic fumes to stay alive and keep powered). There wasn't any way I could figure out to make this obvious, especially once I'd mounted on the intake arms the way I had. This way, I still get to use the bit, even if it's not for the original intention.

There isn't going to be the space for a full pair of tanks, so I started by cleaning them up (and getting rid of superfluous pieces) and chopping them in half.



How do I have all these extra flamer bits around? Well, I think this can best be explained in a flowchart:



Which is a slight variant on my Creme De Menthe flowchart:



Anybody who has ever purchased a bottle of Creme De Menthe will know exactly what I'm talking about.

Anyways, once this was chopped down, I had to chop away some of the skirt in the back to get them to fit, but after that it just went right in.



And with that, the back/top of the torso is now done. Sans tubing, of course. This just left the bottom.

With the skirt down, it was a matter of adding the fur. Realising that I hadn't yet described all that well how I do this, I thought I'd take a moment to explain in more detail.

Firstly, I mix the greenstuff, and then flatten it down between my fingers to the right thickness. Too thick, and the blade is going to sink in too far, leaving not only too deep of recesses, but, most importantly, it's going to drag the ends of the fur too far down, making something that looks more like splint mail than like layers of fur. Too thin, of course, and there won't be enough material to work with. The desired thickness for me is roughly the same thickness as my thin plasticard, if not a little thicker.

Once this is done, I apply it to the model, just putting it over exactly where the skirt is. If you need to cut off parts of it or put strange-angled pieces somewhere else, that's fine. It just needs to end smooth. Make sure that you sort of push the GS into the waves and curves of its armature a little bit to make it nice and snug (and the proper thickness).

Once I do this, I break out an x-acto knife. For this, I actually use dull ones with the tips broken off. Too sharp and the knife will cut the GS, rather than shaping it, and too pointy and I'm going to have problems both with depth control, and with being able to push little pieces of GS around. Knife in hand, the first thing I do is make a bunch of impressions in the GS. Starting from the top and going down, I make little columns in a staggered ^ shape, slanting one impression one way and the next the other. Make sure that they stay staggered along both dimensions or it will look strange later.

In the end, you get something that looks a little like a strawberry:



This picture is a little inaccurate, though, as I usually do the little divots much closer together. This was the first one I was doing in this set and forgot that, much to my mild inconvenience later.

Once this is done, I go through and make more divots to connect the indentations together. I usually try to alternate back and forth on this as well, so as not to make the fur too even. Once they go from divots to trenches, you have a bunch of partially-connected ^ and V shaped bits of GS raised up.

After this, it's going around and seperating the little pieces of raised GS into single fibers. I sort of have a set thickness and length that I like to keep them at (and that need to be to be consistent with the rest of the fur in this case). Basically I just go around and look at every little joint and separate it.

The one key thing to remember with this is to not overwork it. If you cut the GS upraised parts too thin, there is very little you can do to recover. Likewise if you have gaps between fur pieces, or if the end of a fur piece goes down instead of flaring out (a big problem if the GS was put on too thick). Keep it gentle, keep it brief. You just want to get in, make the corrections, and get out.

Once this is done, I just go over the edges again (especially at the bottom), to make sure there aren't any big blobs or trenches.

With a pelt as big as these obliterators, I knew I couldn't do this all in one go. There was no way I'd be able to prevent myself from smushing my own GS. As such, I decided to do it in sections. Because of how the model sat, some of them were done in three sections and some in two (although the two's did have some frustrating finger-smushing moments - they probably could have been threes).

I was originally concerned that the fur between the parts might not line up right and there would be a seam (which I was actually willing to accept for aesthetic reasons), but it turned out that you couldn't really notice, and that was with me just going along normally, without making much specific accommodation for the seam.

In the end, it was a lot of work, but it was straightforward, and, given how much fur I've already done, actually rather easy.



From here, of course, my next step is to finish the fur on the rest of them. I'll post pictures when this gets done.

Looking at what I have so far, I'd say I'm now about 2/3ds of the way through this project. The remainder will be broken down into three main groups. The first part will be to detail the last bit of torso left not done and to do the head. The second part will be to put down the armature for the arms, and connect up all the tubing. The third part will be do to the detailing on the arms, and put on the shoulderpads.

