Land Raider WIP

The next item on my Grey Knights list is a Land Raider. Frankly, I've wanted to build one of these for a while, and could hardly wait to get started. Painting the Dreadnought had to wait!

There's quite a few folks out there who, despite the fact the inside a vehicle/aircraft will seldom be seen, feel the need to paint it. This despite my paint pot procrastinating tendancies. Probably for the same reason the folks at GW put some time into detailing the inside. The Land Raider kit has nice detail, and I looked at it as a chance to play around with ideas.

The top picture is the engine compartment and a control panel. My favorite part is the brass fittings, which are done using a Tin Bitz base over light grey primer, overcoated with Burnished Gold and a Badab Black wash. The skull and gear icon was my first attempt at mirroring colors. I like the way it looks, and was looking for an excuse to try it.

Next is a picture of the sides. Here was an experiment in yellow using VMC Light Yellow and Gryphonne Sepia wash. I'm wondering if I got a bad batch of Gryphonne Sepia, as it comes out of the pot looking orangish. I imagined it as something much more yellow. Also here is a failed experiment with highlighting the edges, probably not going to use that much again.

I do have some Forgeword Grey Knight doors for this. I got the Land Raider, including the doors, in a good deal on Ebay, still much cheaper than what a Land Raider would cost in a store. Timing is everything. Here is the inside of the front, top hatch. Very happy with the colors, and am actually looking forward to having some red on the outside as well. After looking at this picture, I touch up some spots I had missed. May have to take pictures of everything from now on...

An odd part about the side doors is that they were too small. I'm not sure if that is the case with all FW Land Raider doors. If I had bought these direct from FW, I would have called about the problem. One bad thing about buying second hand, you can't take advantage of FW customer service. It's a relatively easy fix. I glued thin strips of plasticard around the outside, filed away any overlap, so it should be unnoticable after a good priming. Fix is on the left here, next to the other door still needing to be done.

My First Forgeworld Order

So, I won a gift card at work last month, and decided to indulge in a bit of Forgeworld goodness. I had a lot of stuff in my wish list, and it was tough narrowing it down to my limit. Given I've started putting together a small force of Grey Knights, I decided to focus on that for my first purchase. I want to say it was a good first experience, as they had it shipped the day after I ordered it, and it was to my house in Virginia, USA 10 days later. All except one were perfect casts, and that one had only minor warping. I've read many complaints about poor casts and long delays with Forgeworld orders. I've no complaints here, except for discovering someone on the Internet is wrong!

First on my list was a set of etched brass Inquisition/Grey Knight emblems. I blame Karitas for making me want these, as I saw him use them on his AoBR to GK Terminator conversion post. Before that, I had thought them a luxury, but now consider this a must have for Grey Knight conversions. While I could create some of these with GS, the detail on this small piece of brass is great and will definitely save me some time. For information, I'm planning on a GK Dreadnought, a Land Raider, and converting some plastic Terminators. This will come in very handy!

Though I like the look of the Forgeworld Dreadnought arms, I wanted to try converting some instead (in other words, I already have some extra arms). So, I moved on to stuff I'd need for the Land Raider. I really liked the look of the tank commander, so I picked up one of those. It comes in five main pieces, the body, the arms, right and left shoulder armor pads, and a head. They also throw in two purity seals. As usual with Forgeworld bits, they have great detail and I'm looking forward to putting them together. Price-wise, it's not much different than you'd pay for a similar specialized GW mini, so I consider it a decent purchase.

Next up is the Psycannon upgrade for the Land Raider. I didn't think this was something I wanted to convert, so I decided to buy it. I do plan to try a psycannon dreadnought arm conversion, so this will be used to scale that as well. As you can see, there are three unique pieces: right and left psycannons, and a targeter. Frankly, I expected it to come with the mounting bits, and was disappointed when I found it did not. One more thing to add to my magnetizing "to-do" list.

Last up is a set of Aircraft Punisher Cannons. Now I know these aren't Grey Knight related, but I have a conversion in mind for this and did an impulse buy. Here was the lone bad spot in the order, as one of the barrels is slightly warped. Even though I have no experience with fixing resin pieces, this should be a simple fix. This set contains a lot of repeat pieces. The two cannons are identical, the two magazines are identical, of course the wing mounts are identical, and the two ammo belts were cast as one piece but are the same.

