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Thanks for the comments guys, I've got a pretty good feel for when I 'm happy with a model, and I can anticipate when it will be well recieved (I hope), but it's always quite reassuring to get the comments and feedback.

I put in a bits order today and ordered a couple unit boxes, when thet stuff gets here I'll be doing some Tusken Raider snipers. Jawa snipers had crossed my mind but the Jawas looked funny (in a bad way) with oversized rifles, heck even a standard bolter looks like a squad heavy wepaon on them because they are so tiny. That's why I had to do the cutom melta as the normal multimelta is bigger than the jawa carrying it. I need to have a heavy bolter in the servitor squad but I think it'll have to be a tripod weapon as it's way too big for a jawa.

I started putting together the stormlord tracks today, when those are done I'll have a frame of reference to figure out how the sandcrawler body should go together. I also ordered parts to experiment with making dark troopers which will stand in as terminators. I was going to do imperial scout troopers as snipers originally but I decided to adopt a Tattoonie feels for the army and while I love the scout troop design it seemed a bit odd for the desert. I'll still have scouts but they'll be on the bikes and won't have the sniper cloaks I'd planned on originally. The Tusken's will fit perfectly as snipers as that's what they are known for in the star wars universe. Also by going with the Tattonie theme it'll lets me make a couple stormtrooper squads in the desert gear and maybe even with dewbacks, and gives me a great color palette on the bases to contrast nicely with the stark white of the stromtrooper armor, as well as an opportunity to mess around with weathering.

Very cool work, I honestly started reading this blog expecting some horrific Internets-style mishmash of 40k & Star Wars. Instead, I find quality work and some really cool stuff

Really digging those jawas, wanted to make some myself for some time. A jawa + tusken army would be fun times

- Salvage

I picked up a set of empire wizards to experiment with and see if it'd work for sandpeople/tuskens. I was looking over the parts this morning and I realized that they'd be a perfect fit for the Emperor, not sure why I didn't make that connection before, doh! I like the power armor version but it's not all that accurate of a portrayal of the presence he projects in the movies, so I figured I'd give him another shot and do a more fitting miniature. I did some scraping and refitting of pieces so that the ams were opened outwards a bit more and scraped off the wizardy details on the cloak.

He's still going to need a bunch of greenstuff work as there's some pretty large gaps, but the rough-in works quite well IMO. I think I need to add a bolt pistol to his waist or maybe a lightsaber hilt. Alternately I could replace the right hand with a hand holding a lightsaber/powersword, I'm going to think it over a bit. I'd really like to give him some force lightning but no idea how to go about modeling it, I may just try doing directional lighting with a glowing hand.

This fits the idea of palpatine much better, When I first saw the original I thought that it didn't work very well with the large cloak, the flowing of the robes on this version is a much more accurate representation of the movie version.

The new Emperor is much much more in line with the feel of the character in the movies, awesome job!

I sat down to resume work on the sandcrawler but a part in the box grabbed my attention and I ended up with a new model. He's still in the rough and needs more work but I liking R-2 so far.

He's on a 40mm terminator base so he's definately much larger than he is in the movie, but oh well not everything scales perfectly. The overall image is more important.



Two models in one day, I'm on creative overload

Haha, love him. I like the new Emperor better though.

Pure win in a slightly larger than normal cylindrical robotic format.

WOW Love the models

That new Emperor is incredible.

Much more realistic Emperor, your work is awesome!

That's a really sweet new Palpatine.

(I wasn't a big fan of the old one, honestly.)

I didn't manage to get all that much done over the weekend, spent most of my time on R2 and gap filling in the emperor, unfortunately I left the box they were in at work so I don't have updated pics at the moment. I'll have to make sure I remember to bring them home next weekend. I also started on the legs for the bike scouts and have them reposed, but they are in the same box :(

Here's the pics of the stuff I do have onhand and made some minor progress on

Bikes


I would have the 4th bike together but apparently I'm out off the correct bits, I'll need to get ahold of another ammo boxes from a predator for the upper veins. The lower veins attach to the upper ones so I can't put them on til I locate a ammo box.

Here's a shot of the jawa group awaiting greenstuff for their torsos:




I also took a basic step by step line up of how I do the torse for those that are interested.


First step is to cut the plague monk at the waist. I use a jewelry saw for this as it makes a much finer cut than a razor saw and is easier to control. Once he's in half I remove a small amount of plastic from the upper edge of the belt area and remove some of the plastic on the underside of the torso's rear that way they have flat edges where they meet up. The pic on the left shows a differant reference angle on how the torso is reposistioned.

Using a pin vise I sink a pin in the legs and upper torso about where the models spine would be that way it has extra support before I glue them together. Once the torso pieces are together I scrape down the shoulder area so that the hood will fit. You have to remove the entire back collar of the robe and part of the surrounding sholders. Once that's done and you have a nice flat surface you can attach the hood.

Then fill the torso gap with greenstuff. Once it hardened up I go in and trim down the collar on the robe to acomidate the various ammo pouches and belts.

The Dark Angels hood has the face removed with a dremmel tool, I use the bit that looks like a little ball with vertical ridges on it. This new batch of jawas has a couple of the heads made from the helmeted and yelling robed heads for variety as the neckline differs a bit on each version. It's pretty much impossible to remove the face with a hobby knife so it needs a dremmeled out, or a lot of repeat drilling with a pin vise. It takes maybe 2 minutes with the dremmel tops, just be super careful not to slip and stab it into your finger.

Ahhh these are just soo good , I... I think im in love,. ahem with your models

Looking great, wack some paint on and they'll be even better !

