Rumours of my death have been greatly exaggerated.... ;P

Sorry for neglecting this blog a bit lately...

First, let's get the bugbear out of the way:

Yeah, racism and bigotry is bad, I support this message.

Anyway, where did we leave off?
The Warhound is finished, except for heat discoloration on the barrels and painting the banners. Plus I still need to work up the nerve to do all the weathering on it...
Here's where he  stands now:

 And close-ups of his markings:

 And finally: the Warhound's name:

I took inspiration for the type and placement of the markings from the old Adeptus Titanicus background and painting guides.

But this hasn't been the only large project lately I've also printed and painted the Dragon's Crest, a free file from Dragon's Rest. I intend to use it as either terrain, vehicle or scenario objective for several games, including Reality's Edge, Necromunda, etc. As a result, I've tried to keep its colours fairly generic, and have magnetized the weapons (which still need painting...).

In its freshly printed, pre-painted stage. 

Base colours done:

Painting the interior and further details:

Done and weathered, with the cockpit glass in place:

Couldn't help myself putting it against a background:

And with some minis for scale/effect:

This entire gang is made from Hasslefree Minis, except for the crew boss, she's Raging Annie, from Bad Squiddo Games.

And ofcourse, the ubiquitous Primaris Marines:

A long view of the interior:

With my Void Crows salvage crew rushing on board:

Some other things I've been doing, but have no pics of:  I'm printing a Rogue Trader fleet for BFG, as well as printing various markers and tokens for that game. This has been delayed due my printer acting up with excessive stringing, something I'm still working on remedying...  Which has been my second major project recently. :/

See you next time, hopefully sooner than last time. XD

A Titanic undertaking, continued. (And a gift)

More progress on the Warhound to report!

Well, the test with the heraldic plates didn't turn out as well as I'd hoped, so they won't be used.

I did however get on with the airbrushing stages:

As you can see in the pics, I've added gun-pennants and a small banner to the Titan. These were made from plastic and metal rod, some spare bits for the finials, and mainly tin sheet from old mayo tubes.

In the course of today, I've been painting the metal trim on the Warhound. Here's where he's at at the end of the day:

I've been using Vallejo Liquid Metal Old Gold for this, and aside from the smell (alcohol based) and the extra bother in cleaning the brush, I'm very impressed with these! Now I just have to paint all the other details and bits... I had hoped to finish it in my current week off, but now I'm having serious doubt if I can make it! Oh well, I'd rather do it well, than do it fast.

And finally the gift. A friend in Scotland, LongFang, does regular streams on Twitch and has significantly stepped up his schedule to keep people entertained during the present Viral Kerfuffle. As a sign of appreciation, and because he is a very keen player of Destiny 2, I decided to make him a custom Ghost (little personal A.I. assistants) prop:

 The core paintjob (airbrush), with a set of markings derived from the Flags of Scotland and a second set derived from his in-game heraldry.

Then it was time for weathering and final assembly:

And then it took a long, looong wait for the final component to arrive, a lighting unit:

Once everything came together, I could finally send it off to it's intended owner. He received it today, so I can now, at last, share this little labour of love with you.

See you all again next time!

A titanic undertaking

Remember, remember, the end of december, when I showed some 3d printed parts?

Well, the past two weeks, I restarted printing a Lucius Pattern Warhound for a friend, and that, in turn got me energized to work on my Mars pattern Warhound again.
I'm printing the last few weapons I need to have the complete set (only 2 Inferno cannons to go!) while assembling the Titan itself.

Which involves sanding, lots of sanding...

Currently I'm focussing on building the main structure of the Warhound. After that I will spend time personalizing and decorating it.

I have decided on the colour scheme and Legio for this Titan(and possible future ones?), it shall be Legio Astraman. I've been deciding on proper markings and heraldry, using the background of Legio Astraman as a guide.
Ofcourse I painted a quick tester:

The legs will be coloured slighly different, and I'm thinking of going either green or cream white for the head instead, but that is the basic layout I'm going for.

