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I thought I'd start a blog here about my modeling adventures. I'm mostly into Gundam model kits but I build a lot of dioramas and I'm doing the odd miniature project in the future. I'm disabled, so my work pace isn't great, but hopefully you guys will enjoy the ride with this cripple.

Current projects
Narn

Finished projects

The mini bug has hit me and I'm working on a couple of projects at the moment so it's time to do some sharing. Sorry for the webcam quality, It's not worth setting up the photo booth for this update.

First up is some bases, I'm stripping my old Lilith E1 crew and I'm going to rebase them using textured plasticard and Vallejo's black lava basing paste. I really like the effect I got on another model, so I'm going to base them all this way. The "finished" bases look messy because I smeared some of the paste across them then rubbed most of it off, it breaks up the recesses so it doesn't look so much like plasticard uniform depth. I'm considering picking up a copy of Puppet wars to use for other models in Malifaux, I believe they are legal and think a puppet crew for Lady Justice would be nice since I don't like the Lady Justice models.



Next up is a Kings of war skeleton unit. Since reading an old WD focusing on the Vampire counts I've always wanted an undead army, so I picked up a box of Mantic's skeletons a few years back and never did much with them, now I'm going to put together a full army but add a bit of a spin to it. The idea is an insane necromancer who has ravaged multiple kingdoms is half insane when he creates the undead, so it's going to have one legged hopping undead, crawling skeletons and look like an 80's B movie horde of randomness as opposed to generic uniform skeletons. I'm waiting on some Wargames factory skeletons to arrive and will use a few EBob skeletons (that's the shiny metal one crawling at the front). That will break up the mantic skeleton's scale a bit since I don't like skeletons all being the same uniform size, people don't work that way.



The based Skeleton is the test model, it's using Olive green from Vallejo and Army painter tones to shade it. I think it's an overall good look and I'll paint the others similar.

The post above can be completely discarded because I've been drawn back into tabletopping and I'm going to blog my adventures here and on my youtube channel. So here's an E1 crew I did a little touching up on and based. The bases are using swamp turfs, clump foliage and some red flock to make it look like berries or flowers were growing on the bush, adding a little colour to an otherwise rather plain set of models.

Oooh, someone who paints Japanese giant robot things, that's interesting.

The random horde of undead sound funny, and Grandma Swamp and her friendly mascots look... eh... swampy I guess, the bases are nice, I'm awful at basing so I always look at other people's bases with envy.

Start of the Von Schill crew.

The trunk goes together awfully, I just couldn't make it work, so it's going to be painted up to look battle worn and dirty, making the most of a bad case here.

The flamethrower carrying dude just wouldn't connect right. I've seen a few people struggle with this and just used milliput to fill in the pipe gaps and change the details a little.

I didn't like Von Schill's skipping pose, so I changed it so he'll be walking up a step and taking a shot at someone. He looks like he's turning into a knife swing as oppose to dancing with the faeries. I didn't mind the Librarian's pose so much because she looks like she's knife fighting and I'm okay with that.












I'm not sure on what colours I want to paint these. I'm torn between 2 options here. Red tunics with a dark silver for the chest plates or a charcoal black with red chest plates. I think I will get out the airbrush to do the base coats and first highlight and go from there. I don't mind the tunics shading and the armour shading looking a bit different, but I'm also considering just airbrushing over a highlight and then using inks to colour each part. Any thoughts on this?

Painting with inks is funny, and it gives a really nice watercolor feel to the models, on the other hand I'm not sure it fits too well with the dark universe thing Malifaux has going on, but the results are cool.

I've almost finished the Von Schill crew but got distracted with making Youtube videos on experiments. But here is the first experiment I did.

Vallejo chipping medium to make a rusty Cankerwurm (a model I had laying around). It pulled up the paint under the Future, so it wasn't a very good test, I plan to grab some rattle can gloss varnish and try it again in the near future.












Painting wise I primed black, then painted over a bunch of reds, oranges and browns. Anything with the rusty tint was thinned and applied heavily all together so it wet blended together. Wasn't trying to do anything fancy as it's only a test. Then I gave it a coat of future and airbrushed over Radome Tan from Vallejo. Followed that up with a coat of Sick Green and Dark Earth from Vallejo, which gave it the perfect Death Guard colour scheme, it needs to be applied very lightly, but it gave the greening white effect perfectly.

I did a review of Fenris's resin 30mm lipped bases.

Caterpillar of doom looks awesome.

I'm working on a Somer crew right now, so here's the pictures and some talking bits under them.












I have some resin bases I'm going to use for the 30mm dudes, but Lenny doesn't have one, so I had to built a similar thing using cork and a couple of different grades of ballast and sand. Should work nicely. I added the chain to the post to make it look like he just broke it to rescue (the pig may disagree on this) the pig. Makes his base have a little story and livens up an other wise rather generic rubble and destroyed pavement base.

The first Skeeter is mounted on a smoky plastic rod. It comes from some 1/400 scale Gundam figures I picked up from Ebay a while ago to do a diorama. I have a few of them and this is the only way I'm going to be able to base the damn things. I'll probably cut it short. The second Skeeter is being reposed. The head is positioned to look forward and I just use some sprue to close the gap and will use milliput to extend the neck detail. Tail was trimmed at the connection point to make it sit differently and milliput filled the gap pretty nicely as an extra part of the tail. Both have had their antenna snapped. They're impossibly fragile to work with and have no flexibility at all. I'm fine with them being small but it's annoying to have parts so thin.

Bayou Gremlins are pretty standard. The fishing rod one was what inspired me to use the resin base, there is one with a sink on it, might grab some water effects and try to make it look like he's fishing in a broken sink. The smoking one fits nicely against one of the bases with a wall. Interesting (to me at leasT) they're mounted on my new painting handles. Found some old wood and cut it up into holdable sizes, sanded the edges down and drilled a hole in the middle to put the pin in. Should hold pretty well but may switch them to corks in the near future.

Somer got his teeth ruined. When you read Somer's back story it makes me think of him having very few teeth since he got them kicked in which gave him the name. So I removed a bunch of his teeth to make it fitting. I may paint him with bloody gums and a lip so it looks like he's just had them kicked in and thats why he's kind of shouting at someone. I don't know if it will fit the equipment time frame but it's better than Somer having a full mouth of teeth.

WIP Bayou Gremlin.





The camera is picking up the blue way more than it should, under normal light it's a black tinted blue not a neon blue.

It's been a while but I'm still painting.

Here's a WIP Narn from Warmachine.