Transformers 2007

Well, it's been several months now since the release of the live action Transformers movie, and I will admit that I was as skeptical as anyone out there. I had been following the development of the movie basically since the day it was confirmed. With each piece of info I acquired, it seemed to simply be the next entry on "Why the movie won't be a transformers movie" list. The lack of Mass shifting, the changes to the classic vehicle modes, the lack of a transformers ship. Each thing seemed to just be reasons I wouldn't like it. But, I hadn't seen it yet, so I made no judgement.
So opening day came, and I went to see it. I'm still not sure what I was expecting to see, but what I did see I liked. Optimus Prime was no longer the iconic god-esque leader he was in the 80's cartoon, Megatron has shed his high pitched voice and the Decepticons are now the viscous conquerors they were intended to be.
But, with all the changes that had been made to accommodate reality and make the transformers seem more alien, there are many reminders of the classic transformers in the movie as well.
Just as he did atop Shirman dam, in the animated series, Megatron wields a flail weapon while Optimus makes uses of an Energon blade.
One of the big changes that I was most skeptical about, was the Character of Bumblebee. In the original series, Bumblebee was the small bot who provided comic relief while occasionally pulling off the daring rescue that no one else could due to size. In the movie he is a partial mute character, the result of injuries suffered in battle. He communicates through his XM radio and operates as an advanced scout for the Autobot forces. I found that I came to enjoy this rendition of the character a great deal. It is a far more adult concept for the character and helps to carry the fact that the Autobots and Decepticons have been at war for an extended period of time.
I suppose the largest single piece of fan service, was a single line spoken by Optimus prime: One shall stand, and one shall fall!

City of Heroes: Invasion Issue 3

City of Heroes Invasion #3
Create your own Comic Books with Comic Book Creator!

It's been a heck of run on this issue, but #3 is out! Check it out has Torroes and Blue face off.

GROWL! Spark!

This is the next item I am selling from my 40K collection, a Converted and fully painted Cyber-wolf. I used it has a familiar for my Daemon hunters' inquisitor though I see no reason it wouldn't work as a Wolf Lord's pet or something similar. I'm asking $8 for this pup.

Eldar Wave Serpent

Well. I like the Forge world version's turret and I think the GW version looks like a Falcon with Tau style turret. So I made my own! Here it is:

As you can see, the cockpit uses the Vyper canopy while the Turret is basically scratch built. The panels on the forward prows are the radiator panels from the Eldar Void stalker from Battle fleet gothic.

The additional engines are also from the Void stalker while the large spirit stones are the targeting sensors from the Fire prism.

The turret is made out of several pieces of 1/16 inch thick plasti-card and then a large amount of Green-stuff

Let there be light!

Several weeks ago I began work on a little exploration project, to turn a Wiskey bottle into a lamp. Well, I have now completed that project. Pictured left is the completed lamp with a 60 Watt light bulb.













...

and now a represenation from "Storm of Iron"

Nearly two years ago I read the book "Storm of Iron". Unlike most 40K books, it takes place from the perspective of the Chaos marines, specifically the Iron Warriors. Well, one of the characters in the book is a captured Imperial Guard member named Larana. She becomes the personal servent of the Champion of a group of Berzerkers. By the end of the book though, she discovers that his armor is in fact daemonic armor, and has called to her. It preys on her yearning for vengence and she dons the armor becoming the new champion. Well, the book inspired me to create several figures for an army I'm now realizing I will never get to. So I'm selling the peices I have built. So, I will be posting images of the Iron Warrior Berzerker squad over then next couple of days. First up, is none other then Laranna her self:





Yes, there is actually a head in there. Figuring that normal human are considerably smaller them a space marine, I used a Escher Juvee head.

City of Heroes Invasion continues!

I have now completed issue 2 of City of Heroes: Invasion. I took much of the critique I received for issue 1 and made efforts to address them for issue 2. In terms of final products, I have to say that issue 2 is leaps and bounds ahead of where issue 1 was.
Sue to technical issues, I have been unable to upload the comic to hypercomics.com like issue 1. I have however pursued alternate hosting methods. The comic is available both for Online viewing (Hosting provided by Photobucket.com) and for download (Hosting provided by Box.net)

(Clicking on the above image will take you to the online version
Click here to Download PDF
(You will require Adobe Acrobat to read. Click here to download Reader)

As an added bonus, MMORPG.com is providing hosting for an exclusive City of Heroes Issue 10 Video. (That's the 10th expansion to the game that deals with the second Rikti Invasion) Click here to watch.

