Introduction and some gribbly things

My name is Eric, I'm one of the co-authors of this page and also from the Binghamton NY area, most of my posts will probably be about modeling projects but I also really enjoy competitive play trying to attend around 1 tournament per month or so. I'm relatively new to the hobby only being in it for around 2 years or so (shortly after the start of fifth ed.) but I've really enjoyed and progressed at the modeling spectrum of the hobby, even if that is a bit difficult at times with a wife and 2 young children. My first and primary army is Chaos Space Marines with a nicely painted and converted Death Guard, and even an Emperor's Children warband started, but I also have 'Nids and just started Dark Eldar in the recent months. I've done a bit of freehand one the tops of my rhinos and I'm working on a banner for someone I know right now, but lately my real fascination has been sculpting, you can expect alot of sculpting and modeling posts from me at this point. A few of the sculpting projects I've done recently are a Chaos Spawn to Bloodbowl Rat Ogre conversion, a Tervigon out of a Carnifex, and one out of a Barbed Hierodule. Some of the projects I'm going to be working on now (and even including some pics of in this post) are turning a chaos spawn into a Slaaneshi demon prince, a Tervigon out of a Barbed Heirodule which will actually be my second so hopefully it will be better than the first, and a freehand Lamenter's chapter banner. After I finish these the projects I plan on showing are a Nurgle Plague Tower, a Tower of skulls, a Skaven Bloodbowl dugout, and maybe even get to painting some of my Emperor's Children. Hopefully I will get some battle reports in, maybe even from tournaments, about 50% of my games are casual and the other half come from doing multiple games in a day at an event, so who knows. This is my first experience blogging, so hopefully I can learn as much as I can teach through this. Now to get onto the actual exciting content: (slight disclaimer, My photo-fu skills are a little lacking compared to my painting/sculpting :-/ )

The first thing I learned about sculpting is having the right things for the job. I've gotten some colour shapers for blending, but my ghetto ass just hasn't sprang for metal sculpting tools and the ones I use I've made from the handles of disposable Xacto knives in various shapes useful to me. Here's what I use for all my sculpting projects:



Here are a few pictures of the first Hierodule->Tervigon conversion. I will be going over a step by step on how to achieve this over the next few posts:







Here are the initial stages of the Tervigon, I use Mighty Putty as a base or "filler" and then sculpt on top of, greenstuff is just too expensive to be wasting huge chunks of it that will just be covered later and detailed. To do this you just need to roll some Mighty Putty balls of various sizes and stick them into the ribs of the beast. On this one I'm doing a gaunt that just burst it's sac, on the last one I did a bursted sac, and one stretched and about to break. It's adding things like this that will really add character to your conversion later on:





The next post will deal with smoothing out the birthing sacs and adding a little detail to them with Greenstuff, stretching them up the ribs and connecting them to each other. Hopefully I will have the banner done by then as well to put pics up.