Speedy Gonzalez: A quick Reaver Jetbike conversion

For those of you familiar with my Adepticon 2013 Dark Eldar project, you know that the army is based around jetbikes.

The story of the army involves rival Kabals of bikers who have temporarily joined forces to conquer an Imperial world that has a fantastic Hippodrome!  These Kabals are normally rival racing teams... hence the value placed on such a great place to show off their rides!!

I have a bunch of them built already, many of them with a bit of conversion here and there (you can search with the 'search bar' on the left hand column to find them).

I am making them as unique as possible, since I have lots of cluster caltrops and various weapons, so I want to be able to distinguish them from one another easily from one another.

To make an extra rear wing, I glued together a few pieces of plasticard together.

This gave me some decent thickness to work with...

A rough pattern is drawn out...

Followed by a rough cut.

The next step is to start creating an edge on the wing.  The rough cuts are done with an exacto knife.

I took a few files and worked on the edge some more.  Then it was time to do a few cuts into that edge.

Once the shapes are positioned, a round file is used to do the rest.

While there is more work to do on the wing, I wanted to get it glued down to see what I wanted to do with it next...

After gluing in a few little blades from the jetnike set just below the wing, it was time to add a few trophy helmets.  Those extra little bits were perfect for holding the helmets into place.

Some razorflails from the Wyche sprue made a nice little addition as well.

I will post the rest of the images later tonight.  Now I have to get back to more video camera tests!

A solid base for Mordor: The rest of the lava effects

As the Army/Navy game was drawing to a close, I was getting to the latter stages of my test bases as well.

So, I had set up my lightest colors for the glowing lava, which meant that I could now put some transparent layers of fluorescent orange over that layer.  The Fluo paints are naturally transparent, so you don't even have to thin them down.

After the initial layer of fluorescent orange, I added some of my reddish brown to that and did some darker portions around the masses of cooling lava.

That color gets progressively darker, and eventually I start adding black into that mixture.

Some of the orange is drybrushed on the underside of the rocks to get lava reflected light.  Meanwhile, on the upper surfaces, I do some cooler dyrbrushing by mixing a very dark brown with a pale green.

I did some more orange lava reflections and some more drybrushing on the upper areas.

As that stuff dried (in addition to the black/brown washes), I worked on the black marble on the top.

I had a shadow grey mixed with a blue green put down as a middle tone layer.  The veins would be lightened further by mixing in that same pale green color.

The pale green is lightened a bit, defining the veins a bit more...

And this is our ultimate result...

Only 25-30 more bases to go!

Always Sing Second... lava and football

On this last Saturday of college football, I was trying to recover from a very late night of camera testing.  The guests arrived very early, so I had an early start as well.

Before that game started, I played my first game of Warhammer Fantasy since the WFB tournament in April.  Man was that different from my beloved LOTR.

Watching the Army/Navy game was a bit all encompassing, so as that was on, I did a little painting on those LOTR bases for my Mordor army!  Time for some hot stuff!

I set it up by painting my brightest lights, so that I could do my transparent Fluorescent orange later.

I tried to establish my initial darks with a reddish brown mix...

The darks of the rocks further from the lava got a cooler shade of brown.

A blue/black mix for the marble surface on top...

Just about ready to start adding the fluorescent elements to heat things up.  You can see how that orange glows just sitting there on the palette.

Sammy was watching me very closely the whole time...

As I was watching the Middies get that first score!  What a game.  Go Navy...

More to come later!!

Forward Progress: First and Ten!

Well, yesterday was an interesting day for the Kickstarter!

This item was kindly donated by Marty to the cause.  In the quest to get the old camera to communicate with our existing computers, we have been consistently stymied.  Even the folks at Sony said that it was an impossible task, no matter how many drivers we downloaded.

So, enter a brand new camera!  As you can see, it is about 1/3 the size of the previous camera.  Marty also contributed a tiny tripod, since he knew what kind of a setup I had been working with.

Late last night I did about a 45 minute film of another Raging Heroes  Vestal.  So, we will be uploading this film and see what we have!

It was different enough from the other camera that I will still have to tweak my own positioning a bit.  I was amazed that even at the highest quality setting, the memory card was still not filled up.  That's cool!!!

Here she is after 45 minutes...

Babo was also very excited.  Christmas came early!  And there were tons of cookies, since Cathy and Kimbery were baking dozens of them!!!!

Mordor is stirring... and my spidey sense is tingling!

First of all, a huge THANK YOU to all the viewers of this blog!

In just over 10 months, there have been over 400,000 page views.  Wow!!!  Many thanks to all of you who participate by leaving comments and such.  Those are much appreciated, especially when it is 5 AM, the alarm will be going off in 3 hours, and I am working on that last blog post. :-)

OK, back to the topic at hand.  You guys want to see hobby stuff!

