The Raven Guard Project

The Ravens gather.....

2009-03-15T17:17:00.000-07:00

Press play for some theme music!

I know it's been over a month since I have updated the blog, but I HAVE been working on the Ravens. It's just been tough to get time between raising the 2 boys, keeping the wife occupied and working on my Masters.

I have received about 90% of all the bits I need to finish.

So first off I'll start with the dreadnought. I finally received the oil paints and MIG pigments to do the weathering. I have never done this type of weathering before but I have seen military modellers pull this off with great effect.

The dread is still very much WIP as I post these pics.

I was going for the "Been out in the field for months" look. I think it looks good, but I believe I went a little overboard, but it still looks kind of cool. I really like the bullet holes!!

(Thats why this was the test model ;-))

The smoke effect done using the MIG pigments.

If you look closely you will notice a big difference in quality between the missle launcher and the lascannon. I didn't use any shadowing, like I did with the missile launcher, and I think it makes a huge difference. Also you can see some of the blue dots, where I didn't do the weathering technique properly.

Here is a link to a site that explains one way of doing the weathering very similar to the way I did it.

http://ultrawerke.blogspot.com/2007/03/painting-and-weathering-tutorial-part-i.html

I probably won't be using a dread in my list for an upcoming tourney I will be going to. (Necronomicon GT in Orlando, Florida) So I am going to put the dreadnought on the back burner for now.

UPDATE ON THE LANDSPEEDER

I'm not the type of painter that can work on only one thing and finish it before moving on to the next unit. I get bored with that.

So some pictures of the control console for my first landspeeder.

UPDATE ON THE DROP POD

I've made a lot of progress on the drop pod. I'm hoping to have it finished this week!!

Close up of the WIP console panels

More WIP pictures

UPDATE ON TAC SQUAD

The Tac squad is coming together nicely. I only need 1 more "old school" backback to finish the bits.

A picture of the bits I used to build the combi flamer. I used the tip of a cadian infatry flamer, a water bottle from the cadian infantry and a combiplasma.

I'm pretty pleased with the way it came out. Can't wait to paint it.

ASSAULT MARINES!!!

I had to cut the border off of the metal right lightning claw shoulder pad. A lot of work!! Cutting, filing and sanding. :-) That's why I used a plastic left lightning claw to save some work. I still need to find something to use to simulate the "bumps" on the right pad. I haven't found pins small enough yet at The hardware store. So I'm thinking scratch building, or ordering online.

I only need 6 more Forgeworld Red Scorpion jump packs to complete both squads.

I can't wait to get all these guys painted up, and based.

I'm planning on making a display board, where the marines are attacking a heretical chemical factory-I'm thinking of a nurgle feel using some Disciples of Xaphan from Forgeworld. I've ordered some cities of death terrain and plastruct stuff. I'll be explaining the building of my display board as well, when the time comes. I only have 3 months to get these guys done!!

I've still have 10 terminators, 10 scouts, Shrike and 2 more landspeeders to finish.

That's it for this post.

In the mean time...(Drop Pod, Speeder, & assorted)

2009-02-10T16:07:00.000-08:00

Press play for some theme music!

So it’s been a few weeks since my last post, because of the new semester starting up and also I am waiting on a bunch of bits and weathering materials to come in.

So in the mean time I have started working on a drop pod, land speeder and some test space marine models. I also built a light box so I can take better pictures!

I have a lot of little updates this time as I wanted to get something up here without waiting tooooo long in between posts.

First an update on the dreadnought. I received my Forgeworld DNCCW and I wanted to give it a heavy flamer. I found an old terminator flamer arm in my bits box so I decided I would use that.

The DNCCW and Arm

View from the left side, after pinning and attachment

I needed to use some greenstuff to attach the tricep to the DN arm. I cut the ends off of the track links from a tank sprue to use as rivets.

The rivets came out ok, but next time I will use real rivets, I just wanted to try this approach and see how it would work.

The primed arm.

My weathering stuff should be here this week. I can't wait to get the Dread finished.

Now onto the tactical marine.

The bits

After gluing pic.
Notice I am not gluing the bolter on yet. I want to be able to paint maximum detail so I used bluetac to hold the arms onto the torso while I glued the bolter to the hands. This will allow me to paint the arms&bolter combo separate from the torso, with the idea of gluing the assemblies together after I'm through painting. I made the mistake once before of trying to paint chest plates with arms and bolters glued to the torso. Take my advice don't do it.