My plan is to make a turret, mount the cannons and magazines over-under, and have it count as a Hydra. I blame credit Admiral Drax for this conversion idea, as he suggested something similar on Col. Corbane's post about Kitbashing a Hydra. The only trouble so far is, all the turret ideas I had are too small to accommodate a cannon and magazine set up. Actually, I was concerned with this before I ordered it. It will be a couple months before I get to it, so have plenty of time to figure out how to make it happen. Other options I'm considering are Admiral Drax's Hydra turret, or buying a Forgeword Manticore Conversion kit and magnetizing it for both versions. Suggestions are welcome.

More Grey Knights

Since I posted about a Nemesis Force Weapon Scratch Build, I've seen some posts about converting AoBR Termies into Grey Knight Termies. Now I'm not ready for that conversion yet, but I did have a regular Grey Knight in power armor that needed a NFW. In my earlier scratch build post, I started with a force halberd pole and handguard, and only needed the blade. With this figure, I was missing the whole arm. I figured if you can convert a CC arm from a regular Terminator to a GK Terminator, I should be able to do it for a regular Grey Knight. I just followed other examples of this type of conversion, like USABOB's over on Astronomicon. Here is my finished result.

Simple assembly, using the following parts:
Metal Grey Knight body on 25mm base;
One Space Wolf Hammer (regular, not Terminator);
Straight pin (you can see the pin head at the halberd base);
Space Marine shoulder pad;
Plastic tube;
Space Wolf Terminator Sword (I would have used a SM Scout combat knife, if I'd had one).

Speaking of Grey Knight Terminators, here's a WIP of a squad I'm currently working on. I usually primer my figures in white or light grey, but these came to me primered black. Rather than strip 'em, I decided to try the ol' Citadel how-to painting technique. These will be painted in the standard Grey Knight scheme found in the Daemon Hunters Codex. So far, I've got the Boltgun Metal layer on all, and one has a layer of CeramCoat Metalic Silver (from Michaels, a local craft store). After I took the picture, I coated the other four figs with the CeramCoat Silver.

This week's challenge

Only a couple figures to show this week. Up top is a priest with an eviscerator. Got this one in an ebay auction with a bunch of other bits. My son took him to battle last Saturday, within the first few days we had him, and he personally took out a Land Raider in four turns, don't ask me how. I do know he had a squad of IG there to absorb damage. My son came home and said he deserved to be painted right away, so he went to the top of the list. He had been primed rather badly, and in black which I'm not used to painting over. But, I scraped away the thicker stuff and painted him up. I'm right happy with the monk's robe look. I'll call my experiment in brown a success for now. I could never get the skin painted up right and it looks rather ghoulish now. This will cause me to rethink painting another bald guy for quite some time. It also taught me to always strip a primed second hand mini, as some detail is lost and there's some nasty cracks in some places.
The second piece was actually finished up right before the eviscerator priest. It is a conversion from and I-Kore Militia Leader, meant to be a Callidus Assassin. She's about 1/6th GW, as her right arm is actually an Eldar Pilot's arm, with a guardsman pistol hand. The Neural Shredder is a complete conversion, made from a jewel type bead, a bit of sprue, a Tau Firewarrior foot, and some GS to tie them all together. I wasn't sure about it before it was painted up, but I like the finished look. The pads on her upper sleeves are green stuff, meant to match her existing knee pads. I figured she looked roughly American Indian , so tried for that skin tone. Again, not too happy with the face, but the right hand gives me hope that some day I shall be able to do skin well. Now, if only I can remember how I did that...

Now it's back to painting the headless veterans waiting in the wings.

Nemesis Force Blade Scratch Build

So as I mentioned in my last post, I've been working on some Deamonhunter allies for my son's Imperial Guard force. I just heard a rumor that the "allies" part of Deamonhunters may disappear with the new codex. I'm hoping that's not the case, as I like the excuse to paint some of these figures up. They give me a good excuse to break from painting up Imperial Guard. What you see in the first picture is the latest addition to the group, namely a standard Grey Knight with Nemesis Halberd. The difference here is that the figure was received second hand and lacked the fighting end of the halberd, so I had to recreate it.












