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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!