Ed's Heresy Kill-Teams: Custodians and ruins

[EdT]

The shield captain is done! Very pleased with how he turned out; here he is in front of the portal. More soon, I hope...

 

 

 

@TheHydra, the Custodes' armour is done using the new, rather good GW Retributor Gold. I spayed a dark brown undercoat, base coated 50/50 Retributor Gold/Rhinox Hide, then layered on pure Retributor Gold, 50/50 Retbributor Gold/Mithril Silver and then a light drybrush of Mithril Silver. I then put on two seperate washes of Agrax to shade on after the other, and then a 25/75 Agrax/Purple wash. With that all dry, I did two more highlights, one of pure Retributor Gold and one of 50/50 Retbributor Gold/Mithril Silver. It comes out really nice and shiny.

 

@Slipstreams, ha, the Jokaero is a fun idea and I'd love somebody to do that- not quite what I'm going for though, as these chaps will be a Automata Maniple custom-made by the Mechanicum for one of the Legions, and will have a Praevian to go with them. The good news is that I think I've solved my head conundrum; got some parts on order so with luck they'll turn out to be the right size.

 

@Kizzdougs, I'm so sorry, I gave you the wrong website- here's what you want. They may have updated their process since when I ordered, but I emailed them with a list of what I was after and went from there. It took a while to come but was definitely worth it. Glad you like the Custodes, yours was a major inspiration!

 

@MagicMan, thanks! A board done this way would be fun; don't have the space for it sadly but if I had a spare basement to hand I'd almost be tempted. Hopefullly this piece shows that doing something on a larger scale would actually be very practical and not too expensive; the method I've used is really very simple for the effect I've achieved.

[the Belgian one]

Whoa ! your captain reminds me Sir Meryn Trant !

Excellent job by the way ! keep it up !

[Stormborn]

Just reread from start to finish, this may be the most AWESOME plog ever.  Have to say though I would love to see some more marines now.

[EdT]

Progress on a number of fronts today.

 

Firstly, the rest of the Custodians are painted;

 

 

Here's a photo of them in situ. Now all I need to do is to finish off the portal, fix them in place and the whole thing is done!

 

 

 

I've also made progress in other fields too. Remember thr tacked-together mecha-gorilla? Well it's now looking a lot more finished! I'll do a proper tutorial for them when my maniple is done, but for the time being, here's a shot of where I am so far.

 

 

Obviously the one thing missing is the head, which is currently seeing its greenstuff cure; more on this front later.

 

My thoughts, naturally, have turned to the scenic base that need to accompany the automata; and I have a fun idea with a nice narrative to it. There's no time like the present to get started on these things, so I took some of the offcuts from my Eldar ruins and put them to good use, tracing around a 32mm base to get a series of flat cylinders.

 

 

I then stuck them together with tiny bits of pva, and began to sand them down! Here's a time series of where I've got so far...

 

 

Fair bit of work to be done on this, but it's turning into the sort of crude basalt altar I was going for...

[BladeBreaker]

i see the yellow sign, im doomed

[Nomus Sardauk]

i see the yellow sign, im doomed

"Not upon us oh King! Not upon us!"

 

P.S. Perhaps the world the Custodes have found themselves upon has a name, Carcosa... ;)

[Thrillhouse]

On the next episode of True custodes

[EdT]

A little update on the Gorilla-bots- this one is more or less done, although I need to let the greenstuff cure and tidy up a bit...

 

[EdT]

Some more progress to show... Firstly, the Webway portal is getting a birt of texture to it. I've put on the first layer of gloss gel, and used a toothbruth to give it some rippling. It's opaque at the moment, but will (hopefully) dry transparent.

 

 

 

I also made some progress on the basalt altar. Having sanded everything down and got everything in more or less the right shape, I was a bit worried that there wasn't enough texture there, and the borders between the layers that make up its structure were still a bit too visible. So I added some pumice texture to rectify a bit of that. It looks a bit odd now thanks to the variation in colour, but once painted it should work quite well.

 

 

The altar is the first component on the scenic base for the gorilla-bots. It's inspired by this...

[EdT]

LIttle bit of an update while I wait for my webway portal to dry.

 

The scenic base for my gorilla-bots will involve them interrupting a religious ceremony, so I've been sorting out the various components of that. First up, there's lots of progress on the altar...

 

 

Still a bit of weathering to be done on it, but getting there. You can't really see the sacrificial victim in the above shot, so here's a top down view...

 

 

Who's doing the sacrificing, and who's the victim? Well, I thought it'd be fun to have some tribal Ratlings around, so here they are... 

 

 

Next, a couple of offertory plates that my ratlings can be leave by their altar. They're upturned shields with the rim rather crudely extended upwards using greenstuff; I deliberately didn't make them that neat as the makers aren't exactly the most refined sorts. The left-hand one with meat is just random stuff from the bits box; I made the fruit from greenstuff with wire as the stalks.

