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Hello, and welcome to my foray into the world of Corvus Belli's Infinity game. This plog will primarily focus on my efforts to put together a force of Haqqislam, but I imagine some other models will sneak in from time to time.

Today's entry, and our start, is the model I was hoping to enter into the painting challenge, but I didn't have the necessary time to finish her after real life got in the way, so I decided to withdraw from the running so I could work at her at a non-rushed pace. She is currently half painted, but the photos wouldn't look very good like that, so here's some pictures from before undercoating instead:



She's a Tuareg sniper, converted from the Al Hawwa sniper. I've done this mainly because while I'm not hugely fond of either of the stock Tuareg models, I do like both of the Al Hawwa models. As you can't have more than one Al Hawwa in a regular Haqqislam force, the Tuareg are pretty awesome in game (getting thermoptic camo) and I love converting, she seemed like a great opportunity to kill three birds with one stone.

I loosely based her on the Tuareg artwork from the rulebook - I did however make a change to her head-wear, as it didn't seem that appropriate for her to be wearing a tagelmust, which are only normally worn by men in (modern) Tuareg culture.

Most of the changes I've made from the stock model are probably fairly obvious - sculpted her a new head and right arm, redid the detail on the left arm and back, had to build her rifle a new suppressor from brass tube - along with the slightly less obvious of having put her on one of GW's slottabases. With her rifle extending forwards, it looked ill-balanced with the direct centre slot on a Corvus Belli base, so I used the off centred GW base instead.

Anyway, until next time...

Great work man, lovely sculpting work!

I might have to pull out at this stage too. I'm quickly running out of time!

I can understand now why you wouldn't want to rush the paint job on such a nice conversion

That is an impressive conversion and can't wait to see it painted.

Casey's Law wrote:Great work man, lovely sculpting work!

I might have to pull out at this stage too. I'm quickly running out of time!

Why, why must my mind always be in the gutter?

Wow that's an amazing bit of conversion work!

I can completely understand not wanting to rush it, I ended up making a ham-fisted attempt with mine which I will have to back to anyway and kind of wish I hadn't!

Wow, that's a really nice sculpt.

I'm not used to seeing very many custome sculpt jobs on Infinity stuff, and that looks outright awesome. I can't wait to see some paint on her.

Chemical Cutthroat wrote:I'm not used to seeing very many custom sculpt jobs on Infinity stuff

I imagine not. But it's my primary weapon of choice when converting, as it frees me from being restricted to what's in my bitz box or what I'm prepared to butcher for parts (which isn't usually that much).
In this case, I've not got an abundance of spare female heads - even less so those that might work on an Infinity model - so I made a new one.

Now I've seen the contest entries, I've a feeling that had I got her finished in time, she wouldn't have been hard to identity as my entry (at least to anyone who'd paid attention to what I said about my penchant for converting almost everything).

On another (rather unimportant) note, I've fixed the broken gallery link in the first post.

She's really nice, great work on the sculpting. I'm looking forward to seeing how your force expands

A minor update today, where I show you the current pile of "contains 5% lead, not recommended for children under 14 years of age" for my Haqqislam, and thus a list of what you're going to get to see as I progress:



I'm sure you can click through and work out what most of them are, but the four small bags might be less clear - these are the girl Naffatun, female Acontecimento regular, and the male and female rifle armed Métros, which arrived today from Shae-Konnit.

It's an eclectic collection, I know, but I just bought the prettiest models without huge thought about how they would fit into the game. But I'm sure I'll find something that can be worked somehow. (After all: "It's not your list, it's you're crap".)
I may have an over-abundance of Line Troops though, given given that the Métros, Acon. Regular and possibly the Hunzakut* are going to get converted to fit in with the Ghulam. I think that makes 9 Ghulam/Halqa and 2 Naffatun.
*While Hunzakuts are useful, they're only AVA 1 and I'm planning on sculpting a copy of the female Hunzakut from the box art.

As a last note, the Foxtrot ranger will be becoming a Najjarun, somewhat inspired by Firefly's Kaylee.

And for anyone who's counting, the 25 models currently WIP or in the to-do bin (and not yet counting those I'm eyeing up as later purchases) are 7 men to 18 women (accounting for the fact the Asawira will be converted), so it appears there might be some bias in my buying habits.
Mind you, it's not quite an all-girl force, although I had considered it. Still, I could probably field one when I'm done.

Looks like a fun mix of Haqqislam! There's a bunch of cool models there, and if you put the same sort of conversion effort into them as your Tuareg, that's going to be impressive.

Hell, just getting them assembled and painted will probably be impressive.

I look forward to it.

Well, this isn't Haqqislam (sorry about that, I will get on with it at some stage, but I'm still trying to decide how I want to fluff my force out and what conversions would be most appropriate), but it is Infinity related, so in it goes.

You may recall what seemed to be an off-hand comment about how I said I should do the Mirage-5 artwork in 54mm scale, mostly as a display piece. Well, now you get to watch it happen.

~~~~~

The basic armature.

Duroc's was the more problematic. Firstly because I don't have a set of "Dog Warrior" proportions to work to and had to make them up as I went. He then took a full length of brass rod to himself (most 54mm scale models only need half) and it snapped at the knee and had to be soldered to a spare off-cut.

In case you're wondering, I never add arms at this stage, as it would get in the way of sculpting the body, and they're easily pinned into place when required.

~~~~~

The first bulking stage.

I almost always use Green Stuff for sculpting, but bulking out Duroc, even using spare Green Stuff that was past shelf life, would be unpleasantly uneconomic. So I resorted to much cheaper (but considerably less pleasant to work with*) Milliput at this point.

*Fails to adhere to anything, to the point that Margot's ribcage has already fallen off and will have to be replaced.

I may have to cut and file a few bits when it dries, but from here on in, the rest of the work is going to be mostly Green Stuff.

Anyway, some progress:



The start of some muscle shaping for Duroc (which will get smoothed over later), and some more basic bulking for Margot (basically the parts that didn't stick in Milliput). Not sure where the scar across Duroc's left buttock came from (must have leant him on something), but I'll be fixing it next time around.
Also not happy with the curve of his back, despite having already cut away some of the milliput, so that's also to be fixed.

(I'll add he's not as front heavy as he looks. He actually keeps tipping the cork block over backwards, plus his feet will extend further forwards than they do now)

Believe it or not, what you see here has already gone through two inches of Green Stuff strip on Duroc - I had to leave some parts under-built because I didn't have any more GS at the desk.

With that in mind, have a scale reference:

Cool stuff. On the GW Sculpting Masterclass, they were coating the armature with a thin layer of GS before applying FIMO because otherwise the FIMO wouldn't stick - and GS sticks to everything

Arakasi wrote:Cool stuff. On the GW Sculpting Masterclass, they were coating the armature with a thin layer of GS before applying FIMO because otherwise the FIMO wouldn't stick - and GS sticks to everything

They were putting superglue onto the wire armature and letting that dry before applying the green stuff as the wire needed roughening up a bit to provide something for the green stuff to cling to.

Good memory! Somehow I forgot that.. Good thing I wasn't the only one there