Once that's done, I'll actually be done. Most of the detailing has already been done. It's kind of strange, I've actually had to break most of my scratchbuilding axioms at one point or another. Usually it's bottom to top, in to out (underparts to overparts and center to extremities), and coarse before fine (detail). The sheer size and complexity of this has wound up with me needing to break these (and other) rules at some point.

But enough chatting, it's time to start finishing off the fur...

Liking the strawberry skirt.

This blog is pretty inspirational on the scratchbuilding side.

Can't wait to see how they end up!

The obliterators are coming along really fantastically.

And yes, I do have flamer and grenade launcher bitz, and I don't know where they came from And with your advice, I won't be buying any creme de menthe.

They are looking great. The only problem i have with them, is that they are starting to look like the cookie monster. the fury loin cloth gives it that look. seems a little puffy to me. But they still look great. you need to get some pics up after you paint them. maybe one of them hiding next to a rhino, just so we can see if you can get cover with them.

lol. COOKIES FOR THE COOKIE GOD!!!

It's one of the strange things about scratchbuilding is that as you put stuff on, it changes the profile of the model. For example, once the torsos and spikes were put on, the models looked super tall and thin, and then when the skirts get added on, the "gravity" of the model sinks "down" a bit. You're right, that they currently look sort of pear-shaped, but once the arms go on, they'll look a lot different.

It's actually one of the challenging things with scratchbuilding - not looking too hard at the incomplete model so that you miss the overall plan (which is made more complicated when you don't have one).

Anyways, I got the next one done:

Lookin good, you have a great ability to depict motion in your models. Can't wait to see 'em done.

I think my dad still has the same bottle of creme de menthe that he had when i was growing up - soon it will be his grandkids stealing swigs!

Thanks!

So, here are the last two done:

They're really coming along nicely. How are you going to adorn the torsos?

Thanks. So far I have them planned to look a lot like my berzerkers - a little bit of armor showing at the bottom, but mostly covered with fur.

Crème de menthe is great in chocolate milkshake, so I don’t have a bottle left. But saying that I do not play guard and i do have flamer canisters

You are a very talented sculptor, I'm impressed. Especially like the captioned photos

Can't wait to see these complete.
It's a very nice and original army, my compliments!

M0rdain wrote:Crème de menthe is great in chocolate milkshake, so I don’t have a bottle left.

So, it's been awhile since I've updated. Part of it is due to burnout that comes from working on fine detail, but a part of it has been the detail itself. The only thing left to do was to do the heads, which is something that takes a great deal of creativity. Moreover, since the arms will be more or less the same, this is my last real artwork on these models before it slides out to the end in something more like engineering.

But before I could put on the heads, I needed to finish off the rest of the non-fur part of the torso. To do the liner on the bottom of the torso armor, I put down GS as usual.



But then, unlike the rest of the liners, I just let it cure like this, as-is, and then cut it once it cured. This made it come out slightly less like how I'd have liked, but it also came out with 100% crisp lines with no mellowing, which was what I was going for. Throw on some rivets, and this part was done.

Then it was finally time to go on to the head. In order to keep up the tech-monster motif, I wanted to make sure that there would be plenty of tubing, so I decided that all four of them would have four tubes coming out of the back of the armor and connect some way into the head. Once that was decided, it was cutting and bending the guitar wire, and then smushing them into a ball of GS to be the armature for the head.



... with a little superglue to keep the wires in place (on both sides) while the GS cured. The one thing I wanted to make sure I did here was to not skimp on head size (the opposite of the problem I've been having with the rest of the model). These models already have the nuts-on-nipples problem, but I don't need to exacerbate it even further with a teeny tiny head (like the real obliteratos). As such, I was careful to make these models with heads that were at least as big as a regular CSM. Once they were done, I found I'd got it basically spot-on (if a little big...)

Once I got here, it was like putting any old head together. The first part would be the top part of the head, with the second part being the bottom third of the head, and details.

Of course, instead of a regular old head, I was trying to make skull-masked tech monsters, so a great deal of liberty was taken...

