Bling-bling for my Word Bearers

In what will most likely be my first and only (seeing how relatively expensive they are) ostentatious accessory for my Chaos Space Marines squad, I finally glued on the Word Bearers shoulder pads on the miniatures. I had gotten these babies quite a while back but only gotten to utilisng them recently.

Shiny and proud

All for the sake of authenticity in my Word Bearers army

Even after a couple of years in the hobby, I still found assembling the Chaos Space Marines a challenge. While the many separate pieces that goes into the assembly of one marine allows for very dynamic poses, it can get a little difficult (for me at least) to get the pieces fitting perfectly without any gaps or wrongly angled position of the arms. This was especially so for marines holding a bolter. All parts have been glued on except for the heads which were dry-fitted with blu-tack.

While I liked the icon-bearer's pose, in hindsight, the aspiring champion (2nd from right) looks like a disco pose (sigh)

Can you spot the Chaos Space Marine who is grasping air rather than the bolter grip?

Despite my "inner-noobness" getting the better of me at times (if you look at the photos above closely, you can easily spot some mistakes I made), I still enjoyed putting the miniatures together. Assembling sometimes can be just as fun as painting ... well almost as fun. I undoubtedly made things worse by using Super Glue instead of Plastic Glue, but it's a hard personal habit to break. I am so used to Super Glue than I rarely use Plastic Glue, if at all. Until next time, thanks for reading!  

Chaos Space Marine Forgefiend [Black Legion]

Being the biggest miniature I have painted to date, the Chaos Space Marine Forgefiend offered a new kind of challenge to me. While the Forgefiend in Black Legion colours wasn't too difficult to paint, it did have a lot of small details for such a big miniature which translated into many hours of paint time. I also decided to paint up both the head choices that came in the box as well as all the weapons i.e. the Hades autocannons and ectoplasma cannons, so that added to the time spent on this miniature. Of all the possible configurations, I think the three ectoplasma cannons one looked the coolest.

Chaos Space Marine Forgefiend with three ectoplasma cannons

In terms of lighting effects, I painted a very simple object source lighting (OSL) on the skulls of the ectoplasma cannon as well as flames on the skull furnaces located next to the exhaust pipes. The vents on the front torso were also painted in a similar manner as the ectoplasma cannons.

Some OSL effects on the ectoplasma cannon

Skull furnace was redone by adding a touch of white in the flames for contrast

Having all three ectoplasma cannons attached to the Forgefiend made it look more chaos-like. Additionally, this configuration had a better balance of organic and mechanical components.

Say aah ...

From this angle, the head looks almost bird-like

Meanwhile, the other Forgefiend configuration comprised the "Dinobot" head and two Hades autocannons a.k.a. the "Transformer" mode. To be fair, it does look cool but just not very chaos-like.

More than meets the eye ...

... robots in disguise

Front torso has similar lighting effects to the ectoplasma cannons

Even the back of the Forgefiend had a lot of details to paint

So my Chaos army finally has heavy support. There is still the Land Raider, Defiler and Heldrake in cold storage but if I were to paint all that and field them in battle ... it would be just too cheesy, wouldn't it? Anyway, have a good 4th of July to those who are celebrating it. Cheers!

Painting the face of Abbadon the Despoiler

Abbadon the Despoiler was one of the very first Games Workshop miniatures I got to complement my Chaos Space Marine Battleforce set. But I never had the confidence to attempt painting my Chaos army HQ ... until now, seeing that I needed to chalk up some practice time in painting faces anyway. In search of the best way to paint faces, I will be trying out many different approaches used by wonderfully talented painters such as Jennifer Haley, Marike Reimer and others. But for Abbadon, I decided to try out an advanced 'Eavy Metal technique. While the method was meant for normal human skin as opposed to warp tainted flesh, I used it anyway for a pre-Heresy Abbadon look.   

Front profile of Abbadon the Despoiler's face

Left profile of Abbadon's face

Right profile of Abbadon's face

For those who might be unfamiliar with the scale I was working with, I took a photo (see below) of the miniature's head together with a 31 mm paper clip and the smallest coin in the Malaysian currency. Surprisingly I did not have to use any form of optical magnification when painting the face, although going forward I may have to, in order to paint more realistic looking eyes with coloured irises and reflections of light. That, however, is a more advanced technique which I have yet to try.

Using the 'Heavy Metal Masterclass Guide to Painting Faces
If you are looking for the original Games Workshop guide to painting faces, a quick search via Google should lead you to the PDF file. In the steps below, I will be showing more of the things I did wrong (and right) when attempting to use the Masterclass guide to paint Abbadon's face.

Step 1: Painting a basecoat of Tallarn flesh on face was fairly straightforward step. In my case, I used the Light Grey Tamiya Fine Surface Primer for the undercoat.

Step 2: Another fairly easy step whereby a very thin wash of Dark Flesh was applied all over the face and the wash was allowed to pool in the recesses. I was still happy with myself at this point.  

Step 3: This step called for a second wash comprising a mix of Scorched Brown and Chaos Black. But I fumbled big time in this step as I applied the wash on too thickly. My bad.

