Diesel DM

Gobber mechanik, ready to work

While flipping through my IKRPG book my 2-year-old son was very interested in the Gobber  on page 5, so much so that we had to flip through the rest of the book looking for “more Gobbers Daddy, more Gobbers”.  Surprisingly there are a lot of Gobber pictures in the book.  So I decided to paint him up his very own Gobber.  I grabbed one from the Cygnar mechaniks unit and got to work.  I tried to go extra bright with a lot of the colors to make it more appealing to a 2-year-old.  It occurs to me that this is the first miniature I’ve ever painted for someone else.  Not exactly commission work, but it should be well worth it.

I kept the colors similar to those of the IKRPG pg5 Gobber

Carrying, of course, a Cygnar ‘jack arm.

I like the blue goggles, they really pop on the green and brown

Painting and basing are complete, but in the hands of a 2-year-old I’m thinking it’s best to put two coats of gloss varnish and then a matte coat in hopes of it surviving. Once that’s complete I think I’ll get back to eStryker, who is based and primed.

I’m not exactly sure how the Warmachine ruleset for 2-year-olds works, but it seemed very important that you place a die next to each mini.

Gobbers vs Khador

I don’t have high hopes for the unit of Cygnar Field Mechaniks with an Avenger against Winter Guard w/ UA, a max unit of Man-O-War Shocktroopers and a Manhunter all led by Sorscha. For a while my son had all the Gobbers in the woods, each with their own die beside them. I think that was a better plan than rushing out to meet the Khadorans head-on.  We can only hope reinforcements arrive soon for the Cygnarans.

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.

(more…)

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

(more…)