Diesel DM

Rhupert Carvolo, Piper of Ord

Rhupert Carvolo, Piper of Ord must be one of the most popular mercenary solos, especially for Cygnar. He’s often found paired up with Stormblade Infantry, boosting their survivability by granting them Tough. This is one of my favorite models. He’s good on the table, has a great model and the fluff is superb. I find myself including the Piper frequently so to extend my fully-painted army abilities, he was a good candidate. Especially with the completion of eStryker, the Piper will be seeing more use than ever. (more…)

Lord Commander Stryker, aka eStryker, Stryker2

Here is the completed Lord Commander Stryker.  The paint job came out okay, but not as good as I’d originally hoped.  The paints got a bit chalky on my while blending, which is especially evident in the blues.  As for the whites on his armor I used Bloodtracker Brown for extra shading, which helped separate it from the cape which I think I used a bit of Beast Hide to darken.

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Arcane Blue and Golds

Updating eStryker work with a couple WIP shots. The first shows my take on his Arcane Blue gear.  The swirling blues in the studio model are really cool but way beyond my skill level.  Instead I’ve gone for a single gradient from top to bottom on each of the tubes. The effect came out nice, almost like a liquid electrical-arcane engergies bottled up on his back.  I also laid down the golds since I was doing the back sections anyhow.

This shot also shows the base I created to replace the included epic base.  I had to bend Stryker’s front foot to line up with the angle of the ledge, but it was a fairly straight-forward mod/rebase.

Cape, brown electrical insulation and white armor completed. Blue armor based.

With further apologies regarding the quality of this iPhone pic: I moved on to painting the brown insulation padding under his cape, the cape and the armor, in that order.  The blue armor is only based, but the cape, insulated and white armor are complete. I noticed the studio model had his electrical padding a gray color, but I made it the same brown to match my Stormblades.  I also washed shaded the golds, working the other areas while waiting for the washes to dry.

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.