Power swords and Lightning claws (or why I5 is awesome for characters)

So I apologize for not having an update the last week or so I had some personal shit go down an it's still ongoing so expect odd updates, but short of that lets get this ball rolling.

So about 3-4 weeks ago when I picked up the forgefiend (which is still in progress) I also picked up a box of the new raptors some parts of which I mixed and matched with a box of regular CSM but we'll get to that another time. Four of the raptors became Lords/Captains, and I gave two of them power swords and the other two lightning claws so they could be switched out. Though most of the time I honestly think I'll be running a lord with lightning claws. 

Now it's no lie I love raptors, and almost all jump troops, something about the phrase "Strike from the skies brothers!" sounds almost magical to me. Thus I love having a massive amount of jump troops to harass the enemy early in the game I5 with the option of FNP is simply a nice icing on the cake. 

 I was slightly torn on how to paint these guys weapons though, as I thought too much metal would make them as characters look kinda bland. I decided to go for the classic glassy blue color, as I thought it would be nice to bring a cool color into the model. Though It was pointed out to me that I chose in doing so the three primary colors blue, yellow, and red.

 That being said though I really love the design of the claws, most of them are designed very very well and produce a fear effect that I find quite nice. my main bitch about them though is the lightning bolts. I cannot properly describe the annoyance of these thin lines but I'll do my best, Imagine that you are painting on a space as large as your paintbrushes brush but you can't get a smaller one because the paint is too thin and runny. It looks neat but I would have much preferred an alternate claw without the lightning bolts.  

The only other thing I realy don't like is the lack of laying with the models movement, most of them look nice, but some of the arms and heads together don't quite look well, and most of the heads have the problem of the neck joint being too short and kind of sunken into the chest cavity. 

 Now I felt these two looked much better than the first, in terms of movement and decided to make them white helmets (vets.) but it is worth noting that these heads were altered and not in the raptors box, The one with claws is a standard topknot CSM head which was cut off and shaved into the arrow, I having never been fond of the top knots with few exceptions (Abbadon and the fantasy Slaanesh lord being they) The other was a khorne berzerker helmet that I cut those stupid looking bunny ears off of, actually if you do this with most of the berzerker heads they look much much better IMO.

 Not much I can say about this guy, he came out how I wanted, though I kinda feel I should have put a mark on his shoulder.

 now I did some other converting on this guy most notably adding the sword from a Chaos knight from the fantasy line, but I think it will look pretty good should I ever decide to take a lord with the murder sword. I took a bolter from the sanguinary guard and gave it to him, though I kinda wish I had some fire effects to add to it.

So moving on from the raptors are a couple of champions I made/painted for my noise marine squads. Though I not sure how often I will be using both.

 Now let me start off by saying I love this shoulder pad, it looks fantastic for noise marine dudes in general. In fact most of the paldrons with those vents that look like speakers do.

 So you may be wondering why they have tongues. long story short I had these fucked up helmets, I kinda wanted to do something with them but I wanted them to look a bit more like chaos, so I drilled them out and put an elongated tongue in their place feeling it would fit the slaanesh theme.

 Now I kinda like this guy, even though I'm not a fan of the X-23 thing he has going on with his version of the lightning claws, though I suppose it beats the retarded look of the wolverine claws they made for the 5th set. Not too much I can say other than that, I decided to do a royal purple here, thinking blue would look weird but I'm kinda regretting my decision now....maybe I'll change it in the future but chances are I'll leave him as is as a reminder.

 Finally we come to the last painted model of this week. I struggled for a while trying to decide how I wanted to paint him, a suggestion coming my way of a family member to do him with an homage to david bowie with glam makeup.... So I did...and I think it looks pretty good.

Not much I can say that the picture does for me.

Finally the last little pit this week, a W.I.P. that might not see finishing for a little while but looks cool none the less. 

That's it for this week, Hope you enjoyed it, Comments, questions and such are always welcome below, Have a great week. 

