Hi everyone!
Gottacon 2015, my biggest tournament of the year, is coming up in just over a month's time. Though I attend other tournaments throughout the year with the gaming club I play most of my games with, this is the tournament that I travel to every year with the crew I've been gaming with for over a decade now. Bringing a fully painted army is a point of pride for us, and sadly I have fallen short of this goal two years in a row.
But this year it will change! Without further ado, I present to you
The Lost Legion of Mekhet for Gottacon 2015
....<ahem>...in its current stage of completion. Still lot's of work yet to go!
This is, of course, not my whole army. It has transitioned from being a full Tomb Kings army (progress on which you can find on my Warseer project log HERE.) to a Nehekharan-themed VC army, to a combined Undead Legions army. However Gottacon recently decided to eschew End Times content, and thus for Gottacon I will be bringing a vanilla VC list (though with Lore of Undeath support, if I have the time to build and paint the necessary models).
Little fiddly bits are still to be ironed out. However roughly speaking my army is to contain the following:
King Mekhet (Vampire Lord-General)
Queen Ahi (Vampire Lord)
13 Black Knights
40 skeletons
40 more skeletons (Flaming banner)
20 direwolves
2 spirit hosts (if they fit, Lore of Undeath otherwise)
2x4 Vargheists
Estimated time to completion: 100 hours.
Scheduled painting time: 139 hours
....gunna be tight!
First up, the Vampires.
King Mekhet
King Mekhet is coming along swimmingly. He’s got some touchup work to do around his waist, and I’m not really liking the spear tip on the butt of his axe...gotta find something to replace it with instead.
I’ve also been toying around with how to garnish his hood. Can’t really be a King without a Crown, now can he? I’ve tried my hand at sculpting a few snakehead crowns and none of them have turned out. I’ve also tried press-moulding the one off my metal tomb prince and it didn’t turn out well either. Snake bits I have from everywhere else are way too big.
The only other thing I’ve come up with is to use the rather boring crown off the warsphinx prince. I have the mangled remains of his head lying around somewhere after it was hacked up to be replaced for my old Hierophant conversion. I’m going to give that a shot and see how it turns out.
QUEEN AHI
Lady vampire in progress with her wings attached, and with her spear. The tip is Prince Apophas’ dagger, which was removed to convert him into my casket priest. The butt adornment is the pommel from a TG sword.
Attached to her base. I stupidly snipped her off the tab, and didn’t realize until after that this made it nearly impossible to attach her to the base. She’s pinned at present but her spindly little legs aren’t super fond of it and have broken on several occasions.
Here she is at present. I’ve sculpted her a new left shoulder, to fit a witch elf arm I got off a clubmate. She’s getting a round shield hoplite-style shield, just like her husband. I need to attach this to the arm first (and sculpt some straps, like with King Mekhet’s shield) before I reattach it to the shoulder. The GS was sculpted to fit so it’s just a matter of gluing.
Here’s a better view of her from behind, with her new hand. Again, from a witch elf. It’s a liiiiitle bit too big, but not super noticeable from any angle save this one. The WE arm wasn’t at the right angle and this arm is sculpted as part of the body, so I didn’t want to go through the trouble of hacking it apart. I might reassess once she’s got some paint on her.
Got a set of these as a Christmas present from my girlfriend. They're kind of like rubber-tipped paint brushes in various shapes, meant for pushing paint around on a canvas. Not sure how well they accomplish that, but as sculpting tools I can attest to how AMAZING these things perform.
You'll still want a metal tool to create the broad shapes...they're a bit too soft to be pushing around large amounts of material. However what these things excel at is the little details. First of all they leave no tool marks. Secondly, because of how soft they are you can really control how your sculpting medium is being pushed around and shaped. You can make tiny, incremental changes to where things are, letting you avoid the endless cycle of over-correcting back and forth that I find happens with metal tools.
This is my second attempt at using the colour shapers. The first was sculpting Lady Vampire's left shoulder, which turned out tremendously better than my previous attempts with my standard metal tools. I disliked how it looked like the only armour on her torso is those silly little nipple tassles, so I added a ridge to make it look like she's wearing a breast plate (tee hee!). Will probably be painted burnished bronze, to fit in with the rest of the army. Might be burnished gold instead...undecided.
Here's a closeup so you can see it better. See how smooth those lines are? Just blown away.
And with my little finger for scale, so that you can see just how fine of detail I'm talking about. These things are just head-and-shoulders above my previous tools. I really can't recommend them enough for anybody wanting to do some serious sculpting.
I think it was $50 for the set, roughly comparable to picking up a nice set of sablehair brushes (like Windsor & Newton series 7, which is what I use for painting).