I regret that sometimes, like this time, I get wrapped up in the conversion and I don't think of taking WIP shots until it's too late. I hope with this one though, a picture and explanation may be enough. So in the close-up picture above I've broken down the parts.

I started with the blade, which is simply two pieces of plasticard glued together. You could use a thick piece of plasticard, but I didn't have that. The important thing here is that it has to be thick enough for drilling pinning holes. You need pinning holes for the spikey bit on top, and for attaching to the halberd pole. I used a stock Halberd for sizing up the blade.

Once the blade is finished, shape the edge and build up the pieces at the base of the blade. The spikey bit on top is made from a piece of sprue filed down and pinned with a nail brad. A nail brad is stronger than a paper clip, and strength is needed here. It is also thicker, so some caution is needed so you don't split out the side while you are drilling. The spikey part on the bottom is not a separate piece, but file down after building up with very thin pieces of plasticard on the halberd base. Another piece of sprue is used to make the transition from blade to hand guard. The handguard is simple a thick piece of plasticard. Not seen in the picture, underneath where the purity seal goes (purity seal fell off for the pic), is a round transition piece. In my case, I used a piece of copper wire wrapped around the pin, but a hollow rod could just as easily work. Copper wire from old phone cord is used for the power line.

Here is a side by side comparison picture. This is not the blade I used for sizing up my scratch built blade. The figure was chosen for its more similar pose. There are four different halberds, and I evidently chose the largest size when I sized mine.

Inquisitor Lord Solar Macharius

I've had a Solar Macharius mini sitting around in my box for some time. Recently, my son decided he needed Inquisitorial allies to add a little punch to his IG force. I found some Grey Knights which are coming along nicely but still currently Painting in Progress (PIP). He also wanted to have an Assassin, and I happened to have a figure that made a good Callidus stand-in. Trouble with adding assassins is, you need to have an Inquisitor Lord in order to field them. Out of the box came Solar Macharius.

Lord Macharius, a great looking mini, came to us as part of an E-Bay purchase made a while back. He was poorly painted and became a victim in my how to strip minis experiments long ago. On that matter, I use Simple Green to start, for the really tough metal minis I use undiluted citrus cleaner. The citrus cleaner proved to soften plastics, and I never got around to trying it diluted. Regardless, Solar was put back together (minus the cape) and took on his new Inquisitor Lord responsibilities with gusto. A couple weeks ago, before I started Skulltaker, I decided he was ready for a fresh coat of paint. So the the workbench he went. The cape was painted separate from the mini, and glued on when all was finished.

This is my most significant use of red, white, and gold on a mini so far. Not a bad experience, and I am actually more happy with the whites. I started with a light grey primer and the white turned out very easy. One thinned coat of white followed by a light grey wash in the crevices, then a heavy white dry brush. Gold is Shining Gold with a Gryphonne Sepia wash and a Burnished Gold dry brush. The red is Red Gore with a Baal Red wash. Not much to drybrush on the red, as there aren't significant red edges thanks to the gold trim. He's not been clear coated yet either, but that will definitely happen before the next game. The right toe sticks out from the base enough to be a problem with the paint rubbing off.

I am impressed with the level of detail on many of GW's old metal minis, and this is no exception. My only issue with the mini is the huge hands. Also, either the face lacks detail, or I was just unable to pull it out with my painting technique. I know I applied more paint than I would have liked trying to make it look good, and admit I need more practice there. I was talking to a guy at my FLGS who had invested quite a bit in Forgeworld DKOK. A comment he made that stuck with me was that he enjoyed painting them because their faces were mostly covered up and he hated painting faces. I'm not there yet, and still think practice will bring me around at some point.

I think he makes a great Inquisitor Lord, so he'll be filling that role for quite some time. He has quite the impressive record on the table already, so far victorious over the forces of Chaos he's faced upon the field of battle.