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yep id have to agree with fatty that sounds like a good weekend coming up...id compliment the vespids paintjob but hes hiding

I'm gonna try my best. Actually the weather is still a bit warmer than normal, which normally would be bad for hunting but since I haven't seen a deer in 2 years it just means I'll be more comfortable while I sit in my tree stand! Last year I got sleeted on for 5 hours... not fun. Up side is I get to fire up my smoker and spend 6 hours lovingly babying 3 racks of ribs, to be rewarded by the grin on the face of my father-in-law who is one tough cookie when it comes to food. Any chance I have to make my wife's dad happy is one I'll take... just makes life easier.

Gitsplitta wrote: Any chance I have to make my wife's dad happy is one I'll take... just makes life easier.

Truer words have never been spoken

Thought you guys would get a laugh out of this... my first attempt at using my airbrush.

The object is a home-made drop pod that is very dear to me as it was made by a friend who wanted to do me a favor for introducing him to 40k. He was virtually pennyless (I wasn't much better) so he found some plastic cups at a $1 store and some balsa wood... and shazam! Instant drop pod. Door is even hinged at bottom and works perfectly. Best of a a dreadnought fits perfectly on the inside *with* the doors closed. So NO JOKES!

However you can laugh all you want at my painting attempt. I practiced my spraying on a sheet of paper for a bit but got bored after a few minutes and decided to attack the model. It went OK... it was certainly very easy to handle. The door was supposed to be shaded black to white but I'd grabbed "black metallic" instead of black, so you see the results. The actual blending is harder than I thought. It's very easy to get thinner patches in the blend and a thicker pass farther along, totally screwing up the blending effect.... and the brush sputters/cuts out a bit from time to time which doesn't help matters. I don't know if it's a brush issue, a pressure issue (though I was running it within specs) or the fact that I didn't want to waste paint so there wasn't much in the reservoir. Alternately I just might not be giving the brush enough "gas" (i.e. opening the paint valve far enough) but then with subtle shading I don't want to be dumping paint on the model whole-sale. Still have to sort this out.

In any case... for a first attempt I'd have to say it went fine. I need a lot of practice, need to watch some vids and do the excercises that came with the brush... but I'm confident I'll at least get the basics down eventually. The pod isn't really supposed to be blue... I just needed a contrasting color to show off the gradient on the door. Now that I have the brush up-and-working I'll have to go get a lot more paint!



Brush was a snap to handle and clean up with Windex and water, which is good! I'd purchased a little Iwata cleaning station which basically looks like a small tea pot, but it has a brush rest, a hole to do your cleaning sprays into and a filter over the exhaust port to remove most of the odor. It worked like a charm, well worth the $25 or so that I spent on it.

One caveat is that I suspect you really fly through the paint using this technique.

yes, yes you do. About half a pot for a single color for vehicles.

wooooow, 60 pages full of goodness...
is that a record or something?? =P

gendoikari87 wrote:yes, yes you do. About half a pot for a single color for vehicles.

Big thing with Airbrushing is THINNING the paint. You get good coverage, with less volume. GWs foundation paints especially should be amenable to very significant thinning, with their over-pigmentation. Prob at least 1:1 with water-paint mix. If airbrishing, you might even want to use rubbing alcohol. Tamiya paints are very amenable to RA thinning. They also dry uber quick. Make sure you thin in a seperate container if using GW paints and rubbing alcohol as it can cause an odd reaction, or it did with the old GW paints from about 6-7 year ago.

Yeah, you should be using a LOT less paint with an airbrush to do the same thing. I think that Les guy said he can basecoat a marine with 3 drops of paint.

Use Windex instead of alcohol.

Well i can say im always enjoying the progress here, and reading the blos has been keeping me entertained during my tour overseas. To be completely honest, every time i see some of the new pictures i cant wait to get my hands on some Marines to work with while I am here.

I think LBursley has a tutorial for all his airbrush paints on his site, but I am not so sure as i have not been on his site since I left the states, since it is usually blocked.

Thanks guys, I appreciate the suggestions.

I'm currently using Vallejo Air paints, which are supposed to be good right out of the bottle, though I have been adding a few drops of Liquitex airbrush medium to each to thin them out just a bit. The amount of paint I've been adding to the cup at any one time has been very small... probably no more than 8-10 drops. I think it's more my unfamiliarly with the technology and technique that's making me inefficient rather than a problem with the system itself.

I'll keep working on it, though right now I need to get back too those sternguard figures so I can get them into the "done" column. Couldn't help myself though... had to try out the new toy!

Glad you like the blog btempleO, drop by any time!

Even the Vallejo airbrush paints can be thinned down. A few drops of distilled water, and then a drop or two of the airbrush medium.

Thanks wolf, I'll give that a try next practice session.

