Grey Knights

One of my apocalypses is a future where demons and vampires are openly attacking the earth, zombies are all over the place and the few remaining humans are fighting back. At the time I was building and painting the figures (four or five years ago) there were very few suitably armed modern models available, resulting in a lot of conversion work.

I picked up most of the Foundry Street Violence figures (and any other figures that looked appropriate, e.g.West Wind for vampires and monsters) and set about turning them into vampire and demon hunters. For the most part this involved removing machine guns, rifles and pistols and replacing them with bows, crossbows, pistol crossbows, swords, axes and halberds (basically anything that looked good). I have quite a lot of more traditional post apocalyptic gangers painted as well, so guns are available if required.

Along with the civilians and non-military fighters (who I'll cover in future posts), one of the groups I envisaged was an elite military fighting force.

For these I turned to GW's Cadians. They're not ideal (I could live without the shoulder pads), but they don't stand out too much, and converting the plastic was easier than the metal Foundry figures. Most of the replacement weapons were from GW's Empire State Troops boxed set.

The first job was to remove the eagles from the Cadians - GW does like its iconography. Once that was done, I set about posing the figures and finding weapons that looked appropriate.

The simplest conversion involved converting laser rifles into crossbows by chopping off various bits, gouging out a channel in the top of the barrel for the bolt and making the bow bit (apparently called a prod or lath) from brass strip.

Figures with crossbows

The rest of the conversions mainly involved swapping Cadian hands for bow and sword hands from the state troops figures. I also attached swords to most of the figures, and bowcases to the bow armed figures. Belts to attach the swords and cases were made from green stuff.

Figures with bows

and a rear view of the figure, showing bowcase

Figures with swords

I added a flamethrower, built straight from the box. The only addition was a sword, just to keep things consistent.

Group shots

Finally, a couple of group shots of the unit. Not quite sure how one guy managed to get into both pictures :-)

One of my plans was to build a couple of heavy support weapons for the unit. The first one was going to be a giant crossbow, and the second a giant flamethrower of some sort. I got bogged down with these - constantly tweaking the design, struggling to figure out how to attach the prod to the body of the bow etc. As a result, these are still languishing on the workbench (actually in plastic bags at the back of a drawer fairly close to the workbench). I dig them out every couple of years, so maybe I'll have another look soon.

The relevance of the post title? In homage to the GW Grey Knights (I have the originals, never really liked the new ones), I named the unit the Grey Knights. For anybody feeling cheated at this point, hopefully a picture of one of the original Citadel Grey Knights will appease you.

Grey Knight Terminator

On a non-figure related note, I'd like to wish everyone a Happy New Year and best wishes for 2011.

Blackbeard

Painting Blackbeard

Most painting articles are tutorials, so I thought I'd do a "lessons learned" instead.

It was my Dad's 80th birthday earlier this year, so I was racking my brain for something to get him. Eventually I decided to paint a figure for him. He's fairly interested in the Golden Age of Piracy and the Caribbean in general, so I looked around for a suitable figure. I settled on Andrea Miniature's 54mm Blackbeard figure, which I bought from Historex Agents (post and packing from Spain would have just about doubled the cost of the figure)

This was only my second 54mm figure, the first being a WW2 British soldier from one of the Dragon kits. It turned out to be quite a bit different in terms of painting :-)

The two main lessons I learned were:

Lesson 1: Don't rush to glue the figure together

I always clean and glue my figures before painting them. Always have, always will, really shouldn't have with this one. I glued the figure, filled in some gaps, put it on a painting base and started to paint. This was fine for the head and jacket, etc., but getting in to the pistols under the arms, and especially the back of his left leg, was a nightmare. In the end I managed to get a bit of paint on the leg, but there are some unpainted areas. Had I painted the parts separately and brought them together, it would have been much easier.

The most annoying result of pre building was that his cutlass, which is soft metal, ended up getting crushed against his right leg due to the way I held the figure to get access to some parts. In the end it had shaped itself around the creases in the trousers. I managed to get most of the kinks out, but its undercoat had cracked and I didn't do a particularly good job of smoothing it back out (I should really have sanded the whole part back, but it was soft metal, and I wasn't sure how it would handle it. I opted to simply repaint it, but it didn't really work). The result is that the cutlass is kindof bumpy, and definitely a weak part of the finished figure.