Wacky stuff man, just wacky.

Good stuff though.

I like it a lot especially the Fetts those guys look awesome well played

UUUUUTTTTTTIIIIIINNNNNNIIIIIIII

those are so cool

fluff wise you should make a whole squad of mandalorians, use em as sternguard. OH! wookies with giant blades as vanguard! OR GIANT WOOKIES FOR DREADS! or Yoda and Wookies for honor guard... or with Palpatine with wookie slaves

Basically what I am saying is that you need wookies to really have any chance of winning with this army... hehe

YES!!!

This is the cooloest thing ever ( well this and the stargate army) the first sith lord looks better and more ominour i think and your chicken walkers look so bad ass, im not a huge fan of star wars but this makes me wanna go watch the movies all over again. ooo i forgot the bounty hunters look sweet as well with the plasma pistols

It's great. But......you do realise that your Palpatine has two hoods....?

He needs two hoods- Palpatine is that evil.

I really don't think I've ever seen any army done this creatively. You should win an award or something.

jabbakahut wrote:I really don't think I've ever seen any army done this creatively. You should win an award or something.

Like what, a Morley? I'll have to look back over the thread...

So when are we going to see a rancor? I'm sure theres a Starwar action figure that can be used, put on a platform, spray painted, and based. Have a few guards men with massive cattle prods behind it.

Love the art work btw.

At the moment no plans for a rancor, as much as I love the big guy he's not part of the all imperial line up. A jaba's palace themed list might be a good option for down the road as dark eldar stuff just screams sand skiff, and it'd be incredibly cool to make a game table that has a sarlac pit in the middle

I think a Jabba list would be an orc list as they'd be the natural stand in for gamorrean guards, toss in the bounty hunters and a rancor as a giant squigoth and it'd be too sweet.


Anways on to the weekly update!

This weekend I quit at my work, my boss wants to play political games with the employees backstabbing each other and being that it's only a part time job I decided it wasn't worth it and walked out. It definately opens up more time for working on the army, but as my weekend job was the source of my gaming budget it may slow things down a bit, fortunately I have most everything I need already. The downside is that my modeling will now have to compete with the PS3 and Xbox for free time now that I'm home on the wekeends.

My casting supplies arrived last week so I puit them to use and cast some stormtrooper heads. I bought a good number of darktroopers but the paint is virtually impossible to remove and the molding on the minis is pretty lax so the majority of them have terrible mold lines or details filled in with gobs of paint. Given how much effort and money I've already sunk into the army I decided I'd cast several of the good heads because I really don't want a bunch of crappy looking stormtrooper heads floating about in the units.

I went through about 40 differant darktroopers and picked out the 5 cleanest looking heads with minimal lines and the smoothest paint. Then I anchored them to a couple pieces of scrap sprue pieces and went to work on making the mold. The housing for the mold I made out of lego blocks with a piece of tin foil taped in place across the bottom. The rubber takes 6-8 hours to cure all the way and requires two seperate pours, one for each half the mold.

I made a couple errors with the mold but ortunately nothing that would affect the casting. First error was I used sticky-tac to hold the heads the sprue, which worked great except when it came time to remove them from the mold, I had to spend the betterpart of an hour scraping the sticky-tac out of the rubber.

The second mistake is that I didn't let the rubber-to-rubber mold release dry long enough before I did the second pour, which resulted in one end of the mold sticking to the first layer, fortunately I was able to get them seperated with a hobby knife, and managed not to ruin the entire mold. Part of the mold is very jagged due to tearing and being cut, but it's not in a detail area.

Here's the cast heads, they came out a bit too soon and were a bit sticky, but the detail level is really solid and there's no bubbling or noticable defects. The resin has about a 2-3 minute working life and around an hour for full cure. It was hard to see the details as the resin is a pure shiny white so I gave it a very quick ink wash to bring out the detial.




I also got some more work in on the jawa pack, greenstuffed the torsos and cut the feet down. The greenstuff work I left a bit rough as it'll all be covered by belts and pouches so it won't be visable, any areas that show I can smooth down later.

What models did you use to build the jawa's ??

This rocks so hard. I really want to build a desert table with a sarlacc now!!

I cast 8 sets of heads today, for a total of 40. I still need to cast another 70-80 heads so I can cover the rest of the stormtroopers and dark troopers.

I have 30 regular tactical marines, and 3 boxes of devastators. I also have 50 black reach marines that I can use to help bulk out to a full company.

Using the newly cast heads here's the first squad of the black reach marines ready for priming. They take a bit of trimming to fit inside the armored collar. The black reach guys are pretty static in pose but it makes for a very cheap option for getting lots of troops together quickly. These guys I'll give a fairly quick paint job as the detail level isn't as good as the regular tactcial squads who I can focus more attention on.



Overall the casting has gone well, I've had two bad batches occur one the mold slipped a bit so the heads came out lopsided. I also ruined a batch by placing the mould under a lamp while it was curing, this caused the resin to bubble like crazy and flow out of the mould, and leaving the cast parts to look like swiss cheese.

I should have another 2 squads of black reach marines ready for priming tomorrow, and I'll finally be priming heads for the 10 man squad of regular marines I have already together & painted.

I also need to get the devistator squads going, and start work on the terminator squads that I'll be using for darkrtoopers.

Ugh so much to do, but I'm quite happy with the progress I'm making.

Nice, the dark trooper casts should considerably ease the process (i hope). You've really done a beautiful execution on this whole project.

Darkwulf wrote:What models did you use to build the jawa's ??

You can't be serious.

He explains how to build the Jawas on this page.

Awesome Love the helmets