After the first stage:



... and complete:



I swear this guy looks a LOT creepier in real life. In fact, I'm really rather pleased. The gross excess of tubing and metal eye sockets gets across the tech, and the jawless, vacant-eyed skull mask gets across the monster part.

For those of you who don't see it, it will make more sense with the paint on it.

After this, it was just doing some much-overdue cleanup, and finishing off the backpack a little bit more.

All that's left is to finish up the other three heads, and it will be time to finally put the arms on.

Love theme already, even if the heads look a bit too small.

well, and it's interesting because these guys have larger-than-CSM heads, versus the real obliterators, which are smaller than usual.



... although the other three are going to be a bit bigger still.

I've just read through this blog and must say that it is superb. Great attention to detail and it should be a great looking unique force once complete. Keep up the awesomeness!

Ok, my bad, You know I love your work and I'm faithfull of a great squad at the end

Great job on the heads. Quite creepy indeed.

Lookin' good!

Thanks, all.

So, my second head is complete:



This one is actually based on an ork skull that came on one of my spikey bitz. Originally, I wanted to have a tube sticking out of his eye in a really creepy fashion, but I couldn't find a way of pulling that off. Instead, I wound up just going with a socket.

Also, it's hard to see on these pictures, but I put in some micro-fractures in the masks of all of these guys. I'm hoping it will add more of a real skull motif, rather than the white helmets that some of these are.

The heads are looking creepy indeed, looking forward to seeing the arms attached, to get a reel feel for these guys

Ailaros, these are looking better and better! you have some excellent skills my friend! excellent! the head is great, nicely chaotic and i look forward topainting time when the arms go on!

Nerdfest09

Got the third one done:



I could just strangle my camera right now for how awful of pictures it's taking of these.

The original plan for this head was to be a cow skull with horns coming out the side. As I went along, it quickly became apparent that this was coming out like a reptile skull, so I just went with it. In the end, I got a practically perfect replica of a velociraptor skull.

And then I went and made it chaos-ey, including a metal eye socket and fangs, etc.

Despite the awful picture, this is probably my favorite one so far.

Wow, they are awesome. This thread is full of win. I love the concept of your guys, and your sculpting skills are exemplary.

Would you ever consider taking commissions?

Thanks!

I'm actually about to start my first proper commission soon - a khorne commissar for some lascannons. I've had enough experience at enough jobs working with clients to have somewhat of a distaste for it, but at the right price...

Like the last two heads, amazing job!

The first head totally looks like the atomic monster from norsica vally of the wind. Well done on them they are grrrrrreat!

That was actually the idea with that one. When I got done, though, I was bored, so I added horns.

Anyways, the last one is done.



So, I think I like this one the most.

Oh, and I also went back in and added rivets to the helmet, and it made them all just that much creepier.

On to the arms!

To arms!

After all this time, I finally got to break out those little pieces of tubing I've been holding on all this time (and trying desperately not to lose as they kept rolling off my desk). Putting these on is actually going to look a lot like putting on the legs.

It will be a little easier, though, as these arms scarcely need to be structural at all. Once the tubes are cut to length and angle, they just glue on to the side and to each other with a little bit of GS getting packed in there.

Looking at the tube pieces, I realised that they were all uniformally too long, so I chopped them down by 2 or 3mm apiece. Also, I figured out a faster way to cut these tubes at an angle - I just used a pair of wire snips. The end result was a bit rough, but these won't be seen. If I had a little more time, I probably could have made it look exactly right.

Anyways, after chopping and angling, it was getting them on the torso.



Once this was done, it was time to put the shoulderpads on. Not only will these anchor the arms on, but I'm also going to want to get this undarpart done right away.

I'm going to do this in a couple of steps, so the first part is getting on something that's vaguely in the right shape that I'm going to put a layer over on top of. Once I get the exact shape on, I'll be able to put on some details.



Once these were down, I could go back in and finally finish the torsos. Without knowing how the arms would go on, I didn't want to put down fur that would wind up just getting chopped up. With the arms down enough, I could put down the fir to finish the torso.



The only other thing that's going on both sides is the tubing, which I think I'll actually roll into the arms.

In fact, I think I'll just roll everything into their respective arms.

They're coming along nicely, however, I think they need a little more weight in the upper torso and shoulders to make sure that they dont appear too narrow.