To get away from my Lord of the Rings 600 point tournament armies, and back into our more informal games, I thought it would be best to create a whole new army.  Our typical game is 1000 points.  Yes, I will be adding to my elves (more eagles) and to my Axles of Evil (more chariots), but I wanted to do something completely unrelated to them.

I just got the Mordor source book and a box of Morgul knights with a prize coupon, so it was time to create!

I have been given the Battle for Skull Pass boxed set to create the Civil War Dwarves, and was left over with all the goblin stuff.  Rich had cleverly used a few of the spider riders as an add on to his usual orc army.

I knew I didn't want any orcs in my force, so I thought of a few ringwraiths with various powers.  One of which will be the Shadow Lord on a Fellbeast, which had also bee around for almost 10 years.  Add the Dark Lord himself, a batch of spiders along with the spider queen and BAM, big time Mordor army.

I have some Reaper figures which will be specters as well.

The bases are all going to be lava OSL.  Big surprise, given the whole volcano thing...

So, how to make this into something useable without taking all day?

First, some cork, and then some sculpey

Oxide paste to the rescue!  Add on some rocks and gravel, and it is all set for painting!

By the way, this kind of basing will be one of the first basing DVD's that we will be making.

Now we need to get that spider to look a little less weird!  I mixed up some green stuff, with more yellow than blue.  I need to sculpt some very basic furry texture to cover that crazy skull, and make the torso less flat.

Some furry texture on the thorax!

Now for the same treatment on the abdomen, and you have a passable spider!  Only 12 more to go...

Cathy suggested that I borrow one of her shirts on this Pearl Harbor day.  My dad was a Marine serving in the Pacific.  We still have a ring that he fashioned out of a 1942 New Zealand coin!

Once again, many thanks to everyone who has contributed to the blog!!!

Heading towards a bright future... Some details about the upcoming Kickstarter

Calling all loyal Wappellians!  And everbody else...

I thought I would share with you all some details about that upcoming Kickstarter you have heard me ramble on about!

As you have alredy heard, we want to do a series of painting DVD's.  We have come up with almost 2 dozen titles thus far, depending on stretch goals, etc.

As of right now, the miniature lines we will be using are Raging Heroes and Urban Mammoth.  They have some big kickstarters of their own coming up, and we will be working closely with them!

The DVD's will cover all my painting techniques... shaded basecoat (the very first DVD), Non metallic metals (NMM, SE-NMM, etc), Object source lighting, Freehand designs, and so on.

I will be doing color specific DVD's on Reds, yellows, blues, greens, blacks, greys and more!  They will have fin titles, such as Yellow Alert, Black Out, Green with Envy, etc.

There will be flesh tone DVD's, such as the Four Fleshtones of the Apocalypse, covering a certain quartet of mischevious gods!

For those of you who have seen that recent series of sculpted bases, those will be tackled as well.  At least a dozen different titles there.

Should things go well, I would even produce some sculpting DVD's as well as Terrain building.  You sense the theme here... I want to cover just about everything there is in the hobby!

As Kickstarter likes to see unusual items in your proposal, some of the things we are working on as extras for stretch goals are T-shirts, novelty dice (in my case, dice that roll nothing but '1' s!!!), and even my own artwork.  I have interspersed a few examples throughout this post...

The basic format of each DVD will be like this:  Roughly 100 minutes long, each episode will be divided into five 20 minute long chapters.  I will start with an introduction, describing materials and concepts, and then get into the painting!

We want to have some form of text on the screen (perhaps scrolling along the bottom) that describes what color(s) I am using, and even basic technique.  This could help non-English speakers, and even those who have trouble hearing.

I would like it if people could almost 'paint along' with the DVD's, so that is why we like this format.

Some of the stretch goals would include actual minis with the disk, as in the one featured on a given DVD.  Lower level goals would have an unpainted figure, but higher level goals would have a figure painted by me!

Since Raging Heroes has informed me that they might be doing an entire army line of one race of miniatures, I would like to do a 'how to' DVD set on that entire line.

Some of the highest level goals would include a 7 stage set of painted figures, so you can get an in person view of what each step looks like.

One of the uber strech goals we had in mind was a very limited (perhaps only 10-12 signed and numbered copies) harcover art book featuring my painted miniatures.  It would feature an army, like the Tomb Kings, with the back story and descriptions of how it was created, etc.

So, we are working up a final proposal to send to Kickstarter, hoping to have it in their hands in a week to 10 days.  I will keep you all updated on how this is going... I promise.

I would love for this project to be a success.  My entire family were teachers in one form or another, and I think this is my best format for reaching the most people.  I have been fortunate enough to help many other painters along on their hobby path over the years, but this could be the grandest method of all!!!