Announcing a sale

Greetings to all. As many of you are no doubt aware, when you do a hobby for an extended period of time you rake a great deal of material for that hobby. Well miniature gaming is no different. As I am now in need of space and money. To solve both concerns I am going to begin selling off some of my pieces. I will power pictures were needed, and post what I'm asking as a fair price. If you have a question, feel free to contact me.

First up on the list is my Nurgle style terminator:
I'm asking $15 for this ugly little piece of Nurglified filth.

Dark Angles Company Master

When the new Dark Angles Company master came to the shelves, I had to get one. Mostly because it so closely resembled the first Warhammer 40K miniature I ever painted, which was the old Dark Angle Captian. Well, no point in beating around the bush. My paint job is one the left, the GW painted one is on the right. Comments always welcome.

Something a bit different....

This is one of my latest projects nearing it's final stages of completion. It's a lamp, built out of old bottle! Nothing much to it honestly. I did a bit of research into glass cutting and found that a Diamond tipped dremmel bit was the preferred method. So after cutting out a hole in the bottom of the bottle, I dropped a threaded rod through, punched a hole in the bottle cap and screwed the socket and shade fixture, attached a base with a nut and viola, 90% complete. Just need to stain the base and run the wire.

Back in business!

Greetings to all my readers! I offer my apologies for being absent these past months, it has simply been one thing after another after another. But that's all in the past, the present is that I'm back in business!
Some updates from the last several months:
I managed to attend Games Day Baltimore this year (Yeah! No food poisoning this time!) Below is a pic of the Big Gunz D.C. who attended Games Day this year
As you can see, we had a commanding presence this year ranging from our youngest members, who comprise our Young Gunz, up to our president and executive officers. I had a GW associate ask, several weeks later, if we were going to conquer the east coast with our army of members. I assured him, the Big Gunz D.C. don't conquer.

I've also begun working on skills in a few areas other then simple modeling. One of them is experimenting with Photoshop (It's nice being a student because you get the educational versions of multi-hundred dollar programs :) ) Below is one of my attempts at coloring. Of course it's a 40k Image. On the left is the original image I downloaded, and on the right is the colored version.

I must stress, I AM NOT the original artist of this image. I only colored it. Beyond that, feedback always welcome.

Something else I have started to dabble with is comic books. No, not reading them (though I do that as well) but making them. No, I'm not working for Dark Horse or Marvel, yet. But I've started work on a City of Heroes fan created comic series called Invasion. Check out issue 1:

City Of Heroes: Invasion #1
Create your own Comic Books with Comic Book Creator!

That about wraps up my update for today. Rest assured, I will have more in the near future.

Update: media Center

Well, it's not warhammer and it's not a model but I've finished a project. My media Center. Originally I was going to build the system in a modified case that bear some resemblence to a large DVD player. Well, I kinda missed one crucile peice of information. Namely the fact that the case I was building wouldn't fit in the entertainment center of the living room. So I took an old case I had, painted it black and picked out a few details in silver and rebuilt the system in this other case. So my first computer mod consited of painting a case! well, not much but it's a start.

Farewell Templar artist

I would ask that all my readers join me in saying Farewell to the Templar Artist blog. The artist behind the blog is a fellow Big Gunz D.C. member and very frequently served as inspiration to myself in my conversion work. Due to his changing life, he has concluded he will be unable to continue updating his blog and decided to take it down. I know I will miss the wealth of knowledge he had posted on it simply by talking about his conversions.

And the hits just keep on coming...

Well, I'll report the good news first. My computer is up and running once agian. Nice new install of windows, removale of some annoying crap and she's happy as can be (For a computer that is)

Bad news: Thanks to screw up with my pay check, my financial situation is tenious right now and my cash flow is near nadda. So many of my projects are on hold for the immediant future. I will update when I leave this dark period in my financial life.

New years update....

Well the new year has come and as ever there's more to work on. However, my computer has recently had a total mental break down and is right now running at about 1/10 it's normal capacity. The problem is a corrupted Windows. So I need to reformat my system and reinstall windows, and then reinstall the drivers for all my hard ware, and then reinstall my programs. In short, my updates will be a bit lack luster for the next week to ten days. By the 15th I should be back up and running at full capacity.

