A new pattern

While the poses of these Lord of the Rings 1st age Elves are very similar to one another, I attempted to get some variety in the freehand patterns.

I thought this might give them a more individual and unique look, and not so much cut and paste!

I had kept the basing quite simple on them as well, since I was still getting used to the Lord of the Rings system at that time.

No Laughing Matter

With all the activity in recent weeks, I have not had a chance to finish off the Laffly trucks completely.   However, I thought that it might be fun for you to see some images of what they look like before all of those finishing touches.

This is the Tank hunter version.

As I mentioned in the previous post, the gun is magnetized so that I can set it on to a standard gun mount for the non self propelled version. :-)

I was quite happy with these, given the minimal expense and extremely short amount of time spent constructing them from pink foam and plasticard.

I have some very fun shots of these vehicles seeing some action in our first Bolt Action battle report.  They did far better than I ever imagined!

There are a few things that I want to add to all the Laffly trucks, and that would be some pintle mounted MMG's.  The transport versions have two of them, so I will try to replicate what was done in this scratch built version.

I now have more of the transports, so there will be a lot of articles on the painting and weathering of each vehicle.  Stay tuned!!

Meet my little pets

I've been showing you the individual shots of the Grotesques... but now it is time to show all of them together, along with their Haemonculus baby sitter!

This view from above shows the same basing that was carried through the entire army... vehicles, monsters, jetbikes and more.

These guys all involved many new techniques, using blood effects, fluorescent paints and lots of object source lighting.

This gives you a few glimpses at the freehand patterns that I managed to sneak onto each figure.  Once again, that's the same pattern which was used on all the Reaver jetbikes, Venoms and Razorwing.

The Abomination figure to the right required a lot of manipulation.  I used a number of Chronos Pain engine bits.

I tried to get some variation in colors from one Grotesque to the nest, with subtle variations on the bony parts and the drug injectors.

One last view of the gang!!

Welcome to the Club!

Since this appears to be MONSTER WEEK, why not have this big boy from Reaper miniatures.

He weighs in at 14.8 ounces of solid pewter!

I believe that one of the arms was repositioned before it got to me for painting.  And yeas, painting something this massive which is already on his base was an interesting challenge!

The way the muscles were sculpted forced me to treat a lot of the shadow areas as five o'clock shadow.  If that had just been a continuous swath of skin tones of the pink variety, it would have been exceedingly boring to look at!

These views might show that particular situation best.

I also had to deal with the hair on the arms, etc., and it seemed like the best way to allow that to mesh with the rest of the arms was to have plenty of green already in the skin tone.

Add to that the snow base, and it was quite important to have that cooler color injected. 

A Great Big Bug!!

Whoa!  Look at the size of that varmint! 

Stomping through the Weird West, we have the new King Scarab from Wild West Exodus.

He is the Heavy Support for The Watchers, the new alien invader faction.  This is one of four new factions released from the Unfinished Business kickstarter.

To give you an idea of scale, the base is the size of a DVD!

This monstrous beast can tear up just about anything.

You can see from these images that he's enjoying a meal right about now.

By the way, the majority of those rocks you see on his base are part of the figure set.

I added a few additional rocks to fill out the base.  Just like the Greys Hired Hands, I had to get creative with tinting the gray colors.  Some had more of a blueish tint, others more greenish, some almost pink.  It is even more crucial on a massive thing like this to create as much difference in the shades as possible, otherwise it would get quite boring to look at!

This was painted to match the concept art, by the way.  And yes... it was all shades of gray!  More warm grays than anything else, so I needed to expand on that range.

These images include a few of those hired hands, which are standard size infantry.  Now you can really see how colossal this guy is!  Wait until you see Buggy next to Old Stompy!

Stay tuned...

Roll out the Runes!

I think it was about a month ago when I profiled the new Green Stuff World texture rollers, and I never got a chance to post any images of the first test bases!

Right now, I have about 6 or 7 different texture rollers.  This was the first batch, purchased directly from Green Stuff World.

For the demonstration, I wanted to use a stronger, firmer sculpey clay.  The gray extra firm is perfect, because it is not rubbery like the Sculpey III.  While it is more robust than the original white sculpey that I normally use, it is still designed to be carved somewhat easily.

Here's a quick review of the process.  I rolled out a slab of the clay onto a ceramic tile.  This is a much better surface for baking, as it won't make your cookies smell like sculpey, which baking on a cookie sheet will do.  Also, those tend to flex and the sculpey gets too hot.

I did the usual sculpey shelf style bases as a quick test.  I have some cork underneath the sheets of broken sculpey.

You can see that I was able to make a number of bases, and still have clay left over!  I also added some sand and gravel around the edges and seams.

A few Secret Weapon skulls were added for some extra imapct!

I have a few ideas for painting these bases.  I want to try some glowing runes on a few of them... at least the ones which are underneath a magic user! :-)

There are many more articles to come, showing additional textures and more complex/elaborate basing methods.  I just wanted to get these on screen for you as quickly as possible!

Colossal Chaos!

Here's an interesting figure from a while back.

I wanted to take some new images with the backdrops and photo booth, hoping to capture many of the details which have not shown up in previous attempts.

This is a massive 72mm figure, which required me to sculpt a substantial base for it.  It was made out of apoxy sculpt and green stuff.

I was attempting to represent all four of the chaos gods, not only in the freehand on the figure, but in the base as well!  Hopefully that all shows up in these new pictures.

The obvious design is to the Blood God, but there's also a hint of Nurgle down at the foot of the base :-)

This side shows the Slaneesh influence in the freehand, but there are some Tzeentchy tentacles on the base too.

It's harder to see, but on the horses fur I attempted to do some light blue spots to get that Tzeetch influence on the mount itself.

The view from above gives you another perspective on the base...

While these low angle views give you a sense of how gigantic this is!

I tried to include a variety of tones on the sword blade, and on the skin tones of the rider.  A little bit of everything went into those!

One more peek at the Khorne and Slaneesh freehand...

And a shot that lets you see a bit more of the rider's armor.

To truly show you how big this is, we have a 28mm Lord of the Rings elf in the picture.  That is, if you can even find him :-)