Lesson 2: You can never clean the figure enough

Even though I spent a long time scraping and sanding mold lines, I still missed a couple. They made their presence known as I was painting them, but as they weren't too bad, I ignored them (it would have caused more damage if I'd gone back in to sand them down, so it was the lesser of two evils. Honest). Next time, I plan to examine the undercoated figure under my magnifying lamp before starting, although I'm sure I'll still miss some bits.

Close up of the top half of the figure

In addition to those lessons, there were quite a few things encountered during the painting and basing of the figure.

Painting the figure

This progressed steadily, although slowly. I chickened out of a few things - trying to get the leathery sunburned look on his face and stripes and mud on the trousers being the main ones.

My usual approach with a figure is to get all the base colours on, then shade and highlight them. For this figure I finished each part completely before moving on to the next part. The result of this was that the figure, pretty much until it was finished, always looked half-done. This was quite frustrating - spending an hour painting a part and not seeing the overall figure move on - but I got used to it.

When I started the figure, I was still adding extender to my acrylic to let me paint with it for a reasonable time. Not too long in, however, I took the plunge with a wet palette, and I have to say, it's the best thing, ever :-) I bought the Winsor and Newton one, but now use my own, made with a plastic palette, a couple of paper towels and some parchment (grease proof) paper. Having thin paints that stay useable for hours/days/weeks is much better; laying down thin coats and blending colours is so much easier than it used to be.

Picture of the back of the completed figure

Handling the figure

With the best will in the world, and even with a painting base (an old vitamin pill box), I still handled the figure while painting - especially when painting high up on the figure, e.g. the hat, or with the figure held upside down to get at some difficult to reach areas. I had the same problem with the WW2 figure, and it ended up with the paint becoming discoloured from body oil, sweat etc. The solution I found was to wear a cotton glove on my figure holding hand. I had thought about plastic or latex/nitrile gloves, but wearing them for an hour or more would have been unpleasant. The cotton let my hand breath, and avoided any damage to the figure. It now actually feels strange painting without one.

Closeup of one of his sets of pistols. Attaching the right arm before painting these caused a lot of pain.

Basing the figure

I had planned to put the figure on a plinth, but hadn't drilled out the figure base for pins. I ended up doing this after the model was finished and removed from its painting stand. I didn't damage it, but this is definitely something to do before starting a figure.

One thing I considered, but didn't do (largely due to time constraints), was to extend the base to the edge of the plinth using sand. This would have taken a lot of PVA, and may well have been a disaster (I don't get on well with scenery, but it's something I'm working on). The figure actually looks fine on its own base, so it's not really a problem.

The nameplate caused a ridiculous number of problems, for what should have been an easy bit. I bought a brass plate from NameIT, but it wouldn't bend enough to go round the plinth (would have been so much easier with a square plinth), so I had to abandon that approach. In the end I found a tutorial about making nameplates using overhead projector sheets. I created a few, and they worked pretty well. The tutorial recommended spraying the back of the nameplate with gold paint and then attaching it to the plinth. Another one I found suggested gluing the acetate onto cardboard before attaching it to the plinth.

I went with the cardboard option, which would have been fine on a square plinth. The weight of the cardboard, however, started to pull it away from the double-sided sticky tape attaching it to the plinth. I ended up using a couple of blobs of epoxy to stick it down, as I wasn't not sure how much damage the sticky tape would have done if I'd tried to remove it.

Despite taking great care when putting the nameplate on, it's not quite straight, and is about 1/4 mm higher at the left than the right. This is compounded by the fact that the nameplate itself isn't quite square (my cutting was not quite as good as it could have been). The effect is noticeable, but not too much. Next time I plan to put masking tape underneath the nameplate as a guide ruler.

Showing the trim and decoration at the back of his coat. I only noticed the chip in one of the folds from this photograph. It has been fixed on the final model.

I took the pictures after the figure was painted, but before I put it on its plinth. It's now in my parent's place, so the above photos will have to do.

Like I said, this was only my second 54mm figure, and quite a change from the WW2 figure. I find painting the larger scale very different to painting 28mm figures, although I have been feeding some of the things I've learned back into those figures.