~SWL

How 'bout an actual update?

So long story short I don't have the full army of space marines painted, after a rollercoaster of a week including new classes, running out of sepia wash and replacing it with watered down brown ink (NEVER DO THIS), an old friend showing up in town, ect. ect. ect. this week has flown by. However I did manage to get a daemon prince painted for you folks so lets check him out real quick.

 I'm sure the first thing you notice on him is the crab claw which came courtesy of the daemon princess I ordered a little while back for my daemon army before I actually got Babylon. I wanted to give it a chitinous look though so I decided to do it daemonette hide and then hit it with a secret weapon purple wash which I feel complimented it rather nicely.

I feel maybe I could have added some more metals than silver to this but I'm not sure it would work out so well, the black fits with what I'm going for (again Slaaneshi Imperial fists) but I feel I could have thrown some gold in there somewhere.

The horns were from the Tzeentch banner of the CSM box, I think they add nicely to the model itself, and I hardly see any daemons with more than those two derpy looking ones. Honestly though I would have loved it if I had an extra fiend of slaanesh head to swap out, I think it would have looked pretty good on a daemon prince.

Now for what most of you no doubt came for.

As I'm not done with My CSM army I have decided to do this, a giveaway every week until I am finished. Standard rules, email in the comments, I pick a winner and send them an email for their contact info. Good luck, See you folks next week.

~SWL

It's how big!? (small update)

Sorry to disappoint, but with some stuff going on this week as well as not being able to pick up anything until today (friday) I seem to have fallen behind, rest assured I still have an update but it's a smaller one before I show off the one of the projects I've been working with off and on for a year now.  SO let me start off by saying the Chaos codex is great having picked it up and thumbed through it. I forsee quite a few good matches coming from it's rules and am rather liking the idea of a slaanesh sorc riding around with 9 feel no pain noise marines tooled for assault in a land raider. Also it gave me a good name for my Chaos Imperial fists so I don't have to call them "Dornian heresy" Marines anymore. The brotherhood of Lethe, Which opens up all sorts of ideas for scenic basing. But that isn't what I want to talk about today, what I want to talk about is one of our new toys for heavy support.

Now I was dubious when I first saw the fiends, but have been since convinced that they can fill a much needed roll in our army, so I picked one up and while being surprisingly simple to put together is also quite large, I was actually amazed how big the thing is.

I recall being surprised at the size of the Tervigon when I got one of those too and wonder if I just have a hard-on for Monstrous creatures. But I find that the more I look at this model as well as it's conversion potential to other projects the more I find myself liking it. The guns look good, the pipes on it's flanks look excellent (for just about any vehicle that you want to have a small pipe-organ feel. The only thing I'm not a fan of is the reptilian head, but I must commend them for giving us the alternative shown above.

That's all for now, expect a larger update this week which will also include some W.I.P.s

~SWL

Need for speed! (painting that is)

Hey folks hope you had a good week, Got an early update for you today a speed painting tutorial for two goblins, one done is the bright almost cartoon-y version that I prefer and then the other done in a very quick style that only needs touch ups. I sort of lost my will to paint the skaven yesterday so expect a bonus update about mid-week with the skaven tutorial in which I will show some interesting colors and ways to do things such as rust.

But for now lets talk goblins.

The first step I do is prime white. Many people don't like to prime white and usually choose black, white does three things: Makes colors brighter, absorbs inks and washs better, and finally will make you a better painter because it doesn't allow you to cut corners as black does, I hear many swear by grey primer but I'm not convinced.

So the next step is the basecoat of the skin, in this case I started with scorpion green (which is near necrite green for those using P3's line) which is almost a bright neon in color.This color will be brought down in the next step so don't worry.

So this is the step where these two goblins are going to diverge in their painting evolutions, the tribal goblin is getting a dose of the green shade from GW while the night goblin with the squig will be getting a P3 ink treatment. Normally I water down the ink a little bit but I didn't feel it was nessecary this time as it was just a drop. covering three small areas, Remember Inks are like LSD "A little dab will do ya."

