Wait for the waitress

Only one mini for today, with a slight conversion. I'm in love with all the Otherworld ranges, but that's easy, you know. I've picked a few minis with my RT setting in mind. First one is this 'serving wench':

Pic taken from Otherworld web

I somehow saw a sci-fi waitress here. The mini needed some subtle (on not that subtle) adjustements and...

Not that difficult

 

I used staples and a terminator link to make her left arm look bionic, the rest was just a matter of greenstuff...

And wires!

 

Clara O'Connor is not what you may call a heroine, she's just a regular waitress at the Sparklin' Pulsar. Young and with little perspective of improvement, she's simply one more of her generation, trying to pay bills and to survive in a hard world.

With the boss at the Sparklin' Pulsar

Some time ago she got the chance... A young man called Kilo Ris bumped onto her and begun to speak nonsense about her being the hope for the future generations, something about her unborn son and stuff like that. Unfortunately the Necron invasion of her homeworld took place just a few days later. Clara shot that Kilo Ris stalker guy in the face with a shotgun and run away. With the planet being invaded, she found a new life as a refugee and after some time she became waitress at the Pulsar in Besenval.

At work!

She may look frail, but take my advice, don't go mess with her...

This is it for today. I made quite a purchase to Otherworld, so you will be seeing more stuff soon... ;)

Battlefleet Gothic. My old Imperial Fleet

As these days I've been onto small scales, I remembered that I even had a smaller scale than 6mm! If you remember, early this year I posted my BFG Ork Fleet. (1, 2, 3) Well, I haven't tested them yet on the table, my fault :(

But I've remembered that I painted this Imperial Fleet looong time ago, let me briefly introduce the ships:

Emperor class Battleship Orion

Dictator class Cruiser Athena and Mars class Battle Cruiser Perseus

Lunar class Cruisers Master of Cosmos and Atlantis

Gothic class Cruiser Solaris and Dominator class Cruiser Dauntless

I also made my own DIY star fortress, or more kind of a starship dock:

Star Fortress Penthesilea

Naive attempt made of tiny garbage about 15 years ago, give or take

But hey, it was designed with care

Besides, at some point I wanted to begin a Space Marines fleet, but only got to purchase my first Battle Barge:

The Octavius, belonging to the Ultramarines

Well, of course you can see they were painted loooong, loooong time ago, they need a repaint for sure. Not only because how chunky they look, I have another reason. As you can see, that fleet has a disturbing lack of escort ships. It's in dire need of frigates and smaller vessels. A friend of mine gently sold me his, but you can guess, I finally bought him all he had...

 

 

You know. These things happen...

So that's my perfect excuse to strip them all and repaint all of them unifying the style!
Agh! Lots of work ahead!! :D

Going Epic. Imperator Titan. Pt. 2

Here it is as promised :)

I've managed to finish the beast. You'll see that I kept the blue and white pattern, trying to make a nice combination. All the other ornaments just go in black, didn't want to overdone it with metals, as the huge amount of tiny details would make it look too baroque. The trick was making them apparent, but not distracting, so the eye gets the whole bulk but doesn't get lost in details:

 

Am I too much? Am I?

 

As the Imperator Titan is a shrine to the Omnissiah, it has to look like one! Well, the cathedral on its back should give you a hint, but I also thought it could be a nice touch making inscriptions on the ornaments, the kind of pious texts you can find on the walls of some of the most impressive churches and cathedrals. If you look closer to the pic below you will see what I mean:

 

Some of them unreadable. Well, I tried

So well, in fact this is a walking war cathedral. I added a banner (a regular Space Marine one) and, after some proper basing, this is the result:

Meet the Miserere Nobis

 

The name was something that popped up while writing the inscriptions. Miserere Nobis ("have mercy on us") sounded quite ecclesiastical and forceful for my purposes. So let it be. Here you have a comparison pic with Epic infantry:

 

Remember, not to scale, not even close. It is supposed to be way much larger

 

After I played Dropzone Commander, I really rediscovered the pleasure of playing smaller scales, and then I remembered I had this Titan and lots of other Epic stuff! So I'll be taking my tiny soldiers out of their boxes, paint all that I still have unpainted and see where this sillyness takes me!