Lovely army!I've always loved fur on space marines.Scrachbuilt zerkers are deadly!Take no prisoners!!

Alright, now that the arms are to the armature stage, it's time to start bulking them out. I've decided to start with the right arm.

Originally, I wanted all shooty weapons to be on the omni-gun, but over time, I'd decided that I wanted to split off the flame weapons, in part because they're rather different, in part because I want something to bulk up the right arm, and in part because I want my models that have their right arm sticking forward something to do with that arm.

To start with, I did some final prep work. This entailed cutting out a piece of plasticard to act as the base for the palm of the hand, and putting down some more GS to bulk out the forearm a bit before I put the fur on.



Then it was on to the flamer. As mentioned, I broke out my guard flamers for this. I went over a couple of options in my mind for how long I wanted the flamer itself to be. On the one hand, I liked it long, going out past the wrist. On the other hand, the model is armed with a power fist that they've actually got to be able to punch someone with. After making my decision, I cut down the flamers to size.



Then it was just a matter of mounting them on to the underarm.



After this point, it was just a matter of doing up the tubing. Obviously there was the one connecting the fuel tank to the flamer, but that made things look really lopsided, so I added some more tubing to connect parts of the power pack to the torso.



All I've got to do is add some sockets for the tubes and this part is done.

From here, I've got just three parts left. The first part is to start work on the hands, which will proceed in a way similar to how I do powerfists. The second is to get the shoulderpads to be the right size and then do the edging. The finishing touch will be putting fur all over the forearm.

This all should be easy enough, technically. The problem will be fighting off burnout enough to be able to actually power through to the end.

Dang, man! This thing is gonna be beast! Love the sculpt, especially the furry pants.

Oh hell yes this is looking sweet! :-) now with the arms dummied in place you can really see the development and how they;ll appear finished, i'm a bit excited to see how it looks all done and painted my friend!

NF09

Looking so good!

Waiting for the final product, It looks already awesome!

It is a delight to find other people who also take very much care of their poses and conversions! All your models are very well done, I really like the fur/skull mask "sheme" of your army, it looks great! I'm also amazed at your work on the obliterators, they look fething badass awesome! (for lack of better words )

I'll definetly be back, subscribed!

Subbed, great work!

Great stuff, Ailaros. Your sculpting skills are fantastic as well. I remember being really into your battle reports in 4th edition back when I was on 40konline, and you were already doing some small sculpting details with your Foleran units!

Segueing into my next comment, I hope that you do a battle report series with these awesome Khornate barbarians in the same vein as your Foleran units!

Kind Regards,
Vladsimpaler

Beautiful. Just beautiful. Makes me want to start playing chaos, but i'd probably go with tzeentch. Now there's an idea... After all, i started grey knights/inquisition on a random impulse, and i'm getting sick of playing the "Good guys."

I'm curious, how do you get such a smooth texture with your green stuff?

Love the helms. The fur coats, not so much. Although the sculpting is well done, they need some serious shading/highlighting.

Still working on these guys for 6th edition?

This is an awesome project! I like it!

So, it's been awhile. 15 months, to be precise. In brief, this is why I haven't been working on this project over the last year.

Back then, I was getting a little burned out from my obliterator project, and I didn't have any other chaos models, so I just kind of stopped for a bit. Then, a few months later, rumors that 6th ed was about to be released immanently were swirling, and I was questioning if I should get back into 40k at all, or to try and find something else to apply myself to, you know, for my life to have direction, and all.

Eventually, I was convinced to give it another go, and, when 6th edition did come out, I decided to get back in with my guard army again, what with it being the only army I had, really. This, of course, meant putting CSM on hold while I had my first 6th ed guard adventure. Most of that year was spent working on guard stuff, including finally getting vehicles, and painting a bunch of stormtroopers among other things.

That all ended a couple of months ago. I felt like I had a good run with it, and I was about to have my first born child, so it felt like a good thing to wrap it all up. The question then remained, though, what to do? Obviously the new baby has been a time occupier, but now that I'm not working, that means I have more time than commitment, which meant 40k would be a great time-waster between changings and feedings (which it has been), and I don't even need to leave the house, except to play games.