Vargheists up next...
Gottacon 2015, my biggest tournament of the year, is coming up in just over a month's time. Though I attend other tournaments throughout the year with the gaming club I play most of my games with, this is the tournament that I travel to every year with the crew I've been gaming with for over a decade now. Bringing a fully painted army is a point of pride for us, and sadly I have fallen short of this goal two years in a row.
But this year it will change! Without further ado, I present to you
The Lost Legion of Mekhet for Gottacon 2015
....<ahem>...in its current stage of completion. Still lot's of work yet to go!
This is, of course, not my whole army. It has transitioned from being a full Tomb Kings army (progress on which you can find on my Warseer project log HERE.) to a Nehekharan-themed VC army, to a combined Undead Legions army. However Gottacon recently decided to eschew End Times content, and thus for Gottacon I will be bringing a vanilla VC list (though with Lore of Undeath support, if I have the time to build and paint the necessary models).
Little fiddly bits are still to be ironed out. However roughly speaking my army is to contain the following:
King Mekhet (Vampire Lord-General)
Queen Ahi (Vampire Lord)
13 Black Knights
40 skeletons
40 more skeletons (Flaming banner)
20 direwolves
2 spirit hosts (if they fit, Lore of Undeath otherwise)
2x4 Vargheists
Estimated time to completion: 100 hours.
Scheduled painting time: 139 hours
....gunna be tight!
First up, the Vampires.
King Mekhet
King Mekhet is coming along swimmingly. He’s got some touchup work to do around his waist, and I’m not really liking the spear tip on the butt of his axe...gotta find something to replace it with instead.
I’ve also been toying around with how to garnish his hood. Can’t really be a King without a Crown, now can he? I’ve tried my hand at sculpting a few snakehead crowns and none of them have turned out. I’ve also tried press-moulding the one off my metal tomb prince and it didn’t turn out well either. Snake bits I have from everywhere else are way too big.
The only other thing I’ve come up with is to use the rather boring crown off the warsphinx prince. I have the mangled remains of his head lying around somewhere after it was hacked up to be replaced for my old Hierophant conversion. I’m going to give that a shot and see how it turns out.
QUEEN AHI
Lady vampire in progress with her wings attached, and with her spear. The tip is Prince Apophas’ dagger, which was removed to convert him into my casket priest. The butt adornment is the pommel from a TG sword.
Attached to her base. I stupidly snipped her off the tab, and didn’t realize until after that this made it nearly impossible to attach her to the base. She’s pinned at present but her spindly little legs aren’t super fond of it and have broken on several occasions.
Here she is at present. I’ve sculpted her a new left shoulder, to fit a witch elf arm I got off a clubmate. She’s getting a round shield hoplite-style shield, just like her husband. I need to attach this to the arm first (and sculpt some straps, like with King Mekhet’s shield) before I reattach it to the shoulder. The GS was sculpted to fit so it’s just a matter of gluing.
Here’s a better view of her from behind, with her new hand. Again, from a witch elf. It’s a liiiiitle bit too big, but not super noticeable from any angle save this one. The WE arm wasn’t at the right angle and this arm is sculpted as part of the body, so I didn’t want to go through the trouble of hacking it apart. I might reassess once she’s got some paint on her.
Got a set of these as a Christmas present from my girlfriend. They're kind of like rubber-tipped paint brushes in various shapes, meant for pushing paint around on a canvas. Not sure how well they accomplish that, but as sculpting tools I can attest to how AMAZING these things perform.
You'll still want a metal tool to create the broad shapes...they're a bit too soft to be pushing around large amounts of material. However what these things excel at is the little details. First of all they leave no tool marks. Secondly, because of how soft they are you can really control how your sculpting medium is being pushed around and shaped. You can make tiny, incremental changes to where things are, letting you avoid the endless cycle of over-correcting back and forth that I find happens with metal tools.
This is my second attempt at using the colour shapers. The first was sculpting Lady Vampire's left shoulder, which turned out tremendously better than my previous attempts with my standard metal tools. I disliked how it looked like the only armour on her torso is those silly little nipple tassles, so I added a ridge to make it look like she's wearing a breast plate (tee hee!). Will probably be painted burnished bronze, to fit in with the rest of the army. Might be burnished gold instead...undecided.
Here's a closeup so you can see it better. See how smooth those lines are? Just blown away.
And with my little finger for scale, so that you can see just how fine of detail I'm talking about. These things are just head-and-shoulders above my previous tools. I really can't recommend them enough for anybody wanting to do some serious sculpting.
I think it was $50 for the set, roughly comparable to picking up a nice set of sablehair brushes (like Windsor & Newton series 7, which is what I use for painting).
Vargheists up next...