Having chosen a Legio, I also set about making a few heraldic plates:
From colour logo (found on the internet):

Through greyscale:

To a 3d relief created by mapping light-dark to low-high:

I still need to print this, and then I'll add it to the Warhound carapace. I've also added a receptacle for a banner pole on it's back, to fly a Legio Astraman pennant/banner. I'll also be adding moderati Kill-pennants to the guns (just one set, but magnetized, so I can switch them over when I swap weapons out). I'll be omitting the "loincloth" banner, as I feel it doesn't suit the Warhound's lines and background says they are precious relics, stored before battle anyway.

See you next time, and good hunting!

Catching up

With the social distancing in effect, I've done some more hobbying that usual in the past weeks...

The start of the medieval farmstead that I built ages ago has finally had it's date with the airbrush and paintbrush, just basing/flocking remains to be done:

I've also been assembling a core force of  Space Wolves, which required some greenstuffing:

In the meanwhile, in the background I was printing stuff. Unfortunately I suffered a major clog in the print head.This forced me to fully disassemble and clean the hot end, as well as replace the bowden tubing... After several days (over several weeks) of tweaking, I have it running reliably again.

But the major endeavour of this month has been two buildings for my Cyberpunk terrain project. They still have some small touches to do (matt varnish, windows and the till on the store interior still needs to be painted), but for the moment, they're finished enough. Both have accessible interiors and locations where signage can be magnetically attached.

The front door is reversible, with a regular door and a quarantine door. :)

 The 3-story building is 3D printed, with some scratch-built additions, the shop is from large scale train terrain. Graffiti and tags are decals (home printed), posters and signs are printed paper, while the magnetized signage is all 3d-printed.

As I was airbrushing a lot anyway, I decided to paint up this little thing as well:

I've also started up a new set of meads. The theme for this batch is "pear". 

Centre is a pear melomel, made by adding chopped pears to the mead recipe, the rightmost is a pear-cyser, made by substituting the water in the mead recipe with pear juice. The leftmost is just whatever pear juice, pear bits and honey I had left over from the other two batches. ;)
(They're in buckets because I tend to have a fairly energetic fermentation the first few days, and I like to contain the spillage.)

See you next time!

Mean streets, mean people

Sooo, some time has passed. But I've been doing stuff, honest!
Though less as I had hoped to do, and with less focus, due to some long running problems and family issues taking a toll on my mental health. I haven't had much time to fully unwind and really deep-dive into hobby projects. But I'm forcing myself to keep scratching at the surface, as the hobby helps me deal with the stress of the recent parade of BS. As a result, I've also been putting off this post, and my prose may seem a bit more terse than usual.

I've painted two crews for Reality's Edge.

First up is the corporate-backed shadow ops crew (sorry for the fuzzyness of some pics... Wasn't paying 100% attention, due to the above reasons) :

And here they are with their Corporate Backer (A VR telepresence that aides and guides each crew in Reality's Edge, sort of the player avatar on the table).

The Shadowbacker is 3D printed, the crew is all from Hasslefree Miniatures.

Crew two, the classic Cyberpunk trope of the scappy street scum that fights to stick it to "the Man":

This crew is mostly Hasslefree Miniaturs, except for the leader, that miniature is "Raging Annie" from Bad Squiddo Games. This group is still without a Shadowbacker.~: My printer has been acting up, and seems to really dislike PETG, so I need to tune and tweak the machine all over again, and start looking for a transparent PLA.

The terrain backdrop is, as often lately, slightly modified terrain from Multiverse Gaming Terrain with extra bits added.

Currently on the painting desk is the medieval farm I showed ages ago, and on the airbrush station is are two cyberpunk buildings, but seeing how my focus is lately, I can't guarantee which, if either of those, will be the next to get finished...

See you next time!

Hello again, remember me?

Well, time to (try and) breathe some life back into this blog...
I've been doing some hobby stuff the past few weeks, but due to a concussion, wasn't able to sit at a PC long enough to post about it. I'm feeling better now, which makes it time to catch up a bit.
As this is going to be a longer, picture-filled post, you can see it all after the break.