It was probably sputtring cause there was not enough paint in the jar..

Tricky things airbrush's, took me a good though times to get right flow...
I got so fed up with stripping the paint of the test model i almost gave up, best thing is look around for tutorials like youtube..

Jim..

I am not going to lie though that is an excellent dreadnought drop pod. Some at my FLGS have told me that the idea was ridiculous, but continued to gripe and moan that the FW version costs so much.

Well, that was kind of primary motivator. Lee knew that I'd always wanted drop pods for my army and had all kinds of ideas on using them, but could never afford to buy them. So he looked at a pic of one and did his best to make me something similar. I've fielded them many times in games with friends since then and if anything people think they're pretty neat (which they are).

Unfortunately, a "major" like Adepticon has a higher standard of GWness so I've had to purchase some official pods, but these will still see duty as pods #4 & 5 in my larger, informal lists. Once I get my airbrushing sorted out I'll give them a good going over and see how nice I can make them look.

One of my buddies makes his killa kans out toilet paper tubes and pipe cleaners, or in another case he made a trukk that actually fell apart when it got a wreked result, and both of those were made out of cardboard, pipe cleaners and extra sprues. At the FLGS all the players like to see the "orky tech", and are even more amused when it actually "works".

well last year at the Fanetic (really the only big tournament around us except for the GT) there was this guy who made a push button on the top of his drop pod. when you pussed it the dors open very cool. the tournament this year is this sunday so i will be going too church (its located in an old church)

I'm going to modifying the doors on my pods to make the pod generally more playable, as well as making at look nicer. Guess I won't know how my proposed mods will work until I try them, but I have hopes that it will greatly improve one of the biggest issues I see with the model's playability on the tabletop.

Git, have you looked at any of the templates that are available for drop pods? Some of them, made with plasticard, or even strong cardboard look pretty damned GWish...

I hadn't wolf, but at the moment I already own 3 GW pods... that's enough for my immediate needs. Though I might look at the templates if I decide I want more.



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Progress on the sternguard and Kantor. About a shade-and-a-half to go and the yellow will be finished.

He suits the unit!

hello giitsplitta,
one thing i forgott but got reminded by your latest pics...
i just love your silenced bolters. the look is so cool!!
have i slipped the part where you revealed how you made them?

always great entertainment when reading your blog,

cheers, vik

Viktor von Domm wrote:hello giitsplitta,
one thing i forgott but got reminded by your latest pics...
i just love your silenced bolters. the look is so cool!!
have i slipped the part where you revealed how you made them?

Thanks vik... you know after what... 60 pages??? ... there's just so much there it's easy to miss.

You have two options, I've used both.

1) Get some marine sniper rifles from a bits merchant, cut off the gun barrels and scopes and move them to the bolt gun. (I think it looks best if you remove the barrel of the bolter first, though I haven't always done this.)

2) Get some... can't remember... 0.065" (?) brass or copper wire (just take a sniper rifle to the hobby store with you and compare them until you find the right size) and some brass or plastic tubing that just fits over it. A $4.00 investment will net you all the rifle barrels and scopes you can stand. The scope mount is tricky. I've tried making it out of green stuff (the side-mount scope is done this way) but I think it would be easier to do it out of a little chunk of sprue with a hole drilled through it for the wire, then put the tubing "sleeves" front and back over that. If I get the system down-pat I'll do a little tutorial for them.

that would be cool, incidently after my post i surfed ebay and i got an saved seller who sells this item^^ and i saved that item weeks before... i would sometimes loos my head if it wasn´t atteched firmly^^...

thanks, and a tut is always nice, specially something from you...)greses the wheel shamlessly^^)

vik

LOL Vik... I was where you are now 6 months ago. Next June you'll be the "old man" with all the neat ideas & people will be asking you for advice!

Right now I'm using brass tubing as the sleeve, it works fine but is thinner in the wall than the suppressors on the GW sniper rifle models. With the next batch of sternguard I'll be looking for a plastic sleeve that is closer to the original model in wall thickness. Once I get that sorted and get a better system for making the mount, I get a tutorial written up.

For gunbarrels with suppressors:

Why not buy some single strand cable a few mm thick that has a plastic outer sheath and then drill out the hole in the bolter like you would for pinning.
strip back a small amount of sheath then cut the length you want and fit it to the gun.

For more fun you could even try to pull the outer sheath forward so you have hole in the suppressor.

Just a thought.... the hard part would be keeping the cable straight.

Very clever dantay, might be worth a shot.

I just cut a small length of styrene tubing and replace the barrels on mine. I dont think it looks too bad.

Note: The targeter cable is a bit off a CSM backpack. WIP Bolter:

Looks kinda like a silenced uzi

Really liking that marine you converted now its getting paint git! keep it up!