It was then a question of what to work on. I've already got my guard army pretty much, well, finished. Furthermore, I'm going to take a break with them until their new codex comes out some months from now. That just left this project, or my orks, which I had also made an abortive start at. I figured that since I already had some CSM stuff, the time to finish a fully-painted army would be short enough to bother with it, especially in the time frame I'm looking at.

But there was a problem. I'd started a khorne army. 6th edition came out and took a steaming hot dump on assault armies and foot armies (and especially foot assault armies), and CSM got a new codex which specifically weakened khorne (+1A becoming rage? Thanks...) As such, well, that kind of defeated the point of what I was working on.

Over the next couple of months, I proceeded to agonize over everything. If not khorne, what faction? What color scheme? What army list? I spent a great deal of time in a masochistic torture of open-ended options thrust upon an autistic brain.

Very, VERY eventually, and after several new threads on dakka, a picture began to congeal. Even if I decided to play khorne after all, I was going to need a more generic color scheme. One that I could always switch to something else. After slowly and painfully weeding out non-god legions (like night lords and alpha legion) for various reasons, I eventually settled on the theme I wanted. I was going to go for a gold color. After all, most CSM armies have some sort of yellow metal, so gold-colored dudes could pretty well be plugged in with any other chaos faction if I eventually made a decision.

But that opened up an entire new set of problems. You see, when I started painting my guard army, my paint job was actually pretty decent. Tabletop +, I'd say. Over the years, however, GW has been producing lots of new stuff, foremost of which washes. Things that made everybody else blow by in skill level while I was plodding along with the old method.

As such, getting back into things, I really wanted to kick things up a notch. I wanted to have all the GS skills in there, but I also wanted to do something really nice for the paint job. Combined with the fact that I hadn't quite decided on a theme yet, this was torture on top of torture. Trying to come up with a design and a method that both showed off that I can do freehand (I do some non-minis minature painting), and to give me a chance to try out all of this new modelling stuff, while also still looking good. And not, you know, looking like I was painting something for nothing more than the sake of showing off.

After a lot of work, I finally got something that I think I'm going to stick with as the new direction for this project.









On the one hand, I've failed. There is nothing all that terribly challenging about this model. It's the same greenstuffing I was doing before, and the paint job is nothing more than some nicely painted brass and a bit of weathering. I feel like I should have stuck it out and aimed higher.

On the other hand, well... look at it. And there are still new things here, such as my use of washes on infantry models for the first time, and use of weathering on infantry models for the first time. And look at that, static grass. You'll just have to trust me when I say that that particular part looks a lot better in person. Plus, in any case, it's certainly a step up from my berzerkers.

The one thing too that I'll credit to this is that it does look pretty realistic. None of this bright, candy-coated nonsense, and this model doesn't look like he's wearing red pajamas like the berzerkers. Indeed, I've played a couple games of 40k with CSM with the berzerkers and the one thing I was shocked to find was that, though they look pretty sweet individually... I don't actually like how much they look like on the table...



I mean, they don't look bad, but they look... I don't know... cluttered. And like they're made of red plastic, rather than something real. They look sort of like toys.

Meanwhile, I'd note that I kept a set of old guitar strings nearby while painting this color, and the brass coloring is virtually identical to the worn phosphor bronze of the strings.

Anyways, I'll post again soon about the details of what's been going on with this project soon, but I just wanted to post that I'm back, so look for more goodies soon.

That brass dude rules, Ailaros. Don't be too hard on yourself. Painting doesn't come easy and you're progressing, which is important. It is great to see you back in the swing of things, even if you are second-guessing here and there. Glad you're back, we'll be watching your space barbarians.

Horray for this plog's return! Love the brass look, but I hope you still keep the skulls and furs and such.

Happy to see you return to this project - and to the eevil batreps I'm another fan of the brass termi, partially because it looks great and partially because simplicity isn't necessarily a bad thing! That said, this dude does make me look forward all the more to the conversion work to come - like your take on Huron, for example

- Salvage

So, now that I've done the intro, to talk about the project itself and its renewal.

As mentioned, one of the reasons I chose to get back into CSM was because I had the models for it. Already I had the 16 berzerkers from before, and I also had another, unopened box that I had purchased while I was working on my obliterators. Also, I acquired a box of terminators.

