2013-03-15: The Ides of Hobby

No pictures tonight, but I wanted to update what has been on my painting desk this week.

I continued painting the Directorate Firestorm Armada models needed for the next round of the campaign I am participating.  Since Directorate frigates have served me well I am adding 9 of them along with 1 heavy cruiser and several escorts.  The bronze color is almost done, so I maybe able to get the dip shading done this weekend if I don’t get to fussy with detailing.

I dug out the ogres for the Garagehammer challenge and started assembling some ogres.  I realized that I don’t have enough parts for as many ironguts as I had wanted to do.  Oh well, I will just do more bulls and ironblasters and perhaps do a few converted ironguts.

I have green paint on the War Steam Shrine Tank and have started doing the bronze/gold trim.  I need to give it some more love as I will be out of town the last week of the month.  Tick Tock Tick Tock.

Tonight I cut out 5 halberdiers from the sprue and added archer heads (furry hats are important since they will be a snow based army).  I also added blades to the arms taking care to use the X-acto blade to cross score the contact surfaces before adding the glue, and then letting the glue melt the plastic for 30 seconds or so before making the join.  I have found that in halberdier and spearmen models I have bought in the past that that joint is very vulnerable to breaking so I wanted it to be as secure as possible.  I can not say enough about taking the time and care with scoring and letting the glue melt the plastic when assembling plastic miniatures as the plastic really makes a weld instead of a joint that consists of two pieces of plastic stuck together with dried model cement.

I placed the artillery and the death wizard into the display cabinet tonight.  Its really nice to see them on display there… and really nice not to have them taking up space on my painting desk!

2013-03-08: Now with more Snow!

I had Tuesday off since it was Town Meeting Day in The Frozen North.  It was a rare day off in which my daughter’s daycare was actually open, so it was Happy Hobby Day for DaDa!!!

I had great plans of assembling a horde of ogres and base coating some Empire swords men.  But in the end I spent most of the day doing snow bases on my artillery and crew, fiddling with my War Steam Shrine Tank (which I talked about earlier), and deciding how to convert up some knights of Moor.

Here are some pictures of the artillery and crew. Ohh… ahhh…

 

 

 

I have decided that the WSST will be my painting challenge for the month.  Now I just have to find that engineer for it.

2013-03-07: Transform and Steam Out!

During the last few days I have been busy throwing together an idea I have been musing about for a while.  Many moons ago I bought one of the very old small steam tanks to use as the heart of a skaven rat tank.  That didn’t happen and later I bought a plastic steam tank hull to for the same project and I never got around to doing a rat tank again.  The parts lingered in the basement until the new war altar kit came out and it looked great except that the griffin on top made it look very top heavy.  So I struck on the idea of sticking it on the back of a steam tank.

So I through together the engine and cannon from the old metal mini-stank, added that to the plastic hull, and placed the podium over the hatch (which I will magnetize later.  I added magnets to the bottom of the griffin and put a piece of steel inside the steam tank ceiling so it latches on well.  The magnets will allow me to swap them out to place the steam tank turret on instead in order to use it as a steam tank.  I have to dig up the old engineer from the mini tank to place inside the turret and then I will prime it all up for my painting project for the month.

Oh, the shields on the side (since I didn’t buy them when I got the hull) are from the knight kit and from the banner things in the war altar kit.