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Hi everyone, for those that don't know me I'm Mangozac and since I've found myself reading a lot more stuff on Dakka these days I figured I might as well begin posting my projects here too

You may be familiar with some of my previous work, such as mastering the Chapterhouse Super Heavy Walker (pics of my painted model here) or my various Battlefleet Gothic style scratchbuilds. Well as is obvious by the post title I have myself a Warhound Titan that I'm currently painting up. I bought it in the first half of 2012 and while I did a bit of cleanup work on it over the rest of the year, over Christmas I felt inspired to get the project going full swing. The very positive response I got to the painting of my Superheavy Assault Walker also gave me the confidence I need to feel that I can do a decent job of painting the Warhound, which is also an epic task.

Between Christmas and now I got sidetracked with some other projects, including The Fiddler Mech, but the Warhound is now my number one project.

Cleanup and assembly has been a big job. All of the joints have been pinned and I'm using Zap A Gap 5 minute epoxy for any important joins. I decided early on that I wouldn't bother with the interior for 3 reasons:
1. It's intended to be a static display model in a case so nobody will be looking inside
2. Getting the body to assemble properly so that the internal parts all line up nicely is a pain
3. Painting the interiors would add a lot of time to painting

I will however probably paint the cockpit and crew in red shades to simulate battle lights, since they can be seen through the eye ports.

One thing I did want to do was something interesting for the grille that covers the cooling systems on the top of the carapace armour. I played around in Inkscape and came up with what I felt was a suitably 40k style design. 10 minutes with my CNC router and some really thin styrene sheet produced this:



It was on the right path but the skull cutout just wasn't right. After some more playing around I worked out the perfect design:


All of the pre-painting assembly done:


I'm building an intricate diorama base for the Warhound, inspired by the building modelling work featured on a Eye of Error blog post (seriously that is one of the best Imperial building ruins I've seen anywhere). So I'll have the Warhound marching around the corner of a city block. I've picked up one of the one of the Pegasus Hobbies Gothic building sets as the main building and I'll be adding suitable details from CoD kits (and stuff I machine up on my router).

The base is made from a sheet of 8mm perspex. It's far more rigid than I had initially thought and guaranteed to never warp!



I decided that the roads of the GrimDark future will still be asphalt, and hence would get pretty torn up by things like Titans traipsing over them. I remembered a cool technique I had read about some time back that a guy used on a 1/35 modern military diorama (link)
1. Place a thin layer of foam that is fairly compressible. I'm thinking about 5mm thick. Florist's foam seems to be most appropriate.
2. Apply a thin coat of the asphalt mix on top and smooth it out.
3. Wait for the asphalt to cure (24 hours?)
4. Make depressions in the asphalt using the Titan itself for the footprints and by hand for potholes and the like.

I did an experiment to confirm it was going to give me the effect I wanted:


Fast forward quite a few weeks with a lack of WIP pictures. Last weekend I did some major work on the base, including the sidewalks and building slabs. Nothing simulates concrete better than plaster, so I'm using Hydrocal tinted grey with a little black acrylic. All of the plaster work is done and just waiting to be smoothed using a scraper and sandpaper. Once that's done I can then scribe lines for the joins and cracks. I'm using the same technique I used on my Fiddler base, which I was very pleased with.



Two things I felt were necessary for the road and guttering were a stormwater drain and a sewer manhole cover. More Inkscape and CNC work have facilitated some pieces I'm really pleased with, although I forgot to take a pic of the man hole cover. The drain grate looks fantastic though:


I've also been making progress painting the titan itself (airbrushing it in Warp Runners colours - blue with a yellow head), but don't have any pics to show. Hopefully this weekend I'll get a chance to smooth out the plaster work on the base and then do the asphalt. And maybe even do some more airbrushing...

Stay tuned!

Looks really good. Can't wait to see how this turns out.

Wow! That tau walker is pretty incredible. I am really excited to see how this warhound turns out. Great work!

Thanks guys!

OK I've got a Sunday night update!

I cleaned up all of the plaster work (scraping and sanding), scribed all of the details and then laid the asphalt. The asphalt is a mix of plaster, fine sand, PVA and black acrylic (I just used cheap discount store acrylic and ran out of it near the end). It's actually really difficult to smooth out properly and once it's dried properly I'll give it a bit of a smooth out

Here's how it has turned out (prior to smoothing the asphalt). Also, I've got a shot of my awesome looking manhole cover!



Painting the Warhound is coming along nicely. I got all of the blue done this afternoon (except the legs, which haven't been primed yet because I've been playing around with them sorting out the base and don't want to damage the paint in the process). I decided to have a go at doing a marbled effect on the blue armour plates by mixing a little white with the blue colour and spraying it on in wavy lines (with the airbrush set at a very low pressure), but it was a bit too light and contrasted too much. So I had to spray a thin coat of the base blue colour over the top to dull the marbling down a bit...



I masked off the metallics that had already been done so that they didn't get tinted blue from overspray:


Here's a shot showing the pre-shading on the head armour plating. I gave it a few coats of yellow tonight.


So all in all it's been a productive day! Next up I'll hit the base with some primer and then I can start work on placing the buildings. Next up on the painting front I'll start doing the brass banding on all of the parts.

Thanks for looking!

I hate painting banding. Not only is it slow and tedious, the brass metallic requires 2 coats for even coverage and the banding seems to go on forever!

I'm washing the brass with sepia ink to shade it and then need to give a final highlight coat of a brass/silver mix on the upper edges.

Here's a progress shot. You can see that the torso armour piece only has one coat of brass at this stage.



One thing I noticed is that the gloss clear coat has muted my marble effect massively :(
I suspect that if I gave it a matte clear coat it might come back a bit, but I think I'd prefer to keep the gloss so I might just end up doing another application of the marbled lines over the top.