The reason why I did this (and didn't, say, get something else for my guard army) was because I was in a league that was a joint venture between my FLGS and a FLGS 45 minutes away. The end-of-league tournament was held there. It was also where the prizes (gift certificates of the league fees pooled together and then divvied out among the winners) were given out. I'd won third in that league, so got $20 in store credit for the other store. Unfortunately, their selection of 40k miniatures was TERRIBLE. The only thing I even remotely wanted was a box of CSM termies. It was either that, or have them order something for me, and then drive all the way out there and back again. Forget it. I took the termies.

... where they sat for like a year, or at least several months, doing nothing. This, though, was one of my incentives to come back to CSM. Not only did I have two troops choices with an extra box of dudes, but I also had these termies I could build. With a bit of ingenuity, I could get up to 1,000 points with just what I had, and in not very much time as well.

It was just a question of how to model and paint them.

As mentioned in the previous post, I was turned way off Khorne, and wanted to have something that looked more neutral that I could apply to anything - including Khorne if I later so chose.

The problem was that I didn't know what I wanted. The sheer open-endedness of it was, frankly, paralytic. What would progress, then was a long chain of needing to do SOMETHING, and hoping that once I'd made one choice, it would help me make other choices.

The biggest thing I was having to figure out was if I wanted to do a traitor legion, or to make my own. My first inclination was towards alpha legion, as the paintscheme in the new codex looks awesome. I also liked parts of the fluff (being the only legitimate alternative to the imperium, etc.)... but then I cooled, because some of the fluff is just awful (twin primarchs? Not really traitors?), and the dragons-in-space thing... started to feel a little juvenile.

I was also seriously tempted by night lords, who had much stronger positives, but much stronger negatives in my mind. Very eventually, they lost out as well. As did iron warriors (which is currently the closest traitor legion I'd pick). Part of it was that I kind of don't like the idea of picking existing fluff, because then I'd have to know it, and accept it, and follow it. And that seemed both stifling, and a lot of work.

In the end, after a brief thought of just saying screw it, and going back to khorne, I eventually settled on a paint scheme - brass.

But while this was going on, (and on, and on...) I had minis that needed making. I started my terminators by doing the same truescaling I was doing on the berzerkers. Nothing big, just uncrouching the poses and bringing the hips up a little higher with an elevated torso.





The question was what to go with from there. For awhile, I was trying chain as the added detail, and was seriously thinking of just running with that.



But in the end, I was against it. After all, this is supposed to be my showpiece army. I decided that I wanted to have three things on the models that showed off my GS/conversion ability, and three things that showed off my painting abilities. With the latter, this was more to set a goal that was too high, so that I'd work on painting stuff and get better.

Eventually, I caved, and went back to my old ways. The models got fur, and then they got skull masks, if in a somewhat less over the top way that my berzerkers did. Throwing those two together and adding the fact that I was doing the truescaling and dynamic posing, and I considered that good enough.

Which just left the painting, which gets us back to where we were before. I was trying really hard to figure out just how I could do better painting, but I also had this other force pulling on my from the other side - a desire to make things look realistic.

My quest for realism, it turned out, was at complete odds with my desire to do some interesting things with painting. Not only was it a problem with execution, but it was mostly a problem with design. I could play night lords and freehand the lightning squiggles... but who on earth would run around in armor with lightning squiggles painted on it? That's just dumb. Likewise, most of the bold colors just looked like they were... well... toys. Like they were made out of colored plastic.

And this thwarted me at every attempt. Glowing effects for the power weapons, and an attempt at adding OSL coolness, the more that I looked at it... the more it looked just plain unrealistic. Like they had just painted their weapons that color. Plus, OSL, however you do it, doesn't actually look like LIGHT outside of a photo studio.

Eventually, when I had settled on brass, this caused no end of problems in other ways. The metallic is both light and dark colored simultaneously, which meant that dark accent colors got lost in the recesses, and light colors got washed out by the glare on the metal. With such complicated (texturewise) models, virtually anything I did just made them more cluttered. The only way around this was to give the model a strong secondary color, but then we'd be back in unrealistic territory. Plus, I was starting to like the idea of brass, rather than brass-and-color.

