Diesel DM

Horgenhold Forge Guard

I’ve completed the min-unit of Forge Guard.  I purchased the repackaged max unit, but painting units is painful enough without doing all 10 at once.  Also I only need 6 for the list I have in mind.  The thought is to have these guys screen for my Storm Strider.  Weapon Masters with reach should discourage models wanting to take free strikes to get past them.  Though at SPD 4 I’ve got to make sure they get out ahead of the Strider enough to screen for it without significantly slowing it down.

Initially when painting began I though they were wall Hammerfall Khaki and this was a simple unit, but once you get brush to model you realize there’s a lot of detail here. There’s the green shoulders and elbow armor, the gold chest piece, which I them matched to the rear armor piece which isn’t shown in the studio scheme. There’s leather straps, green pants beneath the armor plates, red insignia and so on.

Backpacks, lots of backpacks

Each model in the unit sports an identical backpack, topped with a bed roll and hung with a mug. For the bases I consulted the old IK World Guide to see what Horgenhold was like: mountain and cold.  So I went with larger grit for the bases, dry brushing the Battlefield Brown with Bloodstone Red, then Morrow White.  I then used Army Painter winter tufts and snow flock to complete it.

The leader

The only model with a fully exposed face is the leader, and I enjoyed painting it.  It came out well, especially the eyes.

I’m looking forward to getting these guys on the table and I really should paint up the other 4 eventually….someday… Have I mentioned I don’t like painting units?

In preparation for an upcoming Journeyman League, I wanted to add the Tempest Blazers to my list as an excuse to buy, paint and play them. For those unfamiliar, the Tempest Blazers are a unit of Gun Mages mounted on horseback.  Each horse it made of three pieces: a left half, a right half and a head.  There are two styles of horses and two styles of heads.  The heads and bodies are interchangeable giving you 4 different horses, out of the max unit of 5.

Cygnar’s Tempest Blazer unit

The horse halves fit together okay, though I took some plastic sanding needles to them to help smooth out the top joint.  The heads however, have a very large gap all around as shown in the picture below on the top horse.  I’m not great at assembly and my sculpting is limited to the pouches I made in the last post.  But the joint was so bad I knew I couldn’t possibly make it worse.

Tempest Blazer Horses – Raw neck joint (top), grey staff gap filling (bottom)

I mixed up some grey stuff and rolled a portion out into a long thin cylinder.  I then wrapped it around the joint, cutting off the excess and pressing it into the gap.  From there I got out a sculpting tool and proceeded to smooth the grey stuff out, forward and backward, to cover the gap and try to seamlessly smooth out that gap.  As you can see in the bottom horse, it came out really well.  The proof will be once it’s primed and painted, but it’s certainly far better than the initial gap.

The top joint for the horse half came out well on all of them, so that wasn’t and issue, but I did use the same technique to patch up the seams at the back and bottom of the horse halves.

Sculpting the very, very small

Way back at Lock & Load 2012, I attended a session where Sean Bullough, a Privateer Press studio sculptor, covered how to sculpt leather pouches.  I’m like to immerse myself in all aspects of Warmachine, the game, the fluff and the hobby.  A big part of the hobby side is sculpting, and I’ve never tried that.  And I really wanted to.  So it was with great enthusiasm that I took notes on how to sculpt a pouch.  Sadly nearly a year has passed without me getting a chance to actually try this out, so my memories are pretty faded and my notes are cryptic in a few spots.  I’m sure they made total sense when I wrote them.

(more…)

Rangers – Scouting in the wild

While I have been working steadily on painting models for lists I have been trying to play, I took a detour to paint the Rangers, who had been primed and on their slate bases for many months. I don’t currently have a list I use them in, but now that they are painted I think I’ll find some spots to try them out.

The Ranger were a good change of pace as they are mostly green cape with some brown armor and clothing. There is a bit of Cygnar blue on the knees and edges of their coats. Just enough to make them Cygnar and hopefully not ruin their camouflage.  The bases are standard P3 bases with Kromlech Slate Basing Kit pieces applied.  I wanted the Rangers to feel adventurous and not just in the middle of the battlefield, so I the slate rocks helped elevate four of them and add some larger scenery to the other two.  I went heavy on the Jungle Tufts from Army Painter to really sell the deep woods feel.

Camo Cloaks

The cloaks are based with Ordic Olive, highlighted with Iosan Green and shaded with Battlefield Brown.  These jumps of color helped give a camouflage feel, but instead of the pattern, it’s as if the cloaks change from green to brown based on the viewing angle.  Probably could go one highlight more, but I think it is pretty good.