Diesel DM

eStryker: face and hair completed

I’ve been searching for my next Cygnar caster to paint and play. Currently I have pStryker, pCaine and Kara Sloan. It seemed like eStryker, with his in-your-face melee, caster assassinating abilities would make a good change-up from the my current warcasters.  Also the model is remarkably dynamic.  The base however, wasn’t for me.  I cast that aside and have replaced it with an angled rock cliff, as if Stryker were running up and about to jump off it to deliver the kill.

I’ve played him a few times and it’s a nice change of pace, but will take some learning to get used to. Gotta get him up front, but not so far as to get wiped out second turn.

For now the face and hair are done.  The close-up iPhone shot really killed the contrast on the hair, but I really like how it came out.  I typically use standard PP mixtures found in the FoW books, but since the hair is my own creation, here’s the recipe I used:

Base: Ember Orange

Shade: Wash of Bloodstone and Mixing Medium, applied carefully into crevices, avoiding tops as best you can.

Highlight 1: Hit the tops with Ember Orange again to cover any Bloodstone that escaped the shadow areas

Highlight 2: Ember Orange + Cygnus Yellow, paint the tops of the roots and the tips

Highlight 3: Highlight 2 + Menoth White Highlight, paint the same areas as Highlight 2, but smaller to leave some Highlight 2 showing

Highlight 4: Highlight 3 + more Menoth White Highlight, paint very small area of roots and tips

For the Shading and Highlighting I used a Raphael 8404 3/0.  Keep it wet with a good supply of paint to prevent the tip from drying out too quickly, but not so much paint that it floods your shaded areas.

As my first epic caster I’m excited for painting this one and am going to see how good I can get it.  Hopefully this will end up being one of my finer models, but time will tell.

Storm Strider – Crawling across the battlefield

At long last I’ve completed the Storm Strider.  This thing was a ridiculous amount of work.  When I first got it assembled I thought there wasn’t much detail, this thing would be done in no time. WRONG. Painting all those blue glowing circles and the gold rings that surround them takes a significant amount of time, and I didn’t even blend them.  All in all this is one of my least favorite models. I didn’t like assembling it and I didn’t like painting it. I can only hope it plays well on the table.

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After my recent flurry of model completions I’ve started in on something much larger: a Storm Strider.  I actually got this for my birthday in July 2011, but hadn’t assembled it, trying to build up the rest of my force.  Now is the time to get this guy on the table.  I think there is a lot of potential for this in a game and I’ll be interested to see how it plays.

As for the model itself, this is probably the worst-cast model I’ve assembled.  The plastic pieces have gaps, bubbles, missing edges, smushed details, it’s a mess.  I contemplated just taking a picture of every plastic piece in the kit and submitting it to the missing parts portal, that’s how bad it is.  But I’ve decided to just work with what I have and get this construct on the table.  I like to fully assemble models before painting but as with the Stormwall, that wasn’t going to be possible here.  Instead I have the legs and the main platform assembled, then the two Stormsmiths, the ball and the coils are all separate.

Assembly is my weakpoint and it was proven here as I struggled to get the legs and platform together.  And even after all that I somehow had the legs spread too far apart so they were surrounding the base rather than being on it.  I had to break one of them off and retry.  I’d like to think the poor plastic molding allowed me to make such a terrible error, but it’s certainly more to do with my assembling skills.

Storm Strider legs and platform metallics

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Harlan Versh, Illuminated One

Another low-cost solo to help fill out fully painted lists, here is Harlan Versh.  The fist thing many will notice is that I added some color to Versh.  The artwork for Harlan is all browns, and it looks great, but on the table-top I didn’t think that much brown would be very eye-catching, maybe even a bit boring. So I decided to give him denim pants, a green waist coat and a while jacket.  Then for the hat and trench coat I went with tan.  He might not match his artwork, but he’s visually interesting. (more…)