In the end, several interesting freehand designs on the shoulderpad (including an interesting checkered motif) fell through, along with the OSL. This meant that the only interesting painting thing I'd done was having a nice brass color on everything.

... but that wasn't enough. After all of my brain-wracking, my desire to improve and show off my painting skill was ruined by a dogged insistence that I also have models that look nice, rather than as a mere means to display painting skills.

In the end, I feel like I let myself down, but as I narrowed down my options from too-many-to-do-anything I started culling away the options required to meet some of my goals.

The only measure of salvation came when someone suggested that I try weathering the models. I used the same black-stiple method I'd used on my guard vehicles, and, surprisingly, it came out really well.

Then it just came down to basing. Basic sand, but this time I painted it. I also used static grass for the first time, which wound up looking really cool, if being somewhat messy to apply.

Also, I'd note, that for this terminator my gloss coat for the gem went completely berzerk. I painted the eye on three times, only to have the gloss puff up into an opaque goo, rather than setting as a clear hard coat. It may have something to do with the fact that I may have oversprayed the regular clear coat (for the whole model) and on a day that was a bit too humid. Eventually, on my 4th try, I sort of got it to work, but the gloss is still pretty dull, and it did smear around (read: wrecked) some of the gradient, but by then I was too frustrated to care.

The end result, then, was my second completed terminator:









And so I can't be too disappointed in it, of course. It's got the dynamic pose. It's got the brass and fur and skull masks. I also like that it looks like he's actually getting ready to swing his chainsaw-sword-gun. Like you're about to get poked with spinning blades. I don't like the idea of them sort of being just... there... like they are on most terminator models.

And it gets across the idea of a shambling, hulking monster, a "predatory hulk, searching for its next meal", as the codex says.

Also, I did give myself one last parting gift with this model. Right before I sprayed it all, I rummaged through my bitz collection. The idea that this terminator would have been doing so much killing over so many hundreds of years, and yet have a half-empty trophy wrack simply wouldn't do. From the bitz bin, I pulled out a catachan head.

I clipped the end off one of the broken-off trophy rack sticks, did just a tiny bit of knifework on the head (cleaning off the bandana and hair, GSing some neck skin flaps, boring a hole in the eye, etc.), and then glued it down, and glued back in the bit of the trophy wrack I had clipped off.

A touch of paint, and this model's party piece was done:



... finally, an appropriate look for those slack-jawed catachan heads...

Hahahaha your post is hilarious hahaha keep up the good work you absolute weapon of a human

Keep it up. It looks fantastic, very menacing.

beautiful!

Thanks!

So over the past couple of weeks, I've been distracted from this project by an attempt to make a hellbrute look non-hideous, but while I was doing that, I also managed to finish the last of the three initial terminators I was working on.

Though I had assembled the five originally, only three of them got paint on them right away. I would have just used a single model to test and hash out the color scheme, but I didn't want to wreck a single model too badly under a million coats of paint. Plus, I also wanted to have a model with all three of the main weapon types I'd be using on the terminators. There was the fist and mace already - this one was the guy holding the axe.

In the last of these introduction termies, I came to the final conclusion to the final problem of the way I was going to paint these. Namely, that glowey power weapons only look good on power swords. On everything else, they look stunted and silly, and you can't quite tell what's going on. This verdict put the final nail in the coffin of "make the models look cool" and instead leave them squarely in the "make the models look realistic" scheme.

In any case, this went together pretty quickly (well, few hours of actual work over several weeks), otherwise, especially as most of the haranguing was done.

I suppose I should actually make a note now about how I do the brass, it being central to the theme.

I had spent a great deal of time looking at metallic themes, from the old orangey-gold of the St. Celestine model in the 5th ed rulebook, to the kind of gold with silver highlights of the current codex. I thought about what kind of paints to buy and how I wanted to do it when I remembered something that I had read a long time ago on dakka in a thread where people were asking what the best way to paint gold was.

With only the tiniest bit of experimentation, it all came together quite smoothly. The old-school way of painting brass that I've figured out goes something like...

1.) basecoat warplock bronze (tin bitz)

2.) paint over most of the model with a half and half of this and leadbelcher (in my case, it's actually a mix with boltgun, as I still have a lot of that left), leaving the recesses bronze.

