Sunday, September 27, 2009

Farewell Mk1 (almost)

Ooh my aching skull!

It didn't really hit me. I thought I still had some time to get some of the Legends or even Superiority minis thrown together. I looked forward to building Fenris or Beast-09 (although with less glee after my disasters with Drago). I wanted to play with some Kazany or Iron Fang Uhulans before the demise of my tiny-text cards. (Where was that rule for the Greatbears again? flip-flip-flip)

But with the early release of the cards and rules via the intrawubz, my time has gone the way of the flying toaster screen saver. Some of the most expensive I don't yet own, much less have assembled. Ooh, methinks I'll have a busy and CA glue covered fall!

Tuesday, September 1, 2009

A Pair of Jacks (Part One)

Before the last league season started, Red was kind enough to photo some of the painting I had already accomplished. After all the ranting and raving and drooling, and passage of time and all that, I realized that I hadn't posted all of them yet. Tragedy! So, here we are.
Behold the Ber-zer-ker! This was the first of the two I had planned, and oddly the second one assembled. A word about assembly, the Berzerker stinks! Only half of one foot is one the base tab, and the other foot is held on only by a toe. Honest! Worse, the foot ends at the ankle, so there is always a struggle to mode the poor beastie upright. As I worried about how to assemble the figure, I wanted to find a way to pin it so that the weight of the mini more fully rested on the base, so that is why you will see the center pin on these two minis, and why the red one is modeled so far forward.
The plans for the colors were intentional and based on my fascination of locomotives. I mentioned it here. The original mid-1800's locomotives were as much works of art as working machines. I have a few examples from the Internet here, here, here, and here. Brass, and steel, ornate iron work; those were the influences of this model. I worked with a much lighter red pallet, knowing that I was going to lay on a heavy oil/smoke layer. On my other 'jacks, I liked how the GW Dwarf Bronze looked next to the GW Boltgun, so I copied that here, but went much lighter highlighting the bronze with P3 Rhullic Gold.

Again, the balance pin. This model is way front heavy. I considered ripping it apart and trying again, but 1) I figured the model wanted to be that way, and 2) It is in a classic head-butt pose, leading with its noggin. It has held together, so why destroy finished work?

It was about this time, I knew that I don't have the patience or skill to freehand some details, in this case numbers. So I hit up the local train store and found that Woodland Scenics has a line of dry-transfer decals. They have both numbers and letters as well as the occasional widget like all that data you see on the side of the average rolling stock car. I added the numbers to this model after the pics were taken sadly, but I now refer to this as "Old No. 27."