The Project Continues: Desert Color

It's been a while, eh? A couple of weeks... Well, life sometimes gets in the way. And part of that life is sometimes not feeling the desire to paint. But the important thing is to get back to it when the urge hits.

I've spent so much time on the tower that I thought it was time to work on the rest of the structure. I want a desert look to the Fortress so that's what I went for. I drybrushed the decking with Boltgun, of course. I started the sides drybrushing on Codex Gray. I didn't like the look of any of the other GW browns (though, maybe I should have taken a look at Citadel Tausept Ochre) so I went out and got a bottle of Reaper Master Series Tanned Leather. Now that I've drybrushed that one, I'm not in love with the look. I think I'll highlight with something a little yellowish or maybe even Bleached Bone. That should do the trick.

For next time, I don't think I'm going to work on the Fortress. I think I'll work on some of the many minis waiting for some tender loving care. In the near future, I think I'm going to have another theme day. A long time back I had a Drednought day. I think soon I will have a Rhino Frame day. I've got at least two Rhinos and two Predators I have never assembled. I think it's time to get thos bad boys together. So what if I already have enough painted? When it comes to 40K, is there really such thing as enough?

Lastly, I'm looking forward to getting a couple Honored Imperium sets. Everybody bitches about the knees on the statue but you know what? They're supposed to be statues! Abstract and artistic representations of something! Not all statues are perfect and not all artists are good. So even with the wierd knees, looks good to me!

Shrine of the Aquila

Loyal readers, I am a weak man.

So when I photographed the parts of this last night, I couldn't help thinking about how I wanted to put it together. So I dropped everything and did it. What do you think? I didn't show pictures of the back. There are several walk ways and room to put minis behind the bottommost level wall under the balcony. Heck, it's as tall as the tower from the Fortress. I'm also thinking about adding a few buttresses and lamps on the front, but other than a few minor things, it's done.

There's no way I'm going to start painting this thing anytime soon. If I get to play with it, it's going to be bare plastic for a while. But when I do, it'll look sweet! Since this is a shrine to eh Undying Emperor or some kind of crap like that, I'm thinking white with gold details. Very striking! But I may change my mind by the time that comes around so we'll wait ad see on that one...

Shrine of the Aquila and Sanctum

So I totally shouldn't have gotten this. Especially since I have the great project still looming. But I've wanted a Shrine of the Aquila for quite a while and when the opportunity came on EBay, I grabbed it. I also envisioned something more complex than just the big walls of the Shrine so I got the parts of a Sanctum, too. I'm going to put them all together to make one big Shrine! I'm envisioning a front made up of the broken sections of the Shrine with a large recessed balcony leading to the steps and door of the Shrine and the entire thing raised by the Sanctum as a lower level.

You know what? I'm so excited I think I'm going to go work on it now! I promise it won't stay me from the Fortress, but I've got to get this thing started!

The Project Continues: sides Two and Three

Nothing major to report. Last night, I got a little time to paint so I painted the cloaks of two more of the angels of death. Nothing stellar or amazing. Just a bunch of blue. I think I'll do their wings next because having three sides mostly done would make me feel much closer to getting done.

Heck, it occurred to me last night that even if I had time every night to paint, I'd still be working on this giant thing. All this time I've been working on the tower and that's it. Hopefully the rest of the Fortress will go much faster, but I'm prepared for this to take months. And, boy, will it look awesome when it's done!

The Project Continues: Wings

Once again, there has been a little bit of fear combined with a lack of time to paint. But I have overcome again!

I decided to get in there and do at least one set of wings so I have an idea how they will look. Simple formula: I painted on Ice Blue, brushed on some Space Wolf Gray and then highlighted with Skull White. I'm happy with how they came out, though I think I will ink the crevices a little. That's not going to come until a liter time, though. I'll finish all the wings on the other three sides before I do that, I think.

I'm also think that I'm going to re-do the halo. I should have undercoated the points with brown or yellow but I tried to paint directly on black and it just doesn't sit right with me. That should be a simple thing to fix. I could do that with a short amount of time. Maybe I'll get to it tomorrow, maybe not. Either way, now that I have one side mostly done, I'm feeling even better about the entire project.

I have one little secret to tell. I picked up a Shrine of the Aquila and most of a Sanctum on EBay. I shouldn't have and, to be honest, I messed up in my bidding and ended up paying a few dollars more than retail. On the other hand, I did get some extra floor tiles out of it all. Scant comfort, but it's better than nothing. When it arrives, I think it will make a lovely Imperial shrine...

Painting the Fortress

And so, it begins...

Last night I finally said "Enough!" and started painting the fortress. I decided to start with the decorative elements of the tower because that would give me more time to decide what colors I wanted to paint the fortress as a whole. As you can see, I went with Ultramarine Blue for the cloak, Ice Blue for the sash and Mithril Silver for the blade with a touch of Boltgun Metal for the hilt. A little white for highlights should show a little weathering and top it off well. Maybe a motto for the sash, too. Haven't decided on that yet. I might do the wings with Ice Blue and drybrush on Bleached Bone. I might check out how Fantasy players do Pegasus wings and sort of emulate that. Either way, I've got a little time. It'll be a few days before I get the other sides' cloaks, sashes and swords done.