3.) generously highlight the model with leadbelcher.

4.) carefully highlight with runefang steel.

5.) generously wash with agrax earthshade.

What this gets you is a nice burnished steel color with the wash forming a nice gradiant between the bronze and half bronze, half-boltgun.

And then, here's the clever trick.

6.) wash twice with seraphim sepia.

In this case, you're dying the grey-colored metal yellow. If you do this once, you get a very light brass color, that still looks a bit too steel-colored. Three times (like on this model) gets you a color that's a bit too gold. Twice is the magic number of washes to get the perfect brass or light bronze.

7.) highlight with Auric Armor (light gold).

It's a heavy highlight, encompassing most of the places where you put the boltgun down originally. The point is to get a gold color that releases into the yellow color of the sepia wash. Don't go too heavy, though, or it will become a gold-colored model.

8.) highlight with a mix of Auric Armor and Runefang steel, 1:1.

Sparingly.

Then, in my case, between steps 7 and 8, (and a bit after 8), I'll dab on my black color for weathering.

Anyways, this is the result:



Take that, blood angels! Picking on guardsmen is easy, let's see you handle some terminators.



I didn't think so.

Anyways, with this long and tortuous episode over, the remaining two terminators should come along shortly.

With everything finally set up, I could start working on these terminators a bit more quickly. Of my original five, I only have the two left.

This one I put together as a dude with a chainfist, in part because I like the model, but also in part because it's one of those neat little things that CSM termies can get, so I thought I should take advantage of that.

This model would actually have a bit more conversion work done than usual. Firstly, I wanted him to have a multimelta, but had already used the bit on the previous model. Looking carefully, it became obvious that they had used the exact same bit for the combi-flamer and combi-melta, except with a few minor alterations. That meant that it was a few minor alterations back. I chopped off the fuel tank and "borrowed" an ammo box from the combi-bolter that had two ammo boxes. I then made myself a new melta head out of GS and aluminum tubing, and I got rid of the annoying power bayonet. I didn't have anything to put in its place though, nothing that matched... except.. I went to my guard bitz box wherein were a dozen chainswords that had been hacked off to make power weapons for my power blobs. This gave the combi-weapon a chain-bayonet of appropriate size, except I kept most of the length, so it's sort of a stretch-chain-bayonet.

Also, the chainfist has that very curious little knob... thing sticking off of the bottom of the front. It looked like it was supposed to be the mounting for another hose, so I broke out some guitar wire, and added it in.

Of course, there was the usual fur and skull mask, and bit of truescaling. On top of that, my desire to actually fill those trophy racks would focus on DA with this model. I broke out a pendant that I had laying around, and used a GK terminator shield with the sword on it to go in that direction.

Then it was painting. All rather easy, actually. The only problem was that the model did break off its base a few times (you'll see why in a moment), which meant, after a few repositionings, the model isn't QUITE set properly on the base (it's a little too far to one side), but that's not exactly the greatest sin. Especially when you consider that the rest of the model looks like this:











... which is beautiful. It gets across everything that I could want, a baroque monster, a thick, slavering brass beast. A ten thousand year old warrior who exists to murder you with chainsaws. A class-act bad guy. Everything a chaos terminator should be.

I think I can say with little reservation that this is the new favorite model of all the ones I've put together.

And, just as a treat, here's a close-up of the DA stuff on the rack.



The shield converted over to DA from GK with nothing more than a bit of freehand. Out of respect for DA players, I made sure to rough it up to make it look like the chaos terminator didn't just walk up and take it without a fight.

Anyways, I hope you like this one as much as I do. Only one left for the set to be complete!

What a beast! DA bits really help set him off! Loving the pose on him.

These termies are great, and you've brought a ton of dynamism and action into what I've always considered a rather static kit. Awesome stuff.

Mmmm they're good. The last one is especially well posed and painted

I'm loving these termies. stop making me wana get chaos stuff.

Wow, can't believe I missed this blog, those 'zerkers and terminators are amazing. Good to know that some space marines really can be taller than guardsmen

I'll have to keep an eye on this one, really neat stuff!

Very nice! really nice work with the termys