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That GW tool with the scalpel end and the mini, round spatula en is very versatile. Aside from that the silicone tip clay shapers are probably the next tools I would recommend. They smooth the GS so well.

I love your work! I really like the chaplain conversion and your devastator sergeant!!!

Inspiring work. Looking forward to more.

 SickSix wrote:
I love your work! I really like the chaplain conversion and your devastator sergeant!!!

Inspiring work. Looking forward to more.

Thanks! I think those two and my bike sergeant from the DV set are the best models I've completed for the company so far.


P.S. I'm working on a project to do an eagle marine head somewhat similar to what the spacewolves have with their wolf helmets. It's in the VERY VERY early stages right now, but here's where I want to go with it.



My drawing looks a bit more cartoon-y than I really want, but hopfully in the sculpt/build it will come out 'grimdark'.

Really good concept! I hope this turns out really well as it would make great heads for the stern and vanguards and maybe terminators and HQ. Can't wait to see a sculpt

Holy crap my last update was 20 days ago... sheesh.

Lots of doings to report.

1st! I had this grand scheme of converting my entire HQ command squad and getting it painted up by the end of May... oh and terminators and sternguard too. HA! yeah... so... that didn't happen.

What did happen you ask?
1. a scratch built Whirlwind (needs detailing and painting)
2. Captain conversion done! Primed! Whoops too much primer on the helmet wing... hmmm wonder if this dremel nylon bristle tool would take that off? Well, it sure does! Along with all of the details! So... fix that. Yeah. Awesome.
3. Get a ways on my custom eagle helmet project. Get lots more ideas. Got lots more work to do.

But anyway, here's the goods!

Whirlwind Scratchbuild - from paperhammer template, using a $2 'No Tresspassing' Sign from Walmart that's roughly .03



Lots and lots of detailing, filling, riveting, drilling, etc... to go!

And here's what happened with the captain:

He was all ready to go!


Then he got a bit too much primer on the left (his left) helmet wing... so I tried the bristle wheel with my dremel and ummm... all the detail went away! Sadly, it had to come off


And this is what a nylon bristle wheel will do to the dark grey GW plastics.


Whoops! Fill with GS, STAT!


Sculpt like mad...


Screw up a few things, try again, go go go, close? Nah, not really... press mold it is Pretty damn close now!


BUT, it's WAY too flexible. Is there anything I can brush on it to firm it up?


So, off and on I've been trying to work on the custom helmet sculpt/mold/cast.
Here's the original sculpt:


And here's what it looks like on one of the Assault Marines I'm attempting to recover from ebay


Some of the casts have been decent, but none have been perfect. But I have enough now that I can work on perfecting it and work on some variants like a sergeant, comms array, targeting matrix, etc... here's the thread where most of that is going on: http://www.dakkadakka.com/dakkaforum/posts/list/525031.page

Thanks for following my crazy ramblings! C&C welcome as always. Love to hear some outside thoughts.

That is a pretty good sculpt there mate Would look amazing for Honourguard and Vets.
Can't wait to see it put into production

Well, after much fiddling about and wasting time and not having much time and slowly working on it. I've got a pretty good 5 head sprue mold for the custom helmets I made. I've sent off a couple sprues to the guy who originally asked for someone to help him with his idea. And sent a few across the pond to the UK for a bystander who liked them and wanted some too!

It's not the most perfect sculpt and they aren't the most perfect casts, but I'm pretty proud of my first custom production work.

And here's what they look like painted up in Doom Eagles silver on an ebay recovery assault marine (I should have taken a pic of this guy before and after his putty surgery).






Maybe now I'll get the motivation to salvage the rest of that wreck of an assault squad from ebay.... or heck, maybe even finish painting my captain! HAH! That'll be the day.

Those helmets are legendary!! Suits them really well. Really good job

Slow and steady wins the race, right?

Building this squad of assault marines is turning into a heck of a project on it's own.

First off, and I think I've mentioned this before, they were assembled originally with plastic glue... and then primed with some kind of enamel based crap. I tried stripping these with Superclean, Simple Green AND LATA. I managed to get most of the detail back, but couldn't get them totally clean. And then came the attempts to disassemble in the hope of repositioning some of these guys. That ended in some completely--and I mean right down the middle--torn apart torsos, collar sections coming off with the heads, belt sections separated from torsos, and shoulderpads being completely melted into the arms thus non-detachable. Not to mention the guy that built these originally used so much glue in some places that it created half a mm thick coatings on parts of the legs and backs. I ended up having to re-assemble in basically the same positions the guy had originally done.