Step 4: A first mid-tone layer comprising a 2:1:1 mix of Tallarn Flesh, Fortress Grey and Bleached Bone was applied to all areas except the recessed areas. After I completed this step, I could hardly notice much of the first wash of Dark Flesh. But that was entirely my fault for bungling Step 3.

Step 5: The second mid-tone layer was a 1:1 mix of Tallarn Flesh and Bleached Bone. I thought I did rather ok at this step. At the very least, it built a foundation for Step 6, so a pat on the back for me.

Step 6: A final mid-tone layer of pure Bleached Bone was applied only to raised areas of the face and at this stage, I could make out some depth to the face. More back slapping for me then.

Step 7: This step required a wash, mixed from equal parts Bleached Bone and Regal Blue, to be painted around the eyes. However, I modified the step slightly by using less Regal Blue. Similarly, for the suggested step of using a 1:1 wash of Scab Red and Bleached Bone on the bottom lip, I used less Scab Red to prevent it from looking too red.

Step 8: Finally, a final highlight of Skull White was painted on the most prominent areas of the face. In addition, I painted a thin glaze of Skull White on the lips to further reduce the redness. In this step, I also painted the eyes a very simple black pupil on white sclera. As I mentioned earlier, yet more advance techniques actually suggest painting the iris of the eye as well as light reflections, but I decided to leave that for another miniature and not try it on Abbadon. 

Conclusion: I was happy with the final result but there is definitely room for improvement  if I am to achieve more realistic skin tones and eyes. That means trying out new methods and practising existing ones. As for Abbadon, the rest of his body awaits painting.  

About turn, left, left, left, right, left ...

Just a short non-hobby related post in which I would like to give a shout out to my son whose scout team came in third in a school district level marching competition. He did way better than his old man ever could. I still retain horrid memories of my scout drill master who, as punishment, made us stand on one leg in front of a nearby girls school. In his defense, we were terrible at marching and had the coordination of a herd of antelopes running away from a cheetah. Ahhh the memories.   

The Imperial March

Oooo ... shiny and nice looking medal

Side note on Malaysia's worst haze/smog in 16 years
Lately, with the environment being as bad as it is, I am not really getting much done hobby-wise. I am literally choking on the air that I breath and it kinda kills the mood for painting and such.

Reuters Photo by Bazuki M. on the air pollution in Kuala Lumpur

That's it for this very short post. Hope you are enjoying blue skies where you are at.

Testing the Waters (Part 2/2) - Using epoxy resin to make water in a diorama

In the first part of my initial attempt at creating realistic water in a miniature diorama, I had outlined the steps involved in constructing the "vessel" to contain the body of water as well as painting a colour scheme for water found in still ponds or hot springs. To "make" the water, I used the Tamiya Clear Epoxy Resin, which just happened to be the most convenient product available at the time. In the future, I might try the Woodland Scenics Realistic Water but it's the Tamiya one for this project.  

Tamiya Clear Epoxy Resin was used to "make" water

Add resin and hardener in a 2:1 mixture and stir

Detailed instructions were included in the box and they specifically called for the use of a weighing scale to measure out the 2:1 ratio needed the mixture of resin to hardener. As I did not have a scale with a display of 1 gram increments I had to improvise by measuring the ratio using volume instead of weight. Please note this is not the proper way to do it because both the resin and hardener would have different densities. The mixture was stirred well before it was poured into the shallow hole.

Resin and hardener mixture was poured into the shallow hole

Tamiya recommends using its enamel paints to colour the resin mixture. But I decided to try using Citadel acrylic paints instead and they seemed to work well enough though only time will tell for sure if there are any side effects to using acrylic paint on the Tamiya epoxy resin. In this project, I used a clear epoxy resin for the water and not the coloured epoxy resin as I was unsure of the side effects.

Before adding paint (left); after adding paint (right)

With temperatures reaching as high as 35 degrees Celsius where I'm at, the epoxy resin hardened enough to be removed from the "mould" within six hours of mixing the resin and hardener. But it is best to leave it for about 24 hours to ensure proper hardening. There is a possibility I may have added too much hardener because the final epoxy resin product looked a tad cloudy (a known side effect).

Hardened clear epoxy resin

Hardened epoxy resin with Citadel acrylic paint added to it (or is it Kryptonite?)

Final results were a mixed bag of nuts (see pictures below). It was fairly realistic for still or even very slow moving water. However, it did lack the "wow" factor of say ripples or small waves to depict at least some movement of water. Other than that, I was fairly happy with the outcome.    

After epoxy resin had hardened: Realistic looking still water

Front and back views of the pond / hotspring

 
I had attempted to sculpt some waves on the epoxy while it was in the process of drying - done at hourly intervals to determine at which stage the epoxy was the most pliable. Unfortunately, I was unsuccessful as the epoxy resin always resumed its original shape after I had tried sculpting it.

A quick search online shows that there are in fact better alternatives:
(a) Make a mould of sea waves out of silicone for the epoxy resin to set in. But needless to say, my skill level is way too low to try this technique.
(b) Use another chemical product such as the Woodland Scenics Water Effects which can be applied on top of the hardened epoxy resin. This is one option I am considering for future projects.

Thanks for reading and until the next post, stay happy and well.