Going Epic. Imperator Titan. Pt. 1

A new project! Long time nurtured, as usual, but finally commited to it :) I don't usually show unfinished stuff, you know, but please indulge me this time, I'll try to make it worth of. Eventually :D

Some time ago I got this beauty. An Imperator Titan (Weeee!!)

 

Ahem. Some Mechanicus repairings needed

 

I've been trying to get back to Epic for a few years. I'm afraid I skipped the original Space Marine game, I first got on this when the 2nd Ed. was released back in the late nineties. I've played this not that many times, and I'm in the mood for getting back to it. I'm a little bit lost on the rules with all that NetEpic and Epic Armaggedon stuff, I bet I still have to do some research (advice welcome!)

Buuut, about the Titan. Massive war machines erected to the Omnissiah's own image and likeness, the Imperator class Titan is the largest of all, bearing unspokable destructive power on the enemies of the Emperor. Though designed for Epic, the mini of course is not to scale. If we consider the average infantry soldier to be 6mm high for the game, this monster should be... 20, 25? cm high. I recently spotted a guy over the internet using an Imperial Knight (28mm scale) as an Imperator Titan and, oh, man, that really rocks!!

Anyway. My Titan. Thanks to the magic of Oyumaru I was able to rebuild the whole four towers on  the corners:

 

Hell yeah, now that's a cute walking cathedral

 

I wasn't sure of what colours would fit in here. We all of course remember the astoundishing original art of the red Titan:

Just in the unlikely event you didn't know of this (Boooo!)

 

Well, too Red Era for me. I'm going just the opposite way:

This poor big fella is feeling blue

The cold colour scheme works nice here, I believe. After the metals, I'm trying some grey/white on the big plasma weapon and the spires.

I added a MDF base, it was constantly falling down

 Now I'm currenty with all the upper part, the war cathedral. I hope it's finished in a few days! Stay tuned!

Some more zeds incoming!

Ouch. Barely in time, but I've managed to finish these. Coming once again from Clearco Miniatures, this new kit gives you some freedom, as it comes with several spare heads you can combine as you wish. Once again, they are nice sculpts and will definitely add some more variety to my board :)

 

Most likely my favourite from the whole bunch

I may be a zombie, but my watch still rocks

Man, that tee is never out of fashion

Little bit embarassing, zombie apocalypse got him in his pajamas...

Right! Survivors left just that way!

 

They have been definitely fun to paint. Didn't take much time, but once again, I've been painting all the final touches at quite separate moments, so it's a little bit difficult to calculate. Here you have all of them:

 

Man, that stag party went out of control quite quickly...

 

OK, this is it for today. I'm trying to finish more stuff, let's see if I can bring it on next week, it will be a change, that I can say! ;)

Archive pics: WH40K comic attempt

Once again little work done these days, not enough to have anything finished to show over here. In fact I'm programming this post a few hours in advance at an ungodly hour, I didn't even realize it was monday!!

Last week I was talking a little about drawing. That brought some memories about my sadly long time forgotten attempts of doing some comics. Back in the day I used to doodle while taking notes in class (school and university alike). Though nothing really artistic or out of this world, I used to make up stories, build some mildly complex plots and just put my pencils on the paper. Last time I did so was when I embarked myself on the silly adventure of some WH40K fanfic. Not only I did some pencils, but I also decided to apply some colour (the very same acrylics I used for the minis!).

That of course meant that I went sooo slow that I never finished the plot I had in mind and I abandoned the project while in #2 out of 8 volumes I had planned. But anyway I finished #1 (48 pages) and #2 was quite on its way. I have no decent scans of the panels, but some petty pics.