Since I was replacing all of the shoulderpads but couldn't get most of them off of the arms (didn't have enough spare assault arm sets), I had to use my jewelers saw to cut the shoulderpad interior out inside the rim. Then I'd trim down my custom pads to fit in there. I still need to fill some gaps where the fit wasn't perfect, but these should work out alright. I had to do a similar thing with my DV bikers. Unfortunately this also meant that to get the saw in without completely hosing the chainswords in some cases I had to lop off the chainsword hand at the wrist and then pin it back on once I had cut out the shoulderpad interior.

For the heads it was a complete mess even trying to get them off of the torsos and in 2 cases part of the collar behind the head had to be resculpted after part came off during the head removal... bleh.

Now, the sergeant is built from a metal Vanguard vet. I had to saw the his left shoulderpad out like I did with the others and that went fine. For the right shoulder he already had a really nice wing motif going on at the bottom of the shoulderpad, so I left that and sculpted the assault squad icon on with it. For the head I had to saw the existing head off at an angle and then used my dremel with some material removal bits (that honestly don't work well on white metal) to get enough material out so that I could get a custom helmet in there. Even with that done I still had to cut down the custom resin helmet from the top of the neck to above the back horizontal raised section. I left the ear things from the metal helmet on there and wedged the cut down custom helmet between them. Then sculpted in the back of the helmet I had cut away, and pressed green stuff under the helmet to fill the void. Then I sculpted in some hose details and such around the bottom front of the helmet. Last bit was to add a tiny skull to the forhead section to make his helmet stick out as a sergeant.

Here's a pic of him. You can see some of the details I had to add in to the helmet and the shoulderpad rim I had to redo.



I still need to clean up all of the jump packs for these guys.

Here's the group with the one I've already painted:


Here's some more shots of the other guys:





Lots of little details to fix/resculpt/sculpt here before I can prime these guys, but they're coming along.

Cheers!

Good to see your still at it Real shame the previous owner really messed these up but at least your making them look awesome and giving them a new lease of life
Can't wait to see more

I love the helms!
I'm definitely following this project now, Doom Eagles are on the short list of chapters that I want to paint up once my current Xenos kick is over. It is a great color scheme, but it may be too much silver after finishing my Necron army.

Keep up the great work.

Beastly helmet! really nice job with the green stuff.

I really love when hobbyists go all out for their armies and this is a great example of exactly that! Great sculpting work, great custom pieces, great casting, superb paintjobs. All around just an excellent army. Beautiful to look at. I'd love to find myself across the table from this.

Nashbashem wrote:Good to see your still at it Real shame the previous owner really messed these up but at least your making them look awesome and giving them a new lease of life
Can't wait to see more

Thanks Nash! The sad thing is I've also got a predator, razorback and a rhino that the same guy mutilated. But, hey, the whole bunch was cheap cheap... so it's forcing me to grow and hone my recovery skills.

Anpu-adom wrote:I love the helms!
I'm definitely following this project now, Doom Eagles are on the short list of chapters that I want to paint up once my current Xenos kick is over. It is a great color scheme, but it may be too much silver after finishing my Necron army.

Keep up the great work.

Awesome man! Years ago when I painted the first batch of 2nd ed. static pose marines, I did them with rather bright silver. But with the limited fluff they have, the Doom Eagles could go in a really dark direction-- grimdark, even. I haven't REALLY painted any 1st company stuff (vets or terms) and I've been contemplating going only up to boltgun metal with minimal highlights of chainmail and then just a couple line highlights of mithril silver. (Yeah, I gots old paint - no clue what the new stuff is called) Even in their current brightness, I go with black for the backpacks, bikes, dreads, and vehicles. I feel like it keeps the brightness in check to some degree.

Malganess wrote:Beastly helmet! really nice job with the green stuff.

Thanks a bunch Malganess. These helms were my first sketch to cast project. They turned out pretty nice... a little quirky with being able to position them, but I like them.

Warboss_Waaazag wrote:I really love when hobbyists go all out for their armies and this is a great example of exactly that! Great sculpting work, great custom pieces, great casting, superb paintjobs. All around just an excellent army. Beautiful to look at. I'd love to find myself across the table from this.

Wow! thanks for all of that. It's nice to see that people appreciate the whole project. I don't think I knew what I was getting myself into when I decided to "build a whole company plus addon detachments".


I'm going to be doing a lot of filing, filling and sculpting tonight. Hopefully I'll have these 9 ready for primer tomorrow or Monday.

Cheers!

Just want to put my two cents in and say that I'm totally impressed with your work. The helmets and shoulder pads in particular. Very inspirational!

MCRobot wrote:
Just want to put my two cents in and say that I'm totally impressed with your work. The helmets and shoulder pads in particular. Very inspirational!

