The recent charity auction went well and I’m pleased to say managed to raise £347 for the Birmingham Dogs Home. Thanks to everyone who bid or helped spread word of the auction, which had over 10,000 views by the end of the listing.

I’d love to be to preview some new stuff here today but unfortunately time and commitments to other ‘secret’ projects mean I have nothing. I’m hoping to find time to do some work on my Beastmen some time soon but I make no promises.

In the meantime, I decided it was time for a clear out. To say I’ve always kept a large bitz box would be something of an understatement, but with my focus now firmly on my own miniatures I’m clearing out my collection. Along with my reference collection of Codices I’m selling off the contents of my bitz box. I’ve managed to organise some of it into complete squads or collections of bits, but the majority of it is literally a huge pile of bits.

I’ve broken down the pile into 5 bundles of bits each weighting over 200g a piece. There might be a few complete figures in there somewhere but mostly assorted bits. I’ve put these bundles up for auction for anyone interested in taking them off my hands. There’s also some more organised lots I’ve put up for sale on ebay, like full tactical squads and scout squads. Not expecting to make a lot from the bitz boxes as they’re a bit random, but I don’t see myself needing them ever again so I may as well declutter. If I do decide to do more 40k conversions, they’ll be largely scratch built or use very specific parts that I can source as and when needed.

If you’re interested you can find my ebay listings here.

WOWZERS!!!

Look what came in the post yesterday. It’s so weird to see something I made painted so amazingly well. As much as I’d like to keep it, this model is now up for auction on ebay, 100% of the proceeds will be going to the Birmingham Dogs Home Charity, who sadly need all the money they can get this time of year. The auction will last 10 days.

A big thank you goes out to Rafael (Volomir) for the amazing paint job and excellent photos. Find his website here: http://volomir.blogspot.com

Here’s the link to the actual auction for anyone interested in bidding: http://www.ebay.co.uk/itm/200867791829

Please go out of your way to let your blog readers, friends, acquaintances and mortal enemies know about the auction. Fingers crossed it’ll fetch a nice price.

I’m also listing my Inquisitor and Truescale Grey Knight as a second auction to help boost the final donation. They’re not as well painted but the conversions and rather nice if I do say so myself: http://www.ebay.co.uk/itm/200867874124

UPDATE (2nd JANUARY 2013)

I’m proud to be able to report that these three minis have managed to raise £347 for the Birmingham Dog Home.

Thank you to everyone who bid on or helped spread word of the auction. It is very much appreciated.

Greetings all.

So I know updates lately have been even sparser than usual. Unfortunately that’s not going to change any time soon.

It’s time for me to move away from what I’ve focused this blog on for so long (those ever popular Space Marines) and start to work on my own ideas. I know many of you 40K and truescale fans won’t like that but so long as the work is based on someone else’s ideas and intellectual properties I will be tied to this being a hobby, and I want to make it MY job based on MY ideas.

Right now I’m not certain what that means for this site. I’ve spent the last few months working on prototypes for my own miniature range. Whilst progress has been decidedly slow things are really starting to take shape, not just the miniatures but also the creative fiction and something resembling an outline of game mechanics. I feel very strongly that I can’t preview this content here until it is in a very polished stage, which will be a while yet. That leaves very little time for updates on this site.

I’d love to be able to devote time to 40K and Warhammer Fantasy related conversions, but the chances are I won’t be able to. I still have a couple of Beastmen battalions to do something with and I’ve been having urges to assemble a Vampire Counts army too. Maybe I’ll do one or two simple things with that if I can find the spare time or need a break.

While my new miniatures will get their own site eventually, initial previews will still be posted here. When I have the first handful of models finished and ready for casting I’ll look to start a campaign on Kickstarter or Indiegogo. Obviously, the most important element of success there will be having the best finished models I can possibly make. While that is going to take some time I’m happy with how the development stages are progressing.

Sorry I have to be such a tease and not actually reveal anything yet, but the wait will be worth it. I’ve got something really unique and timing and presentation will be vitally important.

To change the subject to something I can talk about…

I’m hoping to soon be putting up for auction an Artscale Imperial Fist miniature that I converted and Volomir painted. Volomir has promised me some top notch photos, but for now here’s a single pic to salivate over. Check out his blog to see his methods (here and here), and my conversion post here.

All proceeds from this auction will be going to the Birmingham Dogs Home, a charity very close to my heart that protects and re-homes abandoned, stray and unwanted dogs.

I’ll also be auctioning off my own Inquisitor and Artscale Grey Knight as a second (not so excellently painted) auction at the same time. Maybe even one or two other items that may be of interest.

Barring complications I’m aiming for both auction to be two weeks long, starting the end of November or early December. If you know of anyone who would be remotely interested in bidding on these please send them a link to this site. I’ll be trying to raise as much awareness of the auctions as possible when they start so any help with letting people know through your own sites, blogs or forums would be greatly appreciated.

While working on my Kharn conversion I knew I had to figure out a way to remake the chains wrapped around the model’s arm. There are a few tutorials online on sculpting chains but none of them appeared to be what I needed. This method gives a more refined and squared off chain.