As for the body, I'm leaning towards doing the supports in Boltgun and then doing the sides in some kind of tan like a desert motif. i may even do the non-angel parts of the tower that way, but I think I'll leave it alone. A black tower imposing over the day seems like the kind of imtimidating stuff the Imperium would build. And at night, the big colorful angel of death would be the only thing seen. Yeah, I think I'll leave the tower black...

Even More Fortress of Redemption

Alright, I have to tell you all a secret. I have been pro- crastinating. It isn't an active thing, but I've known for days that I've been doing it. Over the weekend I was afraid it would rain but I was wrong and I totally got this bad boy sprayed. But since then I've been stalled. Why? because I'm still debating how I want to paint it and am a little reticent to start work until I know. This is bad because I could have started on the tower already because I totally know how I'm going to paint it: Ultra Blue for the cloak, silver sword blade, electric blue sash/banner, and wings drybrushed first white then electric blue and then a highlighted with bleached bone and more white. The big debate is how will I do the rest of it? I could go bright and use white walls and electric blue supports. I could go dark and use fortress gray walls and boltgun supports. Just last night, I started thinking about a desert motif with snakebite/bleached bone walls. I just don't quite know and I'm afraid I'll have a little buyer's remorse if I'm not happy with my choice. I guess the moral to this story is to man up, do something and quit dithering about the little stuff. Just do it! I know better than anyone that if I don't like it, I can always paint it again!

And that is my moral for all of you today. Don't think too hard about your paint job or you'll end up paralyzed like me. Paint! The worst that can happen is you have to strip it and paint it again!

More Fortress of Redemption

Isn't it magnificent! It's more awesome than I expected! I can't wait to start painting this old boy!

But I'm going to have to. While I got the main structures completed last night, I didn't have time to get the extra bits done (the lascannons, heavy bolters and other little flourishes). If the weather reports hold as they are supposed to, tomorrow will start a weekend of cold with off and on wet and I'm not taking chances with this lovely building. Besides, it's not like I have a dearth of things to paint. I've got a Terminator squad and a Vanguard squad along with a Black Reach Tac squad sprayed and waiting for work. I could whip up more squads or the Rhinos I have sitting in parts. And then there are the squads and vehicles I still have in their boxes unopened.

Man, sometimes I think to myself "why don't I just say to heck with it and decide to make an entire Chapter?"...

Fortress of Redemption! WOOT!

I went out on my front steps to find a package waiting for me! It arrived a bit earlier than I expected. As you can imagine, I have set the Thunderfire Cannon aside for now. I wanted to get to work on this bad boy so badly, I almost couldn't wait! But wait I did until evening and got to work!

I will admit, even though I saw sprues at game stores and reviews on Youtube, I'm impressed at how detailed this thing is. And freakin' huge, too!

Last night, I only got the far bunker assembled. Tonight I will work on the smaller bunker and the tower. I should be done with assembly tomorrow night but with luck, I may have enough time to get the entire thing done. I hope so because tomorrow is supposed to be a lovely day outside and it would be a great time to spray paint this thing down. It's been so cold and crappy on and off for the last few weeks that I haven't really been able to spraypaint so I haven't been assembling too many things. Here's hoping that I can git' the proverbial "'er" done and quickly before the weather turns again!

Wall

What did I get done last night? I assembled another wall. Actually, I also painted a couple of miniature ships for another game system entirely but we're concerning ourselves with 40K here so that other stuff doesn't matter. I also have to ask your forgiveness for the photograph. I took a picture of the wall I made last night, but I don't have it on hand for this and since one wall looks remarkably like another wall, I decided to recycle a wall pic. Consider me properly castigated. I'll never do it again. :)

I'm thinking about a quick little project. I was reading an article from some women's magazine about interesting lighthouses and the shape of one caught my eye. It was something easy to do with foamcore and I envisioned it more as the base and column of some kind of memorial or statue. Recently I made a memorial out of a Black Reach Captain (I've got 3 or 4 I'll never use for play), a dice box (you know the ones that dice bricks come in) and some Basilica buttresses all mounted on a CD (good use for coasters). Well, a CD is just a bit smaller than 5x5" (120mm or 4.72") so if I made this base column that's based on this lighthouse, it'll be just the right size to top with this statue. It's also a good reason to make more statues (besides the fact that more and varied terrain is always good).