Space Hulk, Death Wing style

This was a peice I had some planning behind it. I recently fell in love with the Captian Lysander model and started thinking about what I could do with it. And I stumbled up the idea of doing a Death Wing termi in a space hulk scenario. For those of you old enough to remember space hulk, you'll remember that the primary enemy Terminators faced in it were Genestealers. Hence the recently de-limbed genie lieing on the deck plate.
The two most difficult parts of this model were the chest and the right knee. Both were originally modeled with the Imperial Fist icon on them, so that had to go. Enter a dremal! Once I ground off the Imperial fists iconography I attached a shield from the Terminator sprue to the chest and shield emblem to the leg. The rest is pretty straight forward.
A few things I over looked when I originally built the model, and plan to correct when I redo this peice:
1) Mold lines. I was so dead set on the chest and legs, I totally ignored the mold lines. ::Slaps hand::
2) The chest shield: initially I was pleased with how the plastic shield sat on the model, but upon closer inspection it does appear to actually be a totally seperate peice and doesn't really look like it belongs there. I should have shaved down the back of the shield a bit more.
3) The leg/groin area. This one totally got over looked until the model was built, but the peice I attached to the leg is of similar shape and design to the groin gaurd of the model. Not 100% sure how I'll fix that next time. I might grind down the groin gaurd and putty in a tabard or robe of some sort. Death Wing are Dark Angles after all.

Update: Media center

A bit of a minor update today. I picked up what I'm ultimatly going to use for the video card in the center:
The ATI All in Wonder 2006 edition. For those of you who are computer savy, it's not the most powerful video processor out there and not particularly well suited to video gaming. But I'm not using it for video gaming. I'm using to interface with a TV.
The big reason I'm going forthe 2006 edition as opposed to say the X850, well for one I have an X850 on my main system. Fantastic card, but waaaaaaay more then I need for the media center. The other big thing I like about the All-in-wonder is the ability to not have cables you don't need. The card uses an interface system with an adapter that you connect the various cables you actually need to it. So If I don't need, say the DVI cable, I don't attach it. It should help keep cluter to a minimum.

Not warhammer related...

But a project I'm working on none-the-less. For several months now I've been working on encoding all my dvds and VHS movies to digital files on several hard drives (Quit an endevour when you consider I have over 1000 dvds alone) with the intention of building myself a media center/server computer system. Well I was talking with some friends last week who asked if I wanted any extra computer parts. The extra parts ammounted to a mother board, a mid-level video card and a case. Thinking about it, I figured I could use the parts to build a "proof of concept" machine for myself.
Now, here's where the real work comes in. I want to put the finished machine in with the stereo and AV material in my parents living room. But I didn't want this ugly beige computer case sitting there. So I needed to turn the case side ways.
However, my parent's are slighty technophobic (YEah, if you haven't already guessed, I'm the tech priest of the family). So I needed to make it resemble something my parents are already comfortable using.
So after some though, I decided if I rotate the DVD drive so it is parallel with the case, I could make the system resemble a DVD player (which I finally got my mother to use after 4 years).
So, here's the results of my effort thus far:

I'm going to craft a case housing out of acryllic then give it a jet black finish. I'll post more pictures as they are availible. Oh, on the note of this project, I'd like to give a big shout out to the fellas over at www.thebestcasescenario.com who have been a tremendous help to me on this project thus far, and continue to be supportive of my efforts. Thanks guys!

Cursed Founding: Legion of the Damned

I'm finally getting back to work on my Cursed founding chapter trait system. Check it the entry for the Legion of the Damnaed

50th post!

YAY!!! 50 Posts! Yup this is my 50th post thus far! But rest assured, I'm no where near finished. If anything, I'm just starting. I've still got my campaign kicking off in January not to mention an Eldar army I hope to have ready for Games Day Baltimore this year and a Chaos Army with more conversions planned for it then I dare own up to at this time, plus I've got some other random pieces here and there I'm working on that I will show you guys. I've got plans for some Eldar warlocks that will be in the same spirit as my Farseer though not as intense certainly. The Farseer is the leader of my Eldar army after all. I also have some ideas for more space marine conversions. Maybe something based off 80s cartoons, hmm a Dreadnought that transforms into a Predator....
Well that will be for a nother day. Here's my model post for the day:




















Following a similar concept to the marine putting
a bolter round through the gaunts head, this marine was similarly jumped but got the upper hand, this time by shoving a combat knife between the armored ribs of the gaant and getting a killing shot.

I stand Victorious

This fella was one of my more interesting conversions, because it was the first time I ever tried a weapon conversion. By weapon conversion I mean a conversion of the actual weapon, not a parts swap. It's difficult to see from this picture, but the sword in the marines left hand is actually 3 peices. The first is the hilt which is in face the chainsword from the Commander sprue. The next peice is a open mouthed ripper with the tail and body carved down so it fits over the hilt of the chain sword. Finally the actual blade is a Gaunt talon.