 

 

And who are the Ratlings sacrificing to? Something a bit WIP at the moment and not suitable for the board on its own; I'll post some links in the near future when it's painted though, as it's my take on a real blast from the past.

[Brother Pheidias]

Liking this, can't wait to see where you take the tiny cannibals :D

[Brother Dallo]

Really loving the fruit bowl. Is that a Black Orc helm on monkey-bot?

 

Looking great regardless.

 

Dallo

[EdT]

Thanks all.
 
@Dallo- yes, it is a Black Orc helm; they had just the mix of simian and metallic that I was going for. Now I just need to paint the bloody things...
 
The good news today is that the Eldar ruins are now more or less done. I'm still waiting for the PVA to dry fixing people in place though, so I can take lots of photos yet. More soon!
 
In other news, I fancied making an Astartes, so here's an Imperial Fist.  He's going to be the Emissary/Honour Guard for a reaosnably high-ranking member of the emerging Imperial Aristocracy, who will be rather Dune-influenced. I wanted to emphasise the blingy aspect of the VII, rather than the knightly or gritty elements you normally see.
 

 
I also gave him a companion, a Neophyte who I've tried to model to hark back to the old RT-era Scouts. The legs are MK lower legs added to a repositioned MK4 upper leg piece, with cloth covering greenstuffed on. The arms are a mash of the normal Scout ones and WHFB Empire upper arms, which seems to get the required look nicely.
 

 
 
...and here they are looking rather yellow. I'm rather pleased with how the neophyte is a head shorter and much less massive than the Astartes, but still bigger than a baseline human. More to come, hopefully.
 

[Daemon2027]

The new astartes model looks great and I like the use of bits on the neophyte, a good idea with the bottom half of the legs being PA

[Olis]

That neophyte looks a bit weird, but interesting. I think a lick of paint might iron out the slight weirdiness. ;)

[EdT]

So the ruins are more or less done, I think!

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

And underneath, here's a small, very WIP preview of something to come...

 

[Crizza]

Sweet mother of merci... this thread is awesome :D

[oldschoolsavant]

Think the glue on the webway isn't quite as impressive as in theory, but it's still a glorious work.

 

And Empire command meets Solar Auxillia ? Ho-ho !  When are you collating all these into a HoH thread, laden wih pics ?

[Half Goat]

Best custodes I have seen, truly amazing.  Looking forward to seeing more astartes though!

[Ratboy1664]

Webway diorama is Golden Demon worthy, awesome

[EdT]

Thanks all! The ruins have been great fun to do- as OldSchoolSoviet points out, the swirly water effect on the webway gate isn't as good as I'd like it, but I'd literally painted myself into a corner there- really I should have done the whole gate as a single piece and then attached it to the base, but instead I added the effect last, when it was incredibly difficult to access thanks to all the flowers, models and other stuff around it. A failure in planning there.

 

So, you may be wondering what I'm planning on doing next. Well, the Gorilla Bots need to be finished, and as they are currently sitting in the painting queue, I felt it was time for me to get on with their scenic base. You've seen some of the accoutrements, but not the thing itself, which has now come on a fair bit.

 

In choosing the theme, I was conscious that I wanted to do something different that I hadn't tried before, but would also be a challenge. I did wonder about an icy base, but then I had a brainwave- they'll be in a Mangrove- themed situation, which is not something I've ever seen anyone attempt before. This is what's led to the idol, the savage ratlings, etc. The plan was to have a section of beach, an expanse of water and mangrove trees on either side; the robots and their master would be on the shorline reacting to the appearance of xenos in the water. Or at least that's the plan... here's how I started to go about it!

 

Firstly, I went to the shops and bought a plastic flower pot thing and some sand. As you can see from the price tages, this was expensive stuff!

 

 

With that ready, I then started planning. This basically meant drawing on the pot to deliniate what went where.

 

 

Having decided that there would be one area with a single tree and another on the other side with more than one, my next job was to make the base bits, so I could fit them and make sure there was enough space.

 

Leaving the flower pot to one side, I started off by getting some wire and twisting it together. This forms the basic roots, trunk and branches. As it's a mangrove tree and the roots are exposed, they need to be done too. I ended up with this, which I then secured in place with a bit of superglue...

 

 

The next step was to start giving the branches some body. To start off with for this I got some matte acrylic gel; this will allow me to bend the finished branches and roots around without everything cracking and will also give the final texturing something to grip on. Five minutes of application with a toothpick later, and...

 

 

Once that had dried, I then needed to add the real body. For this I used some wood filler, which is a bit heavier-bodied and more flexible than normal polyfiller, and also dries with a nice texture to it. Taking a spoonfull of filler out of the pot, I mixed it with a little water and some brown paint, then added it the same way as I did the matt gel. The result is a bit blurry, but I hope you get the idea...