As a side mention to the foamcore design tutorial and because this entry made me think of it, here's something to think about. Of course you need graph paper to design your buildings. Well, you don't NEED it, but it helps a lot. But 8.5x11" graph paper isn't suited for bigger things which you'll probably eventually want to make. You could make lots of smaller pieces and put them together to make something bigger, but sometimes you want a big facade for a building or something similar. Trust me. Those city walls? The factory? I didn't do them on normal sized sheets. Go out to an art supply store (or, in my case, local blueprint company) and you'll find graph paper pads that are 11x17". They're obviously a little more expensive, but when you want to do something big, they can't be beat. If you're going to make a lot of buildings, it's a good investment if and/or when you decide to go bigger.

Some Things I've Done With Foamcore

So, I've been talking about all this stuff you can build with foam core. Well, it's time to show you some of the things I've done. Maybe you'll get inspired!

Desert buildings. Note the one at the far right front. That's basically the basic building we built last time with the bottom of a plastic easter egg on top.




Similar buildings with an industrial look. The little factory in front is just foamcore with a couple of short PVC pipe fittings.




Desert ruins... Note that their bases are L-shaped. That way I can fit them together to make bigger building footprints...





Of course, wall rubble makes great barricades and can represent even more demolished buildings.





Talking about Planetstrike, does that look like it could be a Skyshield landing pad to you? It's a whole lot cheaper...





And maybe those could be defensive walls around a bunker. How many foamcore defensive lines do you think you can get out of $20 worth of foamcore?




These are bridges. Some are meant as river crossing bridges. The rear ones were meant to be between buildings but several strung together make a great elevated monorail track.




Watch out for the scraps you cut out while making something. These were left over from the monorails. I slapped them on a base and now they're Imperial message boards. Some people like the Imperium and some people don't...




Now these are city walls! Constantinople had nothing on these bad boys!






But if you need something for a small fort or a compound, these'll work nicely, too.




This is one of my biggest pieces. This factory has a 15x15" footprint. It's foamcore with some plasticard on the doors and PVC pipes for tubes and smokestacks.




And lastly, you've seen these before. Who says you're restricted to blocky Imperial architecture?




So, I hope you got some ideas from this. when it comes to foamcore, you're pretty much limited by the thickness of the foamcore and your imagination (and maybe the size of your graph paper but you can buy that bigger!) so get out your pencils. Get drawing, get gluing and get cutting!

Ruins

So there are some ruins. Nothing special here. I've painted a bunch of 3rd Ed. Ruins. They're decently detailed and interesting looking but, paradoxically, there's a simplicity to them that I'm quite fond of. And they're not too different than the good old Cities of Death buildings so one of those and a few of these can make a nice little building footprint. A few of COD buildings for the outsides and these for interior walls can make quite an interesting and complicated building setup. I usually just dry brush the crap out of them with some fortress gray and some white, but this time I decided, since I liked the red touches to the Mechanicum I did last week, I would make the exposed brick red and give it more of a splash of color. I also did a final drybrush with space Wolf gray. It's not a color I kept on hand until recently but I like it a lot. I like what it does with buildings so much that I'm thinking about going back over my old ones that are only done with fortress and white and giving them a once over. Of course, that requires going back to thengs I've already finished and with all I've got undone, I think that will wait for a while.

I have been thinking about color a lot more with the 40K ruins I have. A lot of stuff in 40K looks pretty drab and mundane: gray stone, white marble, black stone, gold details. The gothic look, of course, is the big thing. Funny thing is that Gothic architecture is based on Romanesque architecture which is an emulation of Roman and Byzantine achitectures and even though several centuries back they saw Roman buildings and sculpture and all that and only saw bare gray/white stone, in ancient times it was usually painted and, if not vibrant and breathtaking since dyes and coloring agents were expensive, colorful. So I've been trying to paint buildings with more color in them. My first attempt at this came after I read an article about St. Peter's Basilica restorations. Restorers, who had always seen this white building, began finding traces of paint on the structure. Later they found receipts (signed for by Michaelangelo) for paint for the outer facade of the building. Over hundreds of years, time and pollution had turned the building white and dark more slowly than people noticed over the course of their lifetimes but originally it was yellow, blue, green and red! So I painted up a Sanctum and on the far wall, I inked the panels to give them yellow, blue, green and red tint. That might not have been the best way to do it since I accidentally used too much red and it ran into a few places I didn't want it, but it still came out fine. My point here is that people decorate their buildings and the more the care about them the prettier they make them. And even if they don't, sometimes they use the materials on hand to build things and grey stone may not be it. You know why barns are traditionally red? Because white paint was too expensive for farmers so they would make their own, often with some kind of earth in the mixture so the final product came out reddish. Maybe some buildings get built with some kind of brownish sandstone or maybe local earth is mixed with the "plas-crete" mix or they use the local pink/red/bluish granite. There can be color and there should be color. Not every city should or has to look like some kind of bland ancient drabness.

So tonight I'm going to start the Razorback but it's going to be a two-fer! I found a new school Rhino that I had assembled and based in black but had not started on. Why not do both at the same time? They're functionally the same vehicle with a minor difference. And this Rhino will officially be my eleventh. Yeah, I'm a freak.