Kill team continued

Once agian, this model was designed around a fight scene. In this case, the split second where the fight is decided. This marine was about to be jumped by a gaunt, but the marine reacted first and caught the gaunt in mid-leap. Taking advantage of the gaunt's momentary confussion he levled his bolter and shot the gaunt throught he mouth.
I drew some inspiration from real life milatary tech for this though. See, I figure the bolter is similar to modern day grenade launchers, based on how the bolter shells actually work. The shell detonates after it breaks through the enemy's body. Well with current day grenade launchers, the grenade must spine x number of times after leaving the barrel before it will detonate. Figuring the bolter works along the same concept, I figure the shell wouldn't have armed before it busts through the Gaunts' skull. Hence the bullet exiting the back of the gaunts head.

Face the beast...

This marine was modeled with the end result of a fight in mind. Speccifically, the marine was jumped by the gaunt which was then able to tear and gash away at the marine until finally, the marine was able out of sheer determination and desperation, grab hold of the Gaunts arms and snap off it's talons which he promptly used to stab the gaunt to death.

Kill Team Sergent

Somewhere around the launch of the Current Space Marine Codex, I built a space Marine kill team. Always seeking to annoy certain other players, I modeled my kill team has having just killed, beaten, broken, evicerated, slain, slaughter and generally spanked a bunch of Tyranids.
This is the sergent of the group. Equiped with Master Crafted lightning claws and an Auspix I'm pretty sure he'd hurt in Kill Team Close combat.

The Lightning claws I made to be speccifically slim and more akin to the Hunt Claw the Alien used in the movie Predator. I took a Dark Eldar Helmet and cut off the side blades and then mounted the blades on an Auspix on the back of the Marines wrist. I then ran a bit of wire from the auspix body back to the powerplant of the Marines armor. On the left wrist, I used the blade from a space marine knife to make it look like the blades on that gauntlet hadn;t been deployed yet.
In order to drive home the idea of this being an Tyranid elite kill team (not nessicarially Ultramarine Tyrannic Vetrens though) I converted the sergents back pack to have tyranid themed vents which consist of the forward portion of a pair of Guant heads glued in place of the normal vents of the power plant.

Father Nurgle blesses you

So, I was working on painting my Eldar Dire Avengers and somewhere I jumped form painting Eldar to converting Terminators. No idea what line of logic or insanity possessed me to make that jump, but I did. So now I have some new conversions to detail. To the left is the first of them.
I donno what it was that brought an image of a Nurgle terminator to mind, but I went with it. One of the trade mark images I've come to associate with Nurgle is a bloated gut with spilling intestines. Using a bit of green stuff I molded a swollen and disfigured gut onto a terminator. Using a hobby knife I cut into the gut and opened a large wound. Using more green stuff, I rolled out a long thin snake and by long I mean it was nearly 12" long. I let this piece cure for about 40 minutes before I touched it again. Using some super glue and a pair of tweezers, I began to attach the intestines to the body from with in the wound. It is truly amazing how 12 inches of 1/32" tubing will fit into such a small area. But that was the intestines.
The Claws/talons are actually genestealer hands.

We shall bring the firepower that is needed

I recently compleated building a three man Eldar Warwalker squadron and am not very far from finishing painting and basing the models. But I needed to get something up so people don't think I'm like dead or something.

Much like the new Wraithlord, the New Warwalker is a quantum leap beyond it's predessecor model. Looking more like a vehicle then some form of guardian strapped to a walking engin the new models actually looks like it would work. I can also see immense possibility for convertions with this model. Perhaps a Version Vyper, or some form of Wraith Spirit piloted Walker by combining the Warwalker with the wraith lord. Ah the possibilities...

Behold, the captain appears...

Who remembers this guy?
He finally got painted as a salamder Captain, but I tried a slightly different paint scheme with him. The normal paint scheme is Snot green and chaos black. While I kept the black I went with a mixed Catachen green and scorpion green giving me a green that's similar to Snot green but desidedly "mukier".

Wow I'm in the catalog...

Imagine my feelings when I step into the local GW hobby center to pick up a bitz order, ans one of the employees points right at me and says "YOU, Come here!". I'm immediantly thinking "Okay I don't work for the company for they can't fire me. I bring too much money to the store for them to ban me with out like, my stealing something" Well to get to the end, he took me to the bitz ordering station, flipped open the 2006-07 bitz catalog and shows me this:

We all know where that guy came from right? ::here::

Gaurds men with a storm bolter?

This is once again the result of a random bits box dive. It started as just toying around with with some scrap bolters. Before I had any kind of plans for it, I had built a sort of double barreled bolter with the side feed magazine.

I give you the Relictors!

Links to the individual models:
Terminator 1 // Terminator 2 // Terminator Sergent // Terminator 3 // terminator 4