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Hallo thar.

Given how much time I've been spending over here on Dakka compared to the previous location of this infrequently updated plog, I thought it would be best to make here my main focus, and yesterday's rearranging of my workspace seems like as good an excuse as any(A1 cutting mats are a lot bigger than you think they are ) to get started. I'm not very good at sticking to schedules, I have trouble keeping my attention on a project if I see something inspiring related to one of the others, or if I see something really shiny that gives me a new idea, and after years of fighting that tendency and getting frustrated and burnt out attempting to force myself through a whole army in one go, I've decided to just do whatever takes my fancy at any particular time, and let building armies or finishing whole projects just be an incidental outcome.

Aforementioned new workspace is designed to enable just that, in particular with Raaco organiser cabinets that let me have all my bits in wee categorised drawers, and larger ones which I can shove a half-finished project into without worrying about losing anything or forgetting about it in the bottom of a drawer somewhere, as you can see;



There's another of the cabinets with the small drawers off to the right with more bitz, and a side table with drawers full of unopened vehicle kits. I really should try and avoid buying anything new, but I caved and got Dark Vengeance

So, overly verbose intro out of the way(excessive verbosity will be a theme, there'll be a contents listing for people who want to skip to the pretty pictures ), what do we have in store? I decided to use an Imperial Crusade to reclaim the Hyanom Cluster as a fluff-wrapper for all the various forces I'll be working on, featuring at least three Space Marine Chapters(Space Wolves, Iron Hands, and Exorcists), two Guard regiments(Tallarn and a homebrew I'm still thinking up a name for), and various other small groups and dramatis personae from the usual suspects(AdMech, Imperial Navy, Ecclesiarchy, and Inquisition). A Chaos Warband will be making an appearance at some stage, led by a Daemon Prince who is the nemesis of my Exorcists, and I may even step outside my comfort zone and do some Xenos.

As a big fan of Apologist, Lamenter, Doghouse, migsula, and all the others out there doing great work on truescale/artscale/actual-scale Space Marines, I couldn't resist going in that direction myself, but the thought of individually converting and sculpting the couple of hundred Marines necessary to pull off three different armies made me blanch. So, I decided to sculpt my own legs and torsos and cast them up. This was my first attempt, seen here with a FW Titan Techpriest for scale, and my first attempt at embiggening a Dreadnought(since scrapped in favour of a new method I'm experimenting with);



But I'm not that happy with him, the feet are too wee and the torso armour obscures too much of the abdominal cabling, so I've gone back to the drawing board, and will be keeping the Terminator feet as a basis for my own modifications rather than snipping them off with the new batch, while still scratch-sculpting all the other details. I'm about 90% done on the first five legs, all in "advancing" poses, and about half done with the first five "firing" poses; it's my hope to eventually have moulds that will let me make "firing", "assaulting", and "advancing" sets for each mark of Power Armour, but for now I'm aiming to have a spread. Tomorrow I'll set my Poor Man's Lightbox up again, for WiP pictures of the Librarian(counts-as Sevrin Loth) and his Honour Guard who will be leading my Exorcists, all of which are based on various GW and FW Terminator character models.

For now, I'll leave you with a few shots of my WiP Iron Father Hyr Vaanex, who will counts-as Vaylund Cal, the Forgeworld Sons of Medusa character, until such time as GW stop treating the IH like the red-headed step-child of the Space Marines;







Having completed a very satisfying bitz trade with Ghostflame, I began work on this chap, using the Ork generator-thingy I got from him as part of the custom servo-harness. The model is only about a third complete, the "frame" is there, and I now have to go top-to-toe and do the detailing work; bionics, complete the torso, fully-integrate the servo-harness and finish the augur-array over his right shoulder and so forth. I'm thinking about building a "mechadenrite hive" into the left side of the abdomen, since on reflection he's a little "heavy" on his right side. Bear in mind, my normal artscale Marines will be a wee bit shorter than this chap, who's had extra spacers added to help reinforce his Monstrous Creature-like statline.

Anywho, I'll leave you now; questions, comments, and critique are always welcome.

Nice! The sculpting looks good! Great effort.

I like the Cal counts as too.

I had almost the exact same idea as you a while back, but doing TS Sons of Medusa instead, theyre on hold for a little while, but you can see where i got to (basically only did Vaylund Cal) here:

http://www.dakkadakka.com/dakkaforum/posts/list/480/342824.page#4225562

Haha aw awesome mate, the ork part fits really nice, great work!

R

Awesome conversions! It's inspiring me to start my Iron Hands

Great stuff,loving the true scale models too.

Ooo cool start, looking foward to seeing more models from you!

Thanks chaps

A quick update today, first on the Iron Hands front, I saw this brilliant drawing by Iron Hands Fanatic over on B&C, and I remembered I had leftover Culln bitz. Some rummaging and chopping later, I had the beginnings of Clave Anraak, my Veteran squad;



I'd already started work on a set of MK4 legs which were intended for complete resculpting and casting as part of my generic artscale project, but they serve this end just as well. I also managed to get the basic shapes of the bionic eye for the head worked out; the Space Wolf Terminator heads are quite respectable once you scrape off the daft haircuts He's going to get two fully-bionic arms(the vets have to be really heavy on the bionics to take advantage of Vaylund Cal's special rule, since I'll be using a dev squad with his FnP bonus to represent them in my list), and will be posed firing his bolter one-handed, with his right arm reaching down to his belt for a grenade.

While I had my Poor Man's Lightbox set up(three sheets of white plasticard blu-tac'd together and my daylight desk lamp ), I got some pics of where I stand with my Exorcists. First up is my Librarian, who'll be a counts-as Sevrin Loth(what? I like FW characters, heh), and is based on the Lord Hector Rex model;





Despite having rebuilt his leg armour three times, I'm still finding it a pain to get smooth without making it too thick, so I think I'll experiment with some sandpaper and finishing abrasives before I try tearing off the putty and trying again. I'm planning on his "casting" hand being wreathed in warpfire once the armour is complete.

