Friday, October 2, 2009

The Ursamarines vs. The Ursus Bellum

Still struggling with the name decision, but I guess I'm leaning toward Ursamarines. In the grim dorky world of my far 40K tournament future, I think it will be more acceptable to other players. Ursus Bellum sounds singular, some might need an interpretation, and it might come off like I'm just plain trying too hard. It's a tricky thing, finding something that's cool in a nerdy world, and still have it be my brand of nerdy.

I need to work on the lighting for my pics, but below are a couple marines showing my newly finalized colors. The ML was painted entirely with this new scheme, while the flamer was painted in a different scheme and then touched up to bring in line with the new.
This was more about finding the colors, and less about painting to top standard. Hopefully, my line highlights will be more careful and neat on showier pieces. Also, these obviously need a lot more work (weapons, details, etc. but I do like the eye of the ML trooper).

I decided to ditch the pauldrons with a bleached bone field. They are bears...bears that have been charging through the blood of their kills, seeking more enemies to slay. Really, I wanted brown, but after deciding that most will have red legs, I found that the brown was overpowered by the huge white pauldrons. I think this will also help with the chapter symbol, a nice dark background to slap a white symbol on. I may have some vets with white helms, and some sarge's with red helms. We'll see.

Because of the dark lighting, you'll definitely need to view the larger pic to see anything, and maybe even zoom in on that.

Also, with the switch to brown pauldrons, I can get away with a pauldron trim color, which is more appropriate since it's a codex chapter at the moment. I'm leaning toward a muted gold for second company or red for third (Ultramarines standards)

Blah blah blah...

Update: a stab at correcting the shoddy pic...colors are a little more true to life:

Thursday, October 1, 2009

40K TERRAIN with Pegasus Hobbies Gothic building sets...

This is a little closer to what I had in mind. I'd still like to stretch the building sets with some less ornate panels...get more out of them. I'd also like to elevate the whole structure and have a stair leading up to the main entry (again, like zigor). That would also allow for a blasted floor and rubble spilling out of the building.

And of course, whatever configuration I set the pieces up in, I plan to have a lot more flooring remnants at the various levels. I like the idea of almost everything counting as a ruin, but minimizing the area terrain (I wouldn't want to play the entire interior as area terrain). I'll have to consider that if I decide to glue these up into a permanent configuration. Right now, I'm just having fun building and seeing how far the pieces will go (I used most of what I have on this set-up).

I was very careful when I was shooting the pics...some of them are pretty fuzzy...








Friday, September 25, 2009

40K TERRAIN MADNESS, why I have no beer money...

Okay, I mentioned I made a purchase...here's a preview:

In the boxes:

The boxes opened: (there's a lot of plastic here)

A quick structure: (all boxes are modular and compatible, this is probably no more than 15% of the available pieces)

The pics aren't great, I had to coax each shot from the dying batteries...

but I'm excited by the possibilities. The pieces snap together, so I can take apart and reconfigure with ease. I'm eager to take a look at the cathedral we discussed last weekend, ruined by the Crashed Imperial Aquila Lander.

However, I'm also looking forward to finalizing (to a point) the putty casts I did. I do plan to reduce the scale of the structure you saw and make two ruined corners instead.

Friday, September 11, 2009

WARHAMMER 40K TERRAIN, casting building components...

Well, I finally did a wall panel. I'm not sure I'm all that crazy about he results. These haven't been sanded or shaped to fit together, or glued, painted, etc. (they are just stacked in the picture). Those things might help, but I'm not sure about continuing with this idea.

I like the Gothic buildings of 40K, but our resin casting endeavors will probably yield much better results. As mentioned before, the foam molds and water putty might ought to be left to concrete barricades, bunkers, bridges, etc. Or a more industrial style building. Or natural elements...

Still, I'll probably cast a few more of these and remove some of the 'window glass', just so I can make at least one 12"x12 or 24" building ruin.

Unfortunately, the first glimpse of a home-made building left me thinking...man, I'd rather pay $20 bucks and get this:


Speaking of that, if I were to buy a building, what are your thoughts on an Imperial Sector (manufactorum, administratum, sanctum imperialis, additional pieces for 4th bldg)

VS.

the Imperial Strongpoint (box set contains one Imperial Strongpoint, including two plastic Bastions and three plastic Aegis Defence Lines).
I guess it just depends on the type of battlefield you're going for...obviously they pushed one for Cities of Death and one for Planetstrike. The Strongpoint does come with some cool weapons bits...not sure if they would come into play in a normal (non-Apocalypse) game though.

Monday, September 7, 2009

CONVERTING OLD TERMINATOR TO NEW SIZE...

If you remember, I got a batch of old (circa '94 or '96) terminators on the cheap, and by comparison to the current models, they seem diminutive and static. While I don't plan on getting caught up in 'true-scaling' my army, I would like there to be a difference in the sizes of a space marine in power armor compared to tactical dreadnought armour.

I've been kind of itching to see what I can do about this, so I worked more on this than terrain over the weekend. Below: the two old terminators were from identical blisters and would have the same pose if not for the conversions. The current terminator is from AoBR, but I think it's the same size-wise as those from a termie box.


You see the base layer of green stuff over the pins...I'll build this up to make it look seamless and add detail later.

360:


gotta fix that back crotch the old models have...gotta give 'em a bum...

We spoke before about sharpening the blades of weapons, I decided to do it on the lighting claws since they were so bent and chunky to begin with.
And here's a couple shots of the craters I was talking about...the first attempt is on the left, the process still needs work, will be interesting to see how they look painted



OK, terminator curiosity satisfied for the moment. I like where it's headed, but it is a lot of work...not sure if it's worth it to do every one.
Maybe I really will get to a wall panel mold this week...