 

Volume #1 finished

 

I experienced not only RealLifetm issues (which led me to abandon the project), but... artistic discrepances with some of my pals. The plot itself had quite a RT flavour, the lead character being an adventurer who is hired by some misterious xenos in a hive city underworld in order to recover "something" important to those pointy-ears weirdos. During the expedition the group gets involved into major problems as the stuff they want to recover is in a conflict area and the adventurer is himself being pursued by a Commissar and some more people who have their own plans for desertors like him...

 

Of course we had some of these!

 

 Well, some pals thought that the story wouldn't fit in the 40K universe, as some of these ideas were no more canon and official fluff was pretty going on some other direction. So after some heavy rejection from a few people (the Oldhammer movement hadn't been invented by the time!) I felt somehow tired. I realized that I was being slave of a) other people's IP and b) other people's opinions, and I should not give a shit about any of those!

 

Smiling guy of the scenics...

 

Of course you can see the limitations coming from my puny art and the limitations coming from the use of acrylics on paper...

 

There was to be a double splash on every volume

 

It's a shame I didn't carry it on, I had done other comics before, but this was my first serious attempt on colours and an extended script to be developed on several volumes.

 

My intention was to give some part to every single major Army in the game

 

 The project is currently on a dead end, it's been this way for... eight, ten years maybe? Something like that. The fact of handpainting everything was killing me, I simply couldn't keep on at a decent rate. What I've been thinking of lately is getting back to the beginning, but with two major changes. First of all, setting the plot in my own universe, far from other people's IP. That gives me freedom to do whatever I want and not having anyone telling me 'GW doesn't support your interpretation'. And secondly, going into digital art. I could do the pencils and ink, but colouring a full scale comic totally overwhelms me. It's simply not a realistic plan nowadays. I would like to think that digital colour would offer me some leverage on that aspect.

 

Cypher approves my idea

 

Well, of course it's not a real-real plan, it's kind of a wish. But well, that's my fantasy, hey!

If any of you have real interest in this attempt of comic, I believe I could scan what I have. Using Photoshop I could translate it into English and making it readable for everyone, but please understand that this would involve a number of hours! So I guess I would only do it if there is any real massive interest, hehe! If not, just be patient, I'll remake it all under a new perspective and a similar-yet-very-different setting. Yes. At some point. In the future. Ahem.

I'll hopefully bring more minis during the week! Preferably new ones, I'm on it, I'm on it...

Archive pics: Malcom Reynolds

Hi everyone!

I'm slowly coming back to the usual two posts by week rate, I'll try to keep it up. First thing you may have noticed is that I (finally) changed the header. It was long time needed, I know. What I had was a temporary solution (well, it was in my mind!), but you know, there is nothing as permanent as the temporary...

This new one pretends to be just another temporary solution until I make some other experiments (so I guess you can expect it to be there for another two or three years, ha!), this was just to help me finding a drawing style and combining tools. The composition is quite awful, but I'll try to make it up, promise.

Ahem. Now to the real stuff.

Today I'm rescuing a treasure from oblivion which is quite dear to me. My friend Maria from MCC Arte sculpted this piece for me a few years ago. She's a talented amateur artist making her way out in the world of sculpting and airbrushing. I've encouraged her many times to keep on the path of the arts, but I'm afraid she's scattered through too many things in RealLifetm to focus on her production.

Anyway, back in 2011 when she was starting, she sculpted this Captain Malcom Reynolds for me:

I'm a huge fan of the Firefly universe, so when she gave me this I couldn't but squeak and jump, for me this was the coolest among the cool. It's made out of Sculpey and it's quite big, it's not made in any commercial scale.

Now it was up to me making it resemble the real guy!

Sooo, slow step by step

No power in the 'verse can stop me!

Agh! I'm blind!

 

This was all I could achieve on the face

 

I got a base for the guy, this is the final result

 

Being the gift it was, you can understand this piece is quite dear to me, as I told above, and I consider it a little treasure.

Go visit my pal's blog and encourage her to come back to production!

On my behalf I can only say that this is not the last Firefly related stuff you've seen here, but only the first... (Plans! I have lots of plans!)