Here are some shots of a rough mock-up of a Chimera.
Archive for September, 2007
Tank Gear – After-market tricking out my Chimeras!
I decided to switch gears and to put some time into my never-finished Imperial Guard Regiment for Warhammer 40k. Recently I have gone back to the roots of why I started this project in the first place… tanks. Lots of tanks.
Something that I have been wanting to do is to make some Autocannon turrets for my Chimera IFV tanks. For a while I had considered ordering some parts from Games Workshop to make turrets from the usual Chimera turrets, but then decided that this was a good opportunity for a fairly simple casting project. In addition to the turrets, I also wanted to create some extra armor panels that I could attach to the sides of the tanks.
While the molds for these components will be pretty simple, they are basic one part molds, creating the turret has become a challange. I have been adding detail in various forms onto a base made of super sculpy, and only now do I fell that I like the way that the piece is coming together. I still have a lot of greenstuff work to do.
So far the turret is made from super sculpy that has been carved and sanded, plastic card, greenstuff, and bits from other miniature kits.
The side armor panels have been a little easier. I used bits of plastic sprue to represent reactive armor on top of the metal plates. The plates are layered plasticard, and the rivets are greenstuff that I made with a home-brewed rivet making tool.
I hopefully will be making a mold for these parts tomorrow morning. It depends if I can get the turret in shape by then.
Planning a gaming table
Since I have moved into a new apartment, I have been planning on making a new table for game nights. What I want to do is to make a set of 2′ x 4′ modular sections that could be configured different ways. Here is an idea of what I am thinking.
The sections could be used to make several 4′x4′ tables, or larger 4′x6′, 6′x8′ tables. The larger tables would need a surface to support them, and Velcro mounting areas will help out their stability. Unlike the AWC gamesday table that we made, this set will less likely be dragged around to different places for gaming, so I should be able to keep the edges from getting to banged up. This will help keep all of those seams from being obvious during games.
Defined paint schemes
I am pretty happy with the choices that I made for the color scheme, and method for my Tyranids. I had another idea about painting groups of minis the same scheme that I think that I am going to try out. I am going to premix the various levels of highlight that I am building up and save decent sized quantities of them in air-tight containers.
This green to tan color scheme has about 6 -7 layers of color changing before I pop out the final highlights with tan mixed with a little white. These I am going to premix which will hopefully help speed up the assembly line of painting multiple miniatures. Also, this will allow me to take breaks from this project without worrying about scheme consistency.
I figure that I will do this pretty much only for the greater areas of the miniatures, not the detail area’s such as the red bits around the mouth, or the claws. Those are pretty simple to replicate in any case. This will help me with using glazes to blend the highlights a bit as well. It will be easy to simply water down some of the previous color’s paint for the glaze. I was stumped for a while as to how to add this to a painting process without adding a bunch of steps.
Time for another test stealer I guess.
Genestealers!
I began some preliminary work on my Tyranid project over the last several evenings between my other obligations (homework, and sleep). I had been thinking about the way that I wanted to paint the ‘nids for a while, and had even done some rough tests that I was really happy with. Here are some images of the second round of those tests.
I have to say that I am VERY happy that I did a test run before committing to the way I painted this mini. First of all I realized a few details that I would like to start to build up ahead of time, such as the fleshy red areas around the mouth and the wrists. Also to be very sure about the state of my can of dullcoat before I hit any volume of minis. I used a can of Armory flat spray, and the crap left this weird dusty coat on the mini.
I was so pissed when I realized this! I think that it was an issue of humidity, I have run into this in the past. The test spray didn’t show any funky results, but that was only on a piece of cardboard so I may not have been able to see that things were amiss. I was able to clean this guy up and to restore some of it’s paintjob with a brush with water in it. The thing that kills me is how much this coat of spray desaturated the paint’s color. Dullcoat does this a little usually, but this seemed a bit on the extreme side. I’m using a test mini next time to get a better idea as to what I will end up with. Oh well, that is why this is a prototype, and luckily, I have a lot of Genestealers, so it is not a huge loss.
After painting this model, I decided that I would do something with his broodmates that I haven’t done with many models in the past. I decided that I should paint the arms separately. This will allow me to get at the areas of the face and lower torso better. I have often avoided this method in the past as part of my general painting strategy, but now, with these critters, I think it will really help.