Introduction

Welcome to, for a few nanoseconds at least, the newest blog on the Web. The plan is to use this to post pictures of figures I've painted over the years, giving them their moment in the sun, rather than being buried in a filing cabinet - hopefully the sunlight won't be too much for them. I'll also be adding work in progress posts for current stuff.

My hobby interests are mainly non-historical, and include fantasy, science fiction and near future apocalypses of various sorts. There are some historical elements - ancients, pirates and WW2 being the main ones, although I haven't done much with ancients for a long time and I have no aversion to including fantasy and zombie elements in my pirates. The bulk of my figures are Games Workshop, although there are plenty of other manufacturers represented to various degrees.

Anyway, enough waffle. It seems fitting to show some of my earliest dwarves and a few of my more recent figures in this inaugural post. The dwarves date back to the late 80s, early 90s, long before slottabases. I still remove the slottabase tabs from my dwarves and put them on milliput and card bases; Stunties should be short, and I've always felt a slottabase makes them too tall. I'll discuss my dwarf collection/obsession in a separate post(s), as there are several hundred of the little blighters collected and painted over the years.

This was one of my first attempts at black-lining, now a bit chipped after several house moves in the intervening years. Black-lining involved a white undercoat on the figure, then applying black paint where the shadows would be, as well as separating out pouches, weapons etc. It was quite a few years before I thought to just undercoat the figure in black... This was done with highlights only, no shading, then finished with a coat of gloss varnish (covered years later with matt varnish when I decided that the figures were too shiny). If I remember correctly, the figure is an old Citadel dwarf adventurer, from when they did RPG stuff as well.

From the same period, a female dwarf fighter. I seem to remember I swapped out her weapon and made a scabbard for the new one.

A slightly more recent dwarf - the White Dwarf himself

I haven't painted any new dwarves for a few years now, as there hasn't been much inspiring me. GW plastics have come on in leaps and bounds, but all my dwarves are metal, and I haven't the heart to introduce any plastic ones into the army. Nearly every figure in the army is different (apart from the phalanx), so I'm not sure how successful I'd be at making the plastic ones "individuals". I have a few unpainted metal ones lying about, so I'll probably be painting some soonish. Scibor do a very nice looking dwarf king on bear. I have the original Grenadier dwarf bear riders, so it might make for an interesting group to paint. I am somewhat concerned, however, about the size difference, as modern scale creep suggests the Scibor one will tower over the other two.

Finally, for anybody who's made it this far, some modern figures. The first one is a conversion I did for a modern demon hunting setting (think season 5 of Buffy the Vampire Slayer if they hadn't defeated Glory - which would have made for a much more interesting season 6 than the one we got :-)). It's a Foundry Streetfighter figure with skateboard and gun removed and sword and axe substituted. I also chopped the gun out of the holster and added a couple of bits of plastic rod for stakes. I converted a whole bunch of figures to have swords, bows, crossbows etc. There's a sampling below, but I plan to take some more pictures for a future post.

Foundry streetfighter figure

Not sure who made this figure. I seem to remember removing a gun and adding the bow

Might be another Foundry figure. I chopped the end off the rifle and drilled through the barrel to insert some brass rod for the bow arm

Another unknown (Copplestone possibly) conversion

Citadel Cadian with laser rifle modified to be a crossbow. I built the scope from bits of plastic rod. There's a whole unit of these guys that I plan to show more of in a future post.

Added a sword and replaced the pistol with a pistol crossbow. I think this was the first one I did, and it involved me removing and then rebuilding the pistol. Subsequently I modified the pistols by gouging out a line for the bolt and adding a bow arm with brass rod.

For a more traditional zombie future, a Studio Miniatures zombie chicken and a zombie hunter who's manufacturer escapes me

Studio Miniatures zombie chicken

That's more than enough for a first post, so I'll stop there for now. The next post will hopefully be about the Blackbeard figure I painted for my Dad's birthday, but it might change. I hope to post once a week at the moment (seemingly the thing to do with blogs, until you get bored and forget), and there are still lots of figures to cover.

Sadly, the new smell has worn off this blog, and now it's just another bunch of bytes cluttering up cyberspace. Until next time.