Something Old, Something New, And An Inquisitor In Blue

 Good morning/afternoon/evening everyone!

This week I thought it would be fun to compare and contrast an older miniature with something much more modern. It consists of three miniatures, two of which are part of a vignette, two of which are connected to the other, and one of which is considerably more recent than the other two, but still was painted the same way as one of the others...

Confused? Good! 😀

So, what we have here is a vignette of Ephrael Stern and Inquisitor Hand. This is a metal limited edition, produced by Forge World (I think) in around 2000/2001. I'm in two minds about this set, if I'm honest. The Ephrael Stern miniature is a nice sculpt. It's a little flat, although that's not unusual for the time, but it has lots of nice details and holds up quite well by modern standards. Sadly, the same can't really be said for Inquisitor Hand. For one thing, he's actually quite small compared to Stern and his pose is a little uninspired, and his face is just plain ugly (although I'm guessing that's intentional!) The base, also, is a little odd, being composed of random bits of chaos marines and half of some sort of cultist. There's also no interaction between the two characters in the vignette, so there's no real story to it, and I think they'd have been better served doing them as two separate characters, with their own scenic bases. I can't help but wonder what the sculptors would do with a modern version* especially with GW's penchant for diorama-style bases. Anyway, that negativity aside, it was a lot of fun to paint this set. 

The colour scheme For Ephrael was pretty easy, as there's plenty of pictures of her floating around, plus her Order is known. Inquisitor Hand was a little more problematical, as I could only find one picture of him in colour, and that is Kev Walker's masterful rendition shown below (available as a print here.)

I decided to stick to the same basic idea, of blue, bronze and green, but I decided to go a little more vibrant than the somewhat desaturated palette in the picture, to contrast with the limited colours in the rest of the set. All in all, I'm quite pleased with how it looks in the end. For those who are interested, here's how I did the blue on Hand's armour:

Basecoat of Ultramarines blue contrast over white undercoat. Blended highlights of Sotek Green, Temple guard Blue, Baharroth Blue and Blue Horror. All-over glaze of thinned Leviadon Blue with undiluted Leviadon Blue blended into the deepest recesses.

Bringing things bang up to date, we have this limited edition of Tariana Palos. It's very interesting to compare this miniature to the one of Ephrael Stern, looking at the differences that 20 years of advancements in sculpting and technology has brought. The obvious thing to look at is the increase in level of detail and crispness of the sculpt. The modern plastic miniature is so much smoother and more refined than the old metal one. I know there are those that dislike modern miniatures, that they have less character than old ones but I have to say I much prefer the modern sculpt. Painting the two side by side, as I did here, the modern sculpt does it for me so much more than the old one. The main reason for this, however, is not just because of the detailing on the modern miniature but because of the proportions. The modern miniature is far more proportionally accurate than the old one and, because of that, wins me over every time.

Looking back on the paint job for Tariana, I should have put a little more blue into the highlights on the armour, and given sharper edges. It would have given more definition and shape to the black. also, the burning flame on the base doesn't look right- too much white and not enough yellow. Also, the close-up shot of her face shows I was a little heavy with the shading around her nose. Other than that, I'm pleased with how she turned out. A really nice sculpt, and I'm hoping to do more Sisters in the future. I have a small force that I'm going to put together for a Kill Team at some point, and I may paly around with some single pieces one day.

One final note. While looking up colour schemes for painting these models, I noticed that one of my old paintjobs is still up on the GW website! I painted this Preacher probably 25 years ago and I can't believe they're still using it!

Thanks for reading!

Stu

*I'm aware there's a modern version of Ephrael Stern available. I'm hoping somebody will one day commission me to paint that and Kyganil (and maybe Canoness Verydian or Amalia Novina too**)

**Or any of the Sisters of Battle miniatures, frankly. Particularly the character pieces, like the Triumph of Saint Catherine- a beautiful piece.

With A REBBL Yell!

It occured to me that it's been a while since I showed any of my painted miniatures so I thought it was about time I did something about that.

A couple of years ago, the great Darren Latham* got in touch with me and asked me to paint a miniature to use as a trophy for the Blood Bowl league he was involved in, the Reddit Eternal Blood Bowl League (REBBL). Of course I said yes! This first one was the plastic Blood Bowl Troll from GW:



This one seemed to go down quite well and he came back for more for the next trophy. This one was the Forge World Blood Bowl Minotaur.


After that, I was contacted directly by the organizer of REBBL, Stephen Peers. The next one asked me to do was Vinci's Wolf from Greebo Games.


