Ad mech WIP

Welcome to another installment of Aaron's procrastination from study, today I can present some more WIP shots of 3 machine cultists, a knight, and his base.

Firstly, the things that excite every Ad mech modeler, knights. I will be using this as a forge fiend in my current thinking, so another shoulder weapon will be added.

The base model is of course a dreadknight, and it still looks too much like one for me atm. I need to figure out a way to make a curved glacius plate of some kind, or some kind of sarcophagus like the SM dread. As a further tie in to the nids, hes posing in a suitably safari like stance on the body of his last victim. What colour blood do you think tyranids have?

No idea what the physiology of a tyranid creature should look like, so some random balls of putty and entrail like tubes will have to do. Blood effects and burns like its been hit with a large plasma discharge are what I see in my mind for the damage, once I figure out the colour of the blood.

Finally, 3 more machine cultists.

these have been made from the close combat equipped cultists and cadian arms. Alot of chopping and reposing went into getting the arms to sit flush, I used surprisingly little greenstuff on hiding the actual joins. They are suffering from a minor case of "gorilla syndrome" due to the difference in the size of the cadian and their original arms.

That's it for the moment, any suggestions on continuing the knight titan conversion would be appreciated.

Thanks for looking.

Stormravens finished!

Yes, plural.

I thought photographing one of these bad boys was a pain!

I applied the finishing touches to these two this afternoon. Mostly it was just mucking around with the lense effect on the canopies. Its just a bastardized version of the effect alot of people are using on their GK power weapons.

A tip for young players, the extra 5 minutes you spend in preparation (masking, cleaning, mixing etc) will pay of 100x by the time you get to finishing. Rushing simply ruins things. I learnt the hard way, going from this:

Notice the bleeding, splatters and peeling, all caused by shoddy prep. The masking tape wasn't sealed properly, the paint was too thin (and my airbrush has a splatter gremlin I can't seem to shake atm), and I should have used a white primer instead of simple acrylic to paint the white base over the varnish I'd laid over the reds.

To this:

To this:

Not the greatest, but I managed to cover up most of the blemishes and I think they came out pretty well. The only thing bothering me now is that the reflection/lines aren't parallel, but this is because I was trying to cover as many of the random splotches of paint with the fewest lines, and its something I can live with.

A couple more pics:

I'm really happy overall with how these things turned out, they are the biggest models I have to paint for this army, so its definitely a relief to get them out of the way.

Finally: whats next.