Loth also has the option of taking an Honour Guard unit, and GW and FW Terminator characters make excellent Artifice variants of normal PA in artscale. First, the GW Terminator Chaplain has become the Chapter Champion in Artifice MK3 "Iron" armour; the head is a placeholder, and when I finish the arms he'll be armed with a Thunder Hammer. Again, there's still smoothing work to be done on the armour, particularly the back of the legs;





He's not actually leaning as far as the picture implies, heh. I've also started work on the others, using the legs of Commander Culln, Lugft Huron, and a Space Wolf Terminator to make Artifice MK4, MK7, and another MK7 respectively, but these chaps aren't very far along yet.



I'm going to aim to work on the basic artscale legs now, before I let myself go back to the character models and elite units, since I want to make a start on producing some basic Marines.

TTFN.

Wow loving the sculpting! Really really nice job of true scaling right there.

wow, some amazing work here!

Just a quick wee update for now, grabbed a shot of the first squad's worth of artscale legs(and the MK4 ones for the Iron Hand Vet are lurking in the back as well), five advancing and five firing. Once I'm done there won't be any original detail left beyond a wee bit of the feet, at which point I'm going to attempt to cast them up in resin; if that works out, I'll crack out a couple of squad's worth and try to put together a small playable force, and I can work on additional Marks of armour in differing poses as a side project to add more variety.



I decided to vary my method a bit with the latest ones and build the thighs in two stages(hence why some look a bit weedy even with putty on), and I think I prefer that, it's much easier to get the edges right when I'm not worrying about deforming the whole thigh if I push too hard. This image actually works quite well to illustrate how I get extra "height" out of the termie legs without having to chop them apart to insert spacers(saving the one stuck to the base of the foot ofc); if you remove the belt, enlarge the thigh, and resculpt the joint ribbing to be slightly higher up, it gives the illusion of additional height.

EDIT: Oh, and if anyone reading this is thinking of doing truescale/artscale Marines based on termie legs, do yourself a favour and don't use the set from the SW Wolf Guard box with the left kneepad shaped into a skull, they are a colossal pain in the backside to detail the greaves since they nearly touch in the middle.

Looking great! I like what you are doing with the termie legs, especially the FW ones.

I take it you have seen the Chapterhouse TS kits? They could make your life a whole lot easier! http://chapterhousestudios.com/index.php?route=product/category&path=128

Oh I also like the studs you put on the dreadnoughts shoulder, not seen that done before but I am loving it!

These are looking great! Looking forward to seeing a small force of these

Thanks chaps

Cain: I have seen the Chapterhouse kits aye, personally I don't like them that much, but I couldn't use them regardless - I only get to game occasionally, but when I do it's at a GW store. Stuff I've made myself I can get away with, but third-party commercial products are a definite no-no.

Ahoy hoy.

Just a quick update today, I've mainly been working on a paper this past week, but today I got a lovely wee package in the mail and I had to try it out at once.



On the left, a kneepad made with Green Stuff - total time in terms of actual minutes sculpting to make that was perhaps five or six, to make it a smooth as I could, however that's spread out over an almost two-hour working time, going back every ten or fifteen minutes and doing a wee tiny bit more work on it each time.

On the right, a kneepad made with the ProCreate I got in the post today(if you're in the UK and need putty, I heartily recommend Heresy Miniatures; I've not found cheaper, he has GS, BS, and PC in stock almost all the time, top store). It took literally less than a minute. This stuff is revelatory. I know this probably isn't news to a lot of you chaps, but I'm honestly surprised by just how huge a difference there is in working with this putty over green/brown stuff. It immediately goes where I want it to go, it doesn't distort when I trim excess from the edges, and just a couple of quick passes with my clay shaper is enough to make it smooth - one more quick polishing in twenty minutes or so and I can leave it to dry without any further interference.

Anyway, The Thick Of It is starting, I'll post again once I've made some actual progress

Wow! Having worked pretty extensively myself with gs and brownstuff, i know what you mean. That looks a lot smoother. I definitely need to pick some of that up when my loan comes through.

It's well worth it I think - it costs £1 more than a pack of Brown Stuff, but you get three times as much putty, and ostensibly you can do organic work with it or make it hard enough to cut and file just by varying the resin to hardener ratios(this I've not yet managed to test myself). If that's right, I can't see myself buying BS again, and I think my GS stock will be relegated to bulking jobs.

So, the work is coming along a lot quicker now I have ProCreate, a case of Red Bull in the fridge, and I've not got calculations floating in front of my eyes all day(there's only so much maths you can do before it starts to haunt you even when you're away from your desk ).

Almost all the thighs and greaves are done; five sets are at some point in the "arseplate and belt" stage, three are getting their second set of joint ribbing done, and a couple more are waiting for that stage once the putty dries. I'm a bit leery of the next stage in the process however, as there's not much point in trying to fix GW's ludicrous gorilla-men scale and pose, and ending up with HUEG legs with a stubby wee torso on top. These are the most complete pair, with torsos and heads temporarily mounted directly onto the legs;





Now, what do you chaps think - do they need some extra height there, or am I just fooling myself over the perspective because there's no belt yet? The issue being, I have to attach the torso before I can sculpt the belt into place.

Ugh, I hate how rough the putty looks when you blow it up to that size, I'm going to have to take the sandpaper to these before I can cast them up or the end result will look like arse.


EDIT: Oh aye, bear in mind the whole torso is going to be resculpted, so it'll end up much bulkier.