Finally, the most recent one was the Burning Treeman (with his marker familiars), also from Greebo.


I've really quite enjoyed doing these miniatures, and it's given me the opportunity to see a couple of models from a manufacturer I was previously unaware of. I can highly recommend having a look at Greebo Games, particularly if you're a player of Blood Bowl or similar games. There's some great miniatures on their site, and at good prices.

Thanks for reading!
-Stu







*Yeah, yeah, I'm a name-dropper. Well, I don't get to do it very often...

The Eldar Phantom Titan: The Base

Greetings, all!
So, after some hiatus, it's back on with the big one- the Eldar Phantom Titan. Now, those amongst you with both eagle-eyes and excellent memories may have spotted the legs of the Phantom assembled in my WIP-shelves photo from my Hatcave (really must think of a better name than that*) announcement last summer. So, I thought I'd better bring you all up to speed with how I got the bottom half of the Phantom built. First, though, there's the base to consider.
A big model like this really needs a base to support it, as the last thing you want is to knock it over with some over-zealous dice-rolling and fracture a delicate part. Big bases are commercially available and the client sourced a suitable one from...errr, somewhere. I really must ask him where he got it from.
Anyhoo, the client asked if the Phantom could be posed standing with one foot on a broken-off Imperial Titan weapon (a Melta Cannon), so the first thing to do was to make the provided broken weapon look right, and position it onto the base.
To start with, I raided the bits box to build a piece that would look like the arm joint had sheared off at a pivot point, exposing wire bundles. I also made a couple of plugs to show where a couple of feeds had been pulled out.

Next up I wanted to make the weapon itself look like it had crashed into the ground after being snapped off the Titan. I figured that something so big and heavy, dropping from fifty metres up would not survive intact, so I wanted to add some heavy damage to it. I cut into the gun barrels and then heated them and bent them (judicious application of the required amount of brute force), as if they'd hit the ground tip-first. Some cuts with a knife and clippers added to the effect of damage.

Then I needed to do some damage to the guard that surrounds the gun barrels. I really had some fun with this, cutting and bending (a hairdryer is really helpful with this sort of thing) and I even broke out the mini-drill to make some scuffs and gouges.

Finally all the pieces were assembled (much forcing and swearing and gluing-together of fingers happened...) and attached to the body of the gun, which had also been heavily seen-to with the clippers, knife and mini-drill.

I then needed to paint the gun before it was attached to the base. I needed to do this as a) the barrels would need to be painted before the guards were fixed in place and it made sense to do the whole thing at once, and b) I wanted to be able to get some painting done, to get a feel for the scale of the thing. 

Finally, the gun needed to be fixed into place on the base. I glued it down, and built up some Milliput around it, along with some broken shards of Eldar architecture that the gun landed on.

So that's that. Now I was ready to begin work on positioning the legs. So far, it had been easy and a lot of fun and there was no reason to think it would be any different from now on...

*At the moment, I've using "Edward Shedward" or "Eddie McSheddie McWoo." My head is often an odd place...Please, someone come up with something better...

The Eldar Phantom Titan: The Prologue

So here we are with the biggest single job I've ever been faced with: The Forge World Eldar Phantom Titan. A monstrous collection of resin parts that come together to make a huge, elegant war machine, towering over the battlefield. I've never even attempted a kit this big (unless you count the 1/72 Millenium Falcon, Saturn V and Space Shuttle kits I did as a wee lad) so to say it is somewhat daunting is to exhibit huge understatement.
However, we must rise to these challenges!
I knew this would be unlike any other project I had attempted before, so I did my research. Fortunately there are a couple of blogs by those who have attempted such a project here and here, and these have proved invaluable, if only to get me thinking outside my usual parameters of projects of no more than 50mm in height...
As this is a Forge World model, the first thing to do was to check that I had all the components...

My first reaction was, "Gosh*, that's a lot of bits."

My second reaction was, "Crikey**, some of those bits are really big. This thing is even bigger than I thought it was."

So, once I'd got over my initial shock, it was time to make some trips to the kitchen sink and give all these bits a thorough soaking and scrubbing in soapy water, to try and get all the mould release agent off. Having done that I needed to straighten out a couple of the bits (mostly the guns) with the aid of my trusty hair dryer and steel myself for the construction of this beastie.

But first, I had to make its base...

To Be Continued...

*I might not have used the word, "Gosh."

**I definitely didn't use the word, "Crikey."