Woohoo! Thanks man. Glad you like them.

I've finally decided that I can't stand doing any more filing or green stuffing on this squad. Dealing with all the rough areas, glue covered patches, broken/ripped sections... bleh, I'm just going to paint them up as best as I can and call it a squad.

In that vein...

Here comes the paint.

Basing...


Boltgun Metal... yep it's old.


Base coating the places that will be red or gold with Calthan Brown. I've used scorched brown before, but I wanted to try this because scorched actually is a bit too dark for the gold or red to go on significantly better than just painting them over black. We'll see how it goes.


Sorry for the darkness of the last image. I got this coffee table with a lid that is loaded with hinges/arms/springs and lets me pull the top up to desk height. So, I tried doing some painting on it tonight.

Anyway, they look like crap right now, but they always do when it's just base colors down.

Cheers guys! Hope you enjoy seeing the progress. I think I need to set up a good group shot after I finish these guys. What do you all think?

Hopefully your brilliant paint job can do them some justice
Looking forward to seeing them finished

 Nashbashem wrote:
Hopefully your brilliant paint job can do them some justice
Looking forward to seeing them finished

Keeping the bar high for me... thanks. Haha

I guess I can't slack off so here's some updated progress pics!

In this one I've laid down all the base colors and shaded heavily with black wash.


I wanted to show this shoulder detail because I don't think I ever did as I was building them. The wing motif was already a part of the vanguard shoulder, so I just added some green stuff for the assault icon.


I've gotten all of the main colors re-established post-black wash except for the gold. Hopefully I'll get the gold layer in and be able to start highlights today. I just realized that I still have to fix up 6 more jump packs for this squad. Yay.

Really great work on everything. Got some good ideas from this as well.

Keep up the good work, and consider me subed.

 deadmeat85 wrote:
Really great work on everything. Got some good ideas from this as well.

Keep up the good work, and consider me subed.

Thanks for the support! If you have any questions about anything in particular, ask away!


So... I only got about half of the gold re-established post-wash. The woman's 'quick trip into town' turned into 6 hours and then she needed my help on a website template, so I only got a solid 2 hours in yesterday. Once I finish the gold it's on to highlights and jump packs. Then I think it's time I did some vehicles. I need to figure out a design for Rhino body doors and hatches and details. I'm still planning on doing as many Rhino-backs as I can so that I've got lots of options. As it stands I have 2 land raiders, 2 razorbacks, 1 rhino, 1 predator, 1 baal predator, 1 vindicator and 1 scratch-built whirlwind all waiting for me to do something with them. Oh, and a drop pod. Right now I'm thinking that I'm going to do some of the vehicle details similar to the wing motifs I put on my land speeders:

Basically rolled out GS cut into the shape and glued on. Though, for the doors I think I'm going to scratch build them and sculpt all the detail, then make a mold and duplicate!

Slight equipment discussion:
I've started using my W&N 7 series brushes that I picked up from Blick.com a few months ago. One thing I'm noticing is that they hold a point VERY well... sometimes too well. When you're trying to use one brush stroke to cover a somewhat wide surface it's hard to get the brush to fan out to a decent width in confined spaces. I guess maybe this is reason for me to learn a new technique. With citadel and other brushes that don't hold a point that well I think I got used to using just the very tip of the bristles. On my 7 series the tips are so pointed that it's TINY and that makes it hard to do coverage in a lot of places. Oh well, enough complaining about good brushes... You guys ever used these and have any tips for me?

Do you recommend picking up a W&N? I have only been using the Citadel brushes, and can relate to the fanning out for coverage.

Oh and one more thing, you said you are doing a battle company. Are you going to build another tactical squad to meet the 6 squad organization?

 deadmeat85 wrote:
Do you recommend picking up a W&N? I have only been using the Citadel brushes, and can relate to the fanning out for coverage.

Oh and one more thing, you said you are doing a battle company. Are you going to build another tactical squad to meet the 6 squad organization?

I would say that if you find yourself buying a lot of brushes because the tip goes on whatever you're using, then the $12 or so for 1 W&N might be worth the investment. If you do buy one, buy a brush cleaning puck and clean the brush after each session. I recommend this one

For the company organization, I'm breaking with the standard battle company organization a bit even though Doom Eagles are an Ultramarines successor. So, since the Doom Eagles fluff is mostly about their jump troops, I decided to do 5 tactical, 3 assault, 2 devastator for a standard battle company. That means that even when I finish this current squad I still have one more to go... And then I'm probably doing 50-ish 1st company vets (20 terminator 30 power armor). I haven't decided what exactly I'm doing there, but I have a crap-load of models...probably more than I really need such that I might go back and replace the 2nd edition plastics I've already got painted.