Whilst I normally mix Magic Sculp with my Green Stuff, in this instance I stuck with plain Green Stuff. Begin by rolling out a very thin sausage keeping its thickness as even as possible.

Press the Green Stuff on a clean flat surface, plastic card or something similar. Try and keep it in roughly a straight line.

Using a sharp blade (lubricated with Vaseline, water or saliva) trim the edges away to leaving a tidy clean strip.

Next (using the scalpel again) carefully remove small segments at regular intervals.

Leave to cure.

Repeat the same basic technique with an even thinner sausage of Green Stuff on top to create the links between the first set of segments.

Here’s one I made earlier.

Once cured, make a one piece mold. I use Blu-Stuff, but whatever molding putty or medium you prefer should work.

When you have a mold roll out a sausage of Green Stuff and push it into the mold, carefully removing excess putty as best you can.

Using the edge of a tool (I used the chisel shaped Clayshaper shown above) to make indents on the back of the cast to match the front. After this has cured you can add the central line of interlinking parts just like you did for the front.

Note: if you want the chain to be curved you will need to remove the cast from the mold before it fully cures. If that’s the case the last stage of links on the back have to be added after it’s removed from the mold and left to cure.

It always happens that my most recent conversion is my favourite to date, and Kharn the Betrayer is no exception.

I’m really pleased with the level of detail I’ve managed to get into this model, I really pushed myself to get everything as top notch as I could, and it’s nice to see a bit of improvement in my sculpting, hopefully that’s something that will increase over time.

When making this I had 5 different pieces of artwork as reference material, including the image of the existing GW model. They were all very consistent with the details so it was very easy knowing what details I had to include. The only thing I didn’t keep from the source material was the skulls on the chains hanging from his belt. In truth I would have preferred to have left the chains hanging from his belt off completely because I think it lessened the “flow” of the model by blocking the view of the long chain at the back.

Speaking of chains, I will have a tutorial soon on how to make them like this. The chains are without a doubt one of my favourite elements of the model.

The knee pads were especially tricky to sculpt, but once I had the right one finished I simply duplicated it with Blu-Stuff.

I have to say Chaos Space Marines (especially with the new models just released) are becoming a far more interesting, simply because of the extra levels of details that can be added that generally aren’t present on loyalist models.

Ever since I made my first Artscale Terminator I’ve been asked for a tutorial on how I did it. I was very hesitant for a long time because it takes a while to put this together but also because it requires a better grasp of using Green Stuff than the Artscale Space Marine in Power Armour.

However, enough people requested it, so after a very very long wait for some people I finally got it done.

I’ve tried to make this guide as straightforward as possible. It will require some patience and practise if you’re new to Green Stuff and sculpting but hopefully it’s still rather accessible.

Please feel free to leave comments or email me with questions or suggestions on how to improve this tutorial.

This particular project has had an insanely long delay period, but I finally got stuck in a few weeks ago. This model is my half of a trade I agreed to with Volomir where he would paint up one of my conversions to put up charity auction in exchange for this model.

At the moment this is realistically about 70% complete but the hardest part (the posing) is done so the final 30% shouldn’t take much longer.

Still left to do are the addition of a shoulder pad, some fine detailing and the toughest detail, the chains. At the moment the model is a little top heavy looking but I have a nice idea to add a certain amount of balance with the chains.

The helm was based off of a Fantasy Khorne Champion, stripped down and built up again. I did try a couple of alternative approaches with plastic helms and plasticard “horns” but they just weren’t going to cut it. The Chainaxe started out as an Inquisitor Game scale chainsword, stripped down to just the teeth. The rest of it was built up from Green Stuff, plasticard sheet and a few random bits.

I have to admit when I first was the combat squad pics it didn’t register with me that they were the models I’d made, which I like to think is testament to the quality of the conversion (by that I mean they don’t appear as obvious conversions).

It also helps that the paintjobs are top notch

Click on images to see them full size.

So I haven’t had much time for anything lately but I decided to put together a better video tutorial for casting Green Stuff using Liquid Blu-Stuff. The last few months the majority of questions I’ve gotten via email have been concerning precisely this, and as I needed to cast something for my own project I figured I’d get this done first.

Hope this makes my own method a little clearer to any of you with questions. I wouldn’t attempt making Green Stuff casts any larger than this. I’m going to try using this mold again with just plain Magic Sculp and see what results I get without the inclusion of Green Stuff in the mix.

Just wanted to share a quick sneak peek of a piece I’m working on for Anvil Industry. This is the two wings of a jet pack like device (as far as I know). What you see here will be split down the middle. The reverse side will be have identical details.

Because I needed to make them as thin and delicate as possible I decided to sculpt in relief form onto a thin piece of plasticard onto which I’d drawn the chosen design. I built up what you see here literally one feather at a time. Although time consuming doing it one at a time it does keep each feather from getting damaged by accident.

I’m pretty sure there will be more of these, done in different wing positions (don’t know that ‘poses’ is the right word in regards to wings). These will be cast in resin and their thinness should allow easy bending in hot water should a customer want to alter the overall shape. That’s the idea anyway.