Diesel DM

Taryn in Murderous Magenta

After the recent errata that made Taryn’s Shadow Fire ability work for all (not just friendly-faction) models, she’s become a new weapon for Cygnar’s shooty casters.  A model she hits with Shadow Fire now does not block LOS for anyone. eCaine and Kara Sloan no doubt shared more than few libations celebrating this one.  I decided to put her in my Sloan/Stormwall list and wanted to get her painted up.  I used her in a tournament, but sadly I didn’t quite get her all painted in time.  Nevertheless I did still use her to make the Retribution Colossal not block LOS to get a Sloan shot off on their caster dealing significant damage.  Sadly Reinholdt had died earlier, so there was no reload to be had and no way to finish off what would have been a fine assassination.

Cape was based with the airbrush

I used the airbrush to base the model in Murderous Magenta, a nice change of pace from the studio model which is a bland combination of black and brown.  I really like how the cape came out and the color scheme in general worked well.  Not a fan of her eyes though. They seem a little too Kewpie Doll and not enough mercenary.

Studio pose for Caine2

Fresh on the heels of my Madrak1 repose, I came across another caster I’ve wanted to play, but disliked the pose. First off, he appears to be shooting all around himself in a circle, this seems to line up perfectly with Caine1’s feat and not Caine2, Next, why does he have to be shooting in two different directions simultaneously? It almost seems more like he’s just randomly spraying some bullets around and hoping for the best.

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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.

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