That makes a lot of sense. Im doing somewhat the same thing for my HB Chapter. My ultimate goal is to build a whole chapter over the course of my hobby career. They are a mix of Iron Hands Clans with Imperial Fits thrown in.

I've thought about doing that... and quickly realized that I'd go crazy... I've already got a plan to do a 3-pronged IG force with Cadians, Valhallans and Armor... and Sisters... and GK... and my massive High Elf force to redo... and Skaven... and my World Eaters to fix up to current standards...

I think I'm already insane.

But anyway, on to progress!

I finished the re-establishing the first layer of gold and then finished the bright silver highlights, as you can see in the pic. I've also got the blood red layer done but I haven't taken a pic of that.


Next up: red, black, gold and green highlights... then some touch ups and I may even try OSL on my plasma coils and power sword for the first time ever.

Cheers guys!

Well, I finished the gold highlights on my sergeant today... and then decided to just finish him. So, here he is.

Very nice... very very nice.

Ugh! Site launch week... Almost 30 hours logged in the last two days. But I still got some work in before this craziness started. I finished detailing all of the marines and filled/filed all of the jump packs I still needed. I have all of those painted up to the level of just needing to be highlighted. I'll hopefully finish up the jump packs tomorrow morning and post some good pics.

Cheers guys, gonna grab some sleep.


Automatically Appended Next Post:
Well, that long-ass project is now done.

The goal: create a unqiue, highly customized assault squad using custom jump packs, helmets and shoulderpads.

The challenges:
- ebay recovery assault marines - they really were almost not worth trying to recover and it took WAY too long to get them even to the point that I did (which is very far from perfect or ideal).
- custom castings - I don't have the gear or skill or supplies required to create 'perfect' resin castings (if there is such a thing), so there was a lot of filling with green stuff and filing rough spots. And even some resculpting of details. But all in all, even the slightly rough finished product give a really nice flavorful feel.

The results:



So there you have it. Custom sculpted/molded/cast helmets on a whole squad of assault marines.

See! I told you your painting would do them justice Loving them

The helmets and backbacks make a great touch! I love the helmets, very well done, and incredibly unique!

Anpu-adom wrote:Very nice... very very nice.

Too kind by far, thank you!

Nashbashem wrote:See! I told you your painting would do them justice Loving them

I will tell you this, just the feel of painting the clean, previously un-screwed with sergeant model was so much nicer than working on those recovery models. Not feeling like you have to recreate the details with just your brush is oddly freeing. Oh no... I just remembered that I have a mess of terminators that were handled in the same ham-handed fashion... not going to be fun.

Master Azalle wrote:The helmets and backbacks make a great touch! I love the helmets, very well done, and incredibly unique!

Thanks man! I think they've done their job and given me a nice distinguishing design element.


Now on to other projects! Well, I should say 'back to other projects'.
I'm going to be building a mess of tanks in the near future. Pretty much all of them are recoveries in some way... some will require more work than others... but one thing I want to do is magnetize a lot of options on everything. I've been following Varl's Salamanders Blog and seeing how he magentizes as many options as possible has inspired me. I've already done similar on my Land Speeders and to some degree my attack bikes. But I'm thinking that everything I can make turn into a Rhino/Razorback, should be able to do so.... Just not sure where I'm going to find all the extra bits... I've bought up some bits bags and collected quite a bit over the years, so I might have enough stuff to make up the difference. To be clear, I'm pretty sure I've got everything I need to get Rhinos out of everything. I'm not sure about being able to get razorbacks out of everything.

BUT.... I'm waiting on delivery of my copy of the new SM codex before I get to building out anything else. So, in the meantime, it's time to put some work in on a model I shelved a few months ago.

The Captain's getting some paint.
Here's a refresher of where he was:

I'm not 100% sure the color placement choices are right on this guy. His details are so layered that in order to keep the details looking distinct and not just blending in, I'm doing things a bit differently than I might have otherwise. If it doesn't work out I've got 2 bare copies of him I grabbed from ebay.


As you can see, I went with a white robe, black tabard - picking out the wing motif with red like I did on the back of the chaplain, then red outer cloak and picking out red details like the robe edging wings on the helmet and shoulder and the gun casing. I'm not sure where to go with the Doom Eagle chapter badges I did on his forearms. He's not going to really have the standard chapter badge that most of my marines have on his left shoulder due to the sculpt on this guy. That kind of makes me feel like I need to do them in black with white skull. Another part of me thinks red wings white skull - but there's going to be so many red wings on this guy that it might get to the "overkill" level. So heck, maybe gold is the route to go on these. Anyone got thoughts?