From a Knight's End To A New Year

2016 has arrived!! New year, new projects and undoubtably there will be new models n figs to be bought and painted! First though, in the final days of the old year, I finally managed to finish off the Freeblade Knight - 'The Orphan's Wrath'. Took a fair amount of time overall but can't honestly say I loved every minute - from unboxing to the build to the planning of the overall scheme and livery to the painting adn the final finish. Amazing kit, amazing value and woulkd recommend it to any and everyone. Anyhow... here he is. The last Imperial Knight of the lsot planet of Tiryns - 'The Orphan's Wrath' piloted by the vengeance fuelled Sarpedon!

Freeblade Imperial Knight 1

Freeblade Imperial Knight 3

Freeblade Imperial Knight 2

 And there he is. Am beyond chuffed with how he turned out. Hope you like him. Fully magnetising him was so worth and would recmnd folk do regardless of whether you intend to use him in game or not (I don't even play but still wanted to suck the last drop of marrow out of the kit - lol).

So.......2016 eh?!! I actually made 11 new year's resolutions.......and then realissed that 9 of them are hobby related.....ㅋㅋㅋㅋㅋㅋㅋㅋㅋ But anyway - hope everyone had a great new year's eve and best of luck for the year ahead - paint till you drop!

Cheers

Jan

WiP Catchup 1 - The Colour of Knight

 

Came into work today to find that all morning classes have been cancelled bcs of student elections - Loooooovelllyy Jubbly! My Friday schedule is a bit of a bitch so having 4 classes wiped off the board certainly helps especially considering I was woken up in the middle of the night by a fething mosquito....in novemeber.....a mosquito. Not impressed. Anyways, 'nuff of that.

 

I'm gonna use the sudden gift of a few hours of time to try adn catch up with my WiPs here and over on Dakka. Yes, yes - I'm quite sure that there are much more important teachery things I could be doing but.....:P

Anywho - first catchup is about that imperial knight I bought.....a while . Magnetising a Knight I fully magnetised the brute as these knights have so many awesome weapon loadout options, it seemed a shame to just glue on one loadout and consign the rest to the bitzbox. Origninally I dug out the places to hold the magnets by hand using some crafting gouges and awls. Since then I have got a dremel and really really wish I had bought it earlier! I've started 'wrting' some fluff to go with this Freeblade (admittedly mostly in my head!) Homemade destroyed/ravaged by Chaos due to his brother knight turning to the dark powers (future project will be building his brother, Diomedes' Chaos Knight for which I hope will come even close to the amazing conversion that Krautscientist completed - check his work out over here at  Kraut Scientist's Chaos Knight - absolutely awesome inspiring stuff. ) was rescued and taken in my the AdMech of Achlys III, whom he know fights alongside in his hope of eventual vengeance against his former brothers in arms. Sarpedon is the pilot and his engine has been rename 'Orphan's Wrath'. In thinking up a colour and heraldic scheme for the Freeblade, I wanted to give it quite a 'Greek' feel as the fluff pulls a bit from ancient Greek culture and mythology, albeit in a rather loose and twisted way. Of course as ever, I do love to sketch ideas, things and bits out as I go along. The first page of doodles I bloody lost! So I started over and the new stuff did actually come out a lot better imho!

Freeblade 'Orphan's Wrath' Heraldry Ideas

Main elements are going to be playing around with a Greek(ish) helmet, laurel leaves and the trident. The main decision though was the main colour scheme was going to involved a creamy marble scheme. Now, finding good marble painting tutorials is not the easiest of things. At all :/ However after a load of searching, reading, head scratching, swearing, reconsidering, re-reconsidering, stubborness, more swearing, a lot of coffee and a final ' fuck it - I'll give it a bash anyway' - a faux marble effect was attempted.

Here's the progress -

 

 First all lots of nuln oil to tone down the incredibly shiny leadbelcher sprayed basecoat. Then lots n lots of brass fittings and bits as that ties him in quite nicely with the scheme and style of Achlys III's forces.

 Head done first and then one of the masks ansd the cowl were painted as test pieces for the marble effect

Test painting went well, so onto carapace, greaves and leg armour plates - step 1 - basecoat then staining

Step 2 -defining the cracks

 Step 3 - softening down the whole effect

Then onto the metals

Test fit - check the look so far. Happy happy with how this is going :D

More armour plates and time for some weapons!

 

'Orphan's Wrath' - Freeblade Imperial Knight

 And that's where we're at now. He's coming along pretty nicely. Really happy with the overall look. Next week (once the Kats I'm working on are done) it'll be back to the knight for the rest of the weapons, shoulder plates and other bits. After that, decals  (not that many as I've made all my own heraldry) and a load of freehand painting!

 

 

 

 

 

Into The Mech - the WiPs

Crikey - has been ages since I posted. Since last time work has been a bit mad and of course had a honeymoon to go on!! Went back to Ireland and then a week in Italy with the wife. Missing Italy again already!
While at home I was able to pick up the Mechanicum Castellax Battle Automata and the weathering powders that I ordered from FW. My first resin piece - awwww!!!

Anyways - back in Korea now since the middle of August and been hard at it. Got painting on the Castellax (after a ton of reading etc on how to treat a resin mini) and did him alongside GW's Tech Priest Dominus. If you haven't got one yet - go and buy one. Seriously gorgeous figure and for once, defintely worth the nonsencical clampack prices.

