'Ard Boyz Results, Lamenter's Banner, and Tervigon part 3!!!

Sorry for the delay, I've had a bunch of things interfering with writing posts this week, but after much delay are the results of Sunday's tournament for me. Round one I played against the Tau list that ended up getting first it got a little ugly for me and he won 3-1 in the end for a major victory. Game 2 was against a Necron player; it was a fun game but there was nothing the skeleton robots could do against the superhuman zombies I got a massacre phasing him out. Game 3 was against the Space wolf player that ended up making 2nd, he beat me by 2 kp (21-23 I believe) for a minor victory. I ended up 6th or 7th out of 13, but I think if I had done slightly better in either the first or third games I think I could have made top 3. Overall it was a good time, if a little draining though playing 3 2500 point games in a row. I accomplished my goal of doing better than I did in the practice tournament. As far as individual units go the Defilers held up amazingly well over the 3 games, were even clutch in two of the games, much to my amazement. The three demon squads did their job, at 2000+ I would definitely run them again but not at lower point values. Hopefully by 'Ard Boyz next year I'll be rocking Dark Eldar (and maybe even a new codex) and I'll do even better.

Now back to the Tervigon!

Now that you have your belly sacs covered in greenstuff making them smooth you're ready to start detailing. You're going to want to plan out the order of the lines in between the sacs much in the same way you planned the last step:



















The lines are the lines in between the bubbles, the red ones one the outside are last as they'll take a few sessions. The dotted lines are the other side of the bubble they go through. I started with the black lines; rolling a sausage (2Y:1B) of greenstuff about 5-7mm diameter up to maybe 1cm in between the bigger bulges the length of the line your following. Push it in the with your fingers then take your tools with hooks and points and pull at the sides of the sausages up the bubbles in a a combination of straight pulls and curved ones, keep them pretty close together. Try not to get into repeating patterns as it will look more natural if you don't. Continue this both sides of each sausage the entire length of them. After you finish with the hard tools you want to pull out the cone shaped colour shaper (or whatever soft blending tool you have) and smooth out the curves around the little "slime lines" so it looks as though the connector piece you just put in is part of the two bubbles instead of on top of them. When you are onto the second and third steps when you get the line your working on to intersect a finished one just blend it into the existing detail.




























Now when you get to the outside of the sacs your going to use a slightly different placing method, roll your sausage and place it around the outside of the sac, but roll tiny balls about the width of the ribs, and place them on top of the sausage on each rib. On the sac side your going to do the same thing as you did in between them sacs. On the rib side your going to want to use your pointiest tool maybe even an exacto blade tip and pull the sausage up in between the ribs and push it into the gap (don't be too thick) but on the ribs (where the extra bits of greenstuff are) pull them way up (1 cm or so) the ribs in very close straight lines. Take the chisel tip colour shaper and smooth the lines into the ribs as necessary. You should have something that looks like this:





































Now at the very back and front of the beast its sinewy "muscle" stuff instead of ribs, this is a mixture of the technique you use to detail the ribs and sacs just try to follow the existing lines into where you connect it to the sac. On the front you might have to put a wedge of putty into the top of the ribs so its a steady incline from the neck sinew and the sac on the chest. Here's what you should have by the end of this step:








































Next installment of the Tervigon conversion will be end of it with the final detailing. We will be putting veins on the sacs, cleaning up other small details, and putting all other finishing touches on it.

Finally here's pictures of the Lamenter's banner I did for one of the local player's. This is one the standard space marine chapter banner, with the freehand on the front coming from a description he gave me. I've been doing freehand on my rhinos and larger things like that but this was the smallest one I've done yet, but honestly the hardest part had to have been the checkers on the back of it. Note to self NEVER start an army with a predominant checker pattern in their scheme.









































Well now that I'm back online and able to write I'll have a ton of content coming about my Dark Eldar (WOOHOO!!!!)and will have the conclusion of the Tervigon within a week.

Converting a Tervigon Part 2

It's time for more gribbly stuff! The next step in the Tervigon conversion is to cover the Mighty Putty lumps with thin sheets of Greenstuff. You want to use a mixture with more yellow than blue (actually in my experience you should almost always use a mixture like that) so it sticks nicely to the surface. Alternately you could put a small drop of super glue on the top of the lump to hold the Green Stuff on, and a 50/50 mix will work as well, but I prefer the first method. You only want to cover 2 lumps at a time to avoid prints or kinks. The diagram below shows how I did it to avoid this, just do both A's at the same time, same with B's, etc.





















After you get the sheet of Green Stuff pulled over the lumps you want to take a flat wide tool (I use the tool shaped like a hook on one side, and a flat round handle on the other) and gently roll it back and forth over the Green Stuff until you get a nice round surface with no folds or lines in it. Generally the more gentlry and evenly you roll it, the less flat spots you'll end up with. Make sure to constantly lubricate your tools, water works good, as do water based "personal lubricants", try to avoid anything oil based as it will require cleaning later, personally (as sick as it sounds) I use good old saliva for my tools, as i think it works best, and who doesn't want to give a model a little tongue ;) . Try to keep it as bulbous as possible and remember how gravity would make it hang in relation to where the model stands. Don't worry too much about the spaces in between the lumps, you can push excess Green Stuff there and remove it if it's too thick, or if it's not just leave it, it will be detailed over later.


Now after about 3 days of working the Green Stuff over the lumps and it curing it should something look like this:

















































At this point you could begin detailing in between the sacs (but we're going to save that for next time) or you could detail the bursted (or bursting) sacs. For this you'll want to place globs of Greenstuff over the Mighty Putty frame, a little thicker than what you used on the sacs. Then go at it with pointy tool, I use the hook shaped tool, the pointy ended tool, and an actual exacto knife for this. Start making lines in it from the base (near the ribs) towards the ends, thicker at first then thinner as you go. Poke it, pull at it, even not clean/lubricate your tools as often so the Green Stuff sticks to them more. You don't want a uniform set of lines like hair but wavy, disorganized lines so it has a leathery appearance. When you're pulling at it pull it over the edges and down (remember your center of gravity in relation to how your beastie is standing) so it hangs freely and loosely. After all this you should have something that looks sort of like this:
































Next time we will be detailing in between the sacs and at their bases stretching them up on to the ribs, and into the neck/tail sinew. Only two parts left 'til you have a finished Tervigon ready to birth gaunts all over your opponents corpses. Until then have fun!

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.