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.

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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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.