Diesel DM

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.

Having acquired a Stormwall at Lock & Load, getting it assembled, painted and on the table has been my top Warmachine priority. Unfortunately a week of traveling interrupted early progress, but I’m rolling along now.

Mostly assembled and based

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Little time for painting lately, but in the moments I have found, I’ve been working on my newest Cygnar ‘caster: Kara Sloan. Probably going very close to standard paint scheme on this one, except I’ll use my ‘Jack Bone/Menoth White Highlight color for the white on the dress to make sure she ties in with the rest of my Cygnar forces.

You may recognize this repose from my article over on HCO: Simple Kara Sloan Conversion

I made the base using the technique I read about here: Brush Thralls: Slate Bases

The last few models I’ve done I’ve base coated the entire model first, then gone back for details.  For Kara I’m switching it up and going back to painting each part to completion from inside out.  This is nice as it gives a better feeling of progress and I think I’ll be less likely to miss things.  On the other hand when you make a mistake it takes a lot more effort to correct.

Face and Cygnar blues completed

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The Cygnar Hunter is one of my favorite ‘jacks. He sports an almost reptilian stance, like a predatory dinosaur on the hunt. His face has a bit of a mean, aggressive look to it, while the top of the chassis has a refined aerodynamic feel.

When it comes to the game one of the biggest distinctions the Hunter has is Pathfinder. I wanted to embrace this as I based him to give it the feel that he wasn’t just out on a flat battlefield, but he was in rough terrain, on the hunt. I decided to have him just coming down a bank and stepping into a forest stream.

On the hunt.

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