Kept with the colour scheme I've come up with from my homegrown forgeworld Achlys III and tried to improve on it a touch. So here are the WiPs (I'll put up the finished stuff in the next post) starting with the Dominus; well, he is the boss after all

Everything gets mounted on their own Jenga block and painted seperately

Getting the metals down first. For this scheme I decided not to base paint with metal as I wanted a darker more deep look. So I drybrushed 3 layers over a chaos black base. First Warplock, then Ghenna's Gold and finally Ironbreaker. Much later a little light dusting of Runefang was used to give a final gleem. Some of the metal parts were washed with Drak Blue Shade a few times to give a 'blue steel' look. The edges and some parts were then painted with Runelord Brass, washed with agrax and then highlighted with sycorax

Onto the greys. 10 (I think) thin thin layers later........

 The castellax comes with a multi-melta for his should mounted weapon but I really didint like the look of it so choppity-chop, off came the melta barrels and I pinned/glued on the eradication ray that was left over from building the Dominus.

 For the metals< I did a much rougher drybrushing on the castellax as I want it to look more worn and used than the Dominus. Another 10 or so layers of grey later....

The two boys are nearly done. The Achlys III forgeworld symbol on Cass's shoulder is half decal (the cog part) and half freehand.

So, with Cass & Dom done - decided i NEEDED to make a wee dio for them. But it should match in with the basing I'd already done for the Sydonian Dragoon. I'm not gonna say much about the dio WiPs but any questions - please feel free to ask :)

Of Knights and Men

On to what's on the painting mat at the mo. (And this is what my workplace is like....nah that's a bit of a lie....it's rarely this tidy lol)

After the wedding, I decided I needed a wee treat (hahahaaha) - still had a wee bit of savings left in my Irish account so a quick (online) trip to Orctown and that was that. Two antsy days later and my (2nd) favourite korean (after 'The Wife' of course ;) ) knocked on my door and delivered this......

The current Knight Warden kit and the new AdMech Tech-Priest Dominus and some sundry supplies incl the new leadbelcher spray. Lovely jubbly!!!!!
Now then - the Tech-Priest is a little on the pricey side.....W40,000 I think. Bloody clampack prices. Everything else (imho) GW does model wise is priced fine for what you get as far as I'm concerned. However, clampack figs take the piss somewhat. However.......the priest fig is GLORIOUS!! He's backbenched for now though.
And on the knight. This kit is huge!!! The 3 original large sprues plus the new upgrade sprue and it's all bloody lovely!!!
Have spent a fair bit of time on YouTube checking out the tuts there as from the start was intending to fully magnetise the bugger.
Getting the appropriate size of magnets over here in Korea (without having to spend a fortune or order from another country) has required a little shopping around and imagination. Here's where I am thus far....

      

 

 

Body and hip joint first. This joint is going to be bearing a lot of weight so I found these 20mm (I think) ND mags in the local Arts'n'Crafts store for the job. The mags have a hole throught he middle and one side is concave. Absolutely perfect for the pillar on the hip joint to fit into and get the full movement. These 20mms fit exactly into the bowl cap piece of the hip joint (forgot to take a photo of that) super glued them in place and then built up some green stuff around the one in the main body.

Works perfectly. The magnets are so strong that there is not slippage of movement when the model is assembled even with the full weapons loadout.

Arms and weapons took a little more time. Especially the upper arm pieces that fit onto the shoulder mounts. For these I had to first file off the ridge that would normally clip into the upper weapon housing and then carve down into the piece (didnt have a 6mm drillbit, so out came the carving tools. Obviously the weapon arms have a bit of weight to them so need a bigger magnet than the little 3mm ones I broght back from Ireland with with me. Looked everywhere......nothing.......until........I found these fridge type magets with 6mm ND inside them. Bought a few packs of those and hacked them apart back at home!! Fitted all the arm and weapons out with 6mm mags and sealed them in with GS and somtimes a bit of cut down sprue as well (the well inside a few of the weapons is pretty deep). Anyways that's the weapons all done and interchangeable. They all fit really snuggly and the 6mm mags are pretty strong so again no slippage. Theonly tricky bit was the carving out of the upper arm pieces. BE CAREFUL or you could ass the whole piece up.

Did manage to give the wee 3mm mags some love though. The 2 carapace weapons are maglocked using 3mm pairs (2 in the weapon and 2 drilled into the hole on the carapace) I also decided to make the face plates interchangeable too. This was more to fit the fluff I'm making for this knight; I want him to have his original imperial knight's house face plate and then a 'vengeance mask' which was gifted to him by an AdMech forge world.......more on that fluff stuff later, laaaattter!!! The masks are fitted using the wee 3mm mags. Simple enough to do.

And so......all the pieces are now cleaned, trimmed, filed, smoothed and magged. Next came priming and basecoating........No way in the warp was I going to be basecoating this monster by brush!!!!  Primed everything with a light coat of Chaos Black spray and then got busy with the new Leadbelcher spray. Was a little nervous as the Skull White spray can be ........odd at times and hadn't heard anything about how the LB spray behaved. But it went on as smooth as silk. beautiful coat. I will say though that the LB spray is somewhat lighter and shinier than the LB paint from a pot.....not by much though, but it sure is quite silvery shiiinny (oh, Shiny!!) I also coated the outside of the armour plates with the Skull White spray, which decided that today was the day that it was going to go on smooth and silky (relief). So, the whole bugger is now primed and basecoated and ready for paint..........well, after I get these DV Chosen and their dio finished up for this month's DakkaDakka competion!!!!!

Anyways, that's where the new Knight is at. The magnetising wasn't that much of a bitch at all and has come together really solidly - no disco wobble at all!! Any questions or anything about the build - just drop me a line in the comments

Cheers

Irish