 

 

Still lots to do here, of course- it needs more than a base coat on there to look properly woody, and most obviously the foliage has to be added. But it gives a sense of the thing's footprint, which is all I need for the moment.

 

The next step is to actually get some relief in the base. This is particularly important as large chunks of this one are meant to be underwater. As you might have seen with previous projects, I've tried various things to achieve this relief before; plaster, polyfiller, papier mache, and so on; after a fair bit of experimentation, I've come to the conclusion that for something that needs lots of control and is on a large scale, air-drying clay is the best bet. 

 

So that's what I've gone for here! Splodging some clay into the first area earmarked for trees, I got it to the point I wanted (I'm using the first ridge on the base as the rough target point for the water level, putting all of this underwater), plonked the tree on there for comparison purposes and then, using the same wire as I had for the trunk, added a whole load of new roots coming in and out of the ground around the tree.

 

 

This took quite some time to dry- one of the issues with DAS clay- but once it was done, I gave each of the roots a coating of the matte gel so they would end up with the same wood effect as the tree.

 

Gradually, I went around the whole base doing this- adding layers of clay, letting them dry, and then building them up further if neccesary. When the other trees, altar etc  went on, this is what it looked like;

 

 

You'll notice various bits placed on the base too- I'll get to those. Once everything had dried, things were looking a lot more complete; but a lot needed to be done before I could progress. One of the downsides of using air-drying clay is that it's not waterproof- it also shirnks slightly as it solidifies, which means that in combination with a flexible plastic like the flower pot, you can end up with cracks and gaps. There are several problems with this; firstly, the clay isn't really attached to the base securely, and secondly, if I were to pour water into the thing to check how much resin I'll need for the final run, it would soak the whole thing. Even if that wasn't a problem, the gaps between the different layers of clay and the plastic base risked me wasting massive quantities of the water-effect resin as it seeped in between them.

 

To  prevent this from being an issue, I needed to seal everything. The first step in doing this was a coat of the matt gel over all the clay, paying particular attention to the gaps between the clay and everything else. This should also smooth the topography slightly, making it easier for the sand to get some grip and making everything look a little more realistic.

 

And that's where I currently am. More soon, I hope!

[EdT]

So, more progress to shgow today. Firstly, I got the Gorillabots' master done; here is Cynric Astolat, Consul Praevian of the I Legion...

 

 

 

I also made a lot of progress on the mangrove base. With the matte gel and varnish sealing everything, I put an initial layer of paint on the areas where I wanted deep water. I'll probably darken this a bit later on, but we'll see. I also cut away the bits of lip on the base where there will be water; with all this done, I have a much better sense of how the final thing will look.

 

 

With all this ready, it was now time to put the sand on. I painted a coat of thinned-down wood glue over everywhere where I wanted sand, and started piling it on. I then sealed it with another couple layers of thinned-down glue, left it to dry, and did another varnish spray for good measure. Now I just need to paint the stuff!

 

 

 

I also made progress with the mangrove trees themselves. As you may remember, I had got the basic tree roots and trunk ready, but they needed foliage. My first step in doing this was to get some polyfiber. This was grabbed from the stuffing of an old sofa we were getting rid of. Polyfiber is natruallly white, so the first step was to give it some colour; I did this by spraying some brown undercoat on a newspaper and then wiping the surface with the fiber. Here's the result;

 

 

The addition of the paint stiffens the fiber too, which is convenient. I then pullled the fiber apart slightly to be less dense, slapped some pva on my tree branches and pressed it on.

 

 

Once that properly dried, I liberated some of my girlfriend's hairspray and sprayed it on the polyfiber until it beaded up, as you can see below.

 

 

Finally, I then sprinkled on flock to provide the foliage. A bit of tapping to get rid of the excess, and this is what I ended up with!

 

 

Oh, and one last thing before I go- remember the rather flamboyant-looking Empire Command/Solar Auxillia combo a few posts back? Well, with a big debt to Lamby's excellent creations, here are some rather WIP guys in crude powered armour. I see them as the pinnacle of a slightly retro civilised world's military potential; obviously extremely crude compared to Astartes, but loud, stompy and intimidating nonetheless. I am a bit undecided as to how to arm them- do people have any thoughts? My initial thinking was a big saber and shield, to preserve the anachronistic element; with power-assisted arms, these suits could do some real damage. The alternative is something shooty, but then why bother with the suit in the first place? Decisions, decisions...

 

[Nomus Sardauk]

Big-and-Choppy! Big-and-Choppy! Big-and-Choppy! Big-and-Choppy! :D

[Half Goat]

nice work on the DA astartes

[Arendious]

Why not both shooty and choppy? Sort of like a "poor man's Astartes", give them big swords, big shields, and a brace of grenade-launcher sized pistols.