Our goblin friend will remain like this for a little while, as he'll get done rather quickly now that he only really has details and weapons to paint. So we'll focus on the Night gobbo for a bit.

As you can see I added a layer of coal black for his hood and clothes, as well as painted a layer of Lime green (vallejo, Wurm green is the P3 equivalent) for the skin and we can already see the miniature coming together.

Wanthing to give a nice contrast with the model and not seeing very many Orange squigs, I decided to make an orange ink with the P3 red and yellow inks (3 drops red, 4 yellow will net you this mixture) which after it dried I added a light brown for the leash as well as coloring in the eyes on the goblin and squig with mephiston red (which I'm still convinced is the best red I have ever used) and finally added a menoth white base to their teeth and claws.

Now sadly I went a bit fast on this one, and perhaps should have taken another picture inbetween this and the last one, but hopefully I explain it well. The first step was to add a tanned almost ochre color for the wood, when a sepia wash is applied to this color it gives the appearance of wood, I also added a very light silver color to the top and bottom of the hook and when dry went over it with a coat of black wash finally finishing up with very light drags of an old brush with mephiston red for blood spatter. You also notice that the squig is more defined now thanks to a sepia was over the entire skin, teeth and claws, which I feel pulls  a lot of color and character into it.

Meanwhile our tribal goblin  gets his bones and feathers painted, along with the beady red eyes though you can hardly tell those are painted from more than six inches away.

The next few steps were rather simple, adding brown to the loin cloth as well as the bands around the wrists. The bow got an ochre treatment like the hook on the night goblin, it along with the bones and loincloth got a sepia wash while the feathers got their standard blue glaze which I still think looks great. Finally I made the spider pink and gave it a small wash of purple to show the segmentation and such.He may seem kind of dull compared to the first guy but he only took 15 minutes to paint, compared to the 30 of the first, which if you are like me and have an assembly line of the little bastards can be a godsend, but ultimately it depends on what you want to do.

Hope you learned somthing from this, as I said I'll have a skaven up later this week as well as talk a bit on my thoughts on the new CSM codex once I have it in my possession.

Preview of somthing else I'll be working on this week:

Have a great week, See you guys soon.

~SWL

Watch the skies! (The parasite returns)

Hey there folks, This week I decided to work on the parasite after chatting with a few folk I know IRL and not having enough time to paint a tank this week. 

So time to show off the completed parasite, and the color scheme I have chosen for my 'nid army.

 Well it may be a bit of a cop out, but results from those that I hear from were so varied on the two color schemes that I decided to do them both, the medium to big sized bugs getting the darker color scheme, and the small ones getting the bright green with blue shell.

 

 It's worth noting that I tried out the secret weapon purple ink over vallejo pink for the membranes of the wings as well as a few other spots, which I think gives it a distinct contrast, though I think some butterfly type symbols wouldn't be amiss if I ever decide to touch it up.

 So all in all that is my Parasite of mortrex, hopefully I have some gargoyles completed soon to keep him company.

In other news while trying to finish the parasite I wanted to redo my company commander for my Traitor guard. As my army is fluffed as house guard gone cult, I thought it only fitting that their company commander should be the lady of the house.

 Yes I do realize there are better whips around now, but I really didn't feel like remaking or tearing the piece offso even though it looks kinda bad I still kinda like it.

 For those of you wondering the model is from anima tactics, and she's a 32mm scale, so if you decide to get some for any of your armies he will look taller and thinner than most but I feel that kinda fits for this army so I let it slide.

 Her hair was done simply with the P3 brown ink over white paint, which I was astonished looked so good when done. again the pinks were done with a light coat of purple wash over them.

If I can't get around to another tank this week You will probably see these gals next update.

As always leave any comments you may have below, and have a great week.

~SWL