So it’s about time I posted some evidence of progress, so here goes… the heading towards finished Grey Knight Chaplain.

Whilst painting him I decided I wasn’t totally happy with the positioning of the shield arm, mostly because the direction the attached purity seal was hanging looked odd. So I rebuilt the arm with the shield in a slightly more dynamic pose and the seal hanging more naturally downwards. Whilst doing this I realised I’d missed an opportunity to take the rather awesome Iron Haloed Skull and repeat the design on his own shield. So before continuing with painting I’ve sculpted the Iron Halo design onto his Storm Shield.

Originally I’d wanted to have all of his power armour black (as described in the novels) with just a few gold details and a silver skull helm, however, the all black armour just didn’t really look that good, so in the end I opted to paint both shoulder pads the same silver as his helm. It certainly requires a lot more attention on the painting side of things, but you can certainly imagine how the finished model will look now.

I’ve also managed to gather bits together for more members of a Grey Knight squad. All the legs are quite obviously from GK Terminators, the torsos from MK8 armour and a Black Templar plastic bit and the heads come from Black Templars, a metal veteran model, a company champion and a AoBR marine.

First up today, SIlicone Putty!

I’ve mentioned this a few times over the last few months so I figured I’d give an example. As I’m working on a Grey Knights army, I decided to make a mold of a special purity seal for them. In some of the GK artwork they can be seen with really long flowing purity seals, which I think not only look really cool but are especially useful for hiding less than perfect sculpting.
So here I sculpted a long flowing seal onto a piece of plasticard.

The silicone putty comes in two parts, both of which are of, well a putty consistency (obviously).

Take two small equal sized amounts. They are very easily mixed just using fingertips and takes probably no more than 20-30 seconds. It’s not exactly messy, but you’ll want to wash your hands afterwards.

It hardens very quickly, so as soon as it’s mixed into one colour, press it onto whatever it is you are molding, being careful to sort of spread it over the piece so as not to capture air bubbles.

Give it a minute to set, and pull it off. It captures details very nicely (you can see my fingerprints on the putty in the photo above). Whilst normally on larger objects the mold has some flexibility, on small pieces like this there really is none. It’s very easy to cut and will break if you use too much force, but the beauty of this material is that Greenstuff will not stick to it at all, so there’s no need for any kind of release agent.

When making the cast a soft mix is highly recommended (ie: at least twice as much yellow as blue) and you’ll need to press it into the mold with a wet tool, otherwise it’ll stick to the tool and be pulled right out of the mold.

I’ll be using this particular mold to add flowing purity seals to all my Grey Knights, which will certainly add a sense of movement to a fairly static pose that most will have.

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Actual Scale bike.

This is the bike for an Actual Scale Salamanders character (will count as Khan). The rider is currently in bits, but the main structure of the bike is built as you can see. The exhausts might be a little bit flared. The whole thing is about half as long again as a regular bike, hence the need for a custom base. The front of the bike is a little rough but I’ll be sculpting a large imperial eagle on it as soon as I can get some more GS. The plastics are a combination of Ork and Space Marine bikes and I think the exhausts may have come from a Baneblade (I’m not too sure).

I finished filling in the terminator legs to make them appear like power armour (sorry forgot to photograph back of the model), and greenstuff the torso to be a bit more in line with the rest of my marine conversions. I’m not entirely happy with the abdomen shape, so there’ll be some conveniently placed purity seals when it’s finished I’m sure. Still need to add a belt buckle and cables, and I think I may end up sculpting a bigger chest eagle over the existing one, despite plans to keep the torso’s original details. Oh well.

The large book has been scavenged from the familiar in a previous post (typical – spend time converting and then go chop it up!). Once the torso is finished, I’ll add a heavy duty strap or chain over his shoulder.

I opted to go Crozius/Thunder Hammer and Storm Shield set up. I could count the weapon as a standard Nemesis Force Weapon or Thunder Hammer, without causing any confusion.

The Crozius/Hammer has been made a bit more compact by shortening the hammer heads and adding a smaller handle. The forearm is taken from the Hector Rex mini, just so it matches the arm holding the storm shield. I really like how this weapon has turned out. Took a lot of tinkering with to get it right but it got there in the end. It did in fact start out as the Thunder Hammer on the Preacher Josef model but has been chopped up and whittled down till only the center part between the hammer heads is left… and I could easily have used plasticard to build that bit

I think they’ll some issues getting the shoulder pads to fit but I’ll leave that till last.