The primer and base coats I used to airbrush the marine.

After Prime and basecoat

After the ink wash of black ink.

As mentioned previously I built a lightbox

Here is a link to the sight I used for instructions on how to build one. It took me about an hour to make and cost me under $10.00.

http://digital-photography-school.com/how-to-make-a-inexpensive-light-tent

I'm still learning how to use it and will have some pics later.

I started on my drop pod, which was a real pleasure to build.
The main thing I wanted to point out is that, if you plan on getting maximum detail out of the center console you should not glue the entire model together before painting it.

All of the parts ready

Closeup of the putty filler I had to use on the door joins.The picture makes it look ragged but the end of the door has been sanded smooth.

The harness frames. These were a little fiddly.

Closeup of a what you see when the harness frames are "dryfit" into the center consoles. You can see how hard it would be to paint the center console if you were to glue the frames in place before painting.

Another picture showing the same concept except with the additional obstruction of the door spars.(dry fitted of course)

So I would recomend only gluing the center console to the base with the doors so you can paint that, as a complete assembly, then after all of your pieces are painted, come back and glue them in place.

This picture was taken using the lightbox. Currently I only have one overhead light so I need to get a few more lights. But this picture is still usefull to show what I mean by only assembling the center console to the base with the doors.

I also started on a landspeeder typhoon.

Closeup of the putty fill for the massive gap. I hate assembling the landspeeder!

Again I will not be gluing the driver and gunner in place until after I have painted them. I want room to work on the interior consoles, seats and back wall

I ordered a raven wing upgrade sprue and I used the typhoon launcher from the sprue. There are also a lot of nice goodies on there that I think fit in just nicely to the Avian themed Raven Guard...hmmm Raven Wing...Raven Guard, not much of a stretch there.

So the only problem is, I have to deal with the dark Angel Iconography. So I pulled out my exacto knife and sliced away the dark angel icon. It took me about half an hour to get this thing off, as I didnt want to scar the bit. I had to slice, gently scrape and sand(using 600 grit paper)quite a few times to get it smooth.

Some post surgery pics. The banner in the background(drivers side of the speeder)is the one I did surgery on. The banner in the foreground has a skull instead of a dark angel icon. So that saved me some work!

Some post prime,basecoat,inking pics using the light box.

You can see a nice closeup of where the putty "filled" the gap. I'm not real happy with the way this turned out. I think I can fix it with weathering techniques.

A picture of the finished airbrushing and inkings for the drop pod and speeder.

OK so that's all I have for this time. Now that I've got the pod, speeder and some test marines ready, it's on to the actual brush painting. I plan on using some major blending and shading on these models. I'm hoping for a real pro look. Wish me luck.

And don't forget the dreadnought, which I will get back to once my weathering materials come in.

Raven Guard Space Marines Part I

2009-01-24T02:53:00.000-08:00

Press play for some theme music!

OK so this post will deal with the Raven guard marines by posting some links which will also help to explain why I choose to build the army the way I am building it.

There are extensive resources on the web to explain the history of the Raven Guard Space Marines chapter and successor chapters. To save time, and to spare anyone not interested in the fluff, I will just post some links.

http://wh40k.lexicanum.com/wiki/Raven_Guard

http://www.bolterandchainsword.com/index.php?autocom=ineo&showarticle=316

http://warhammer40k.wikia.com/wiki/Raven_Guard

There are also extensive resources on Space Marine power armor. Which I will also post links here.
http://wh40k.lexicanum.com/wiki/Power_Armour

http://www.collecting-citadel-miniatures.com/wiki/index.php/Space_Marine_Transition_Collectors_Guide

http://www.bolterandchainsword.com/index.php?autocom=ineo&showarticle=43

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Equipment_of_the_Imperium_%28Warhammer_40%2C000%29

http://29thgreatcompany.home.comcast.net/~29thgreatcompany/Armor/marine_armor.htm

The history of the raven Guard explains that they don’t have access to all the resources that the other Space Marine chapters have. They also rely on stealth and lightning strikes to accomplish their missions.

In this vein I have chosen to use Mark VI Corvus armor for all of my raven Guard tactical and Assault Marines. There is even what appears to be mark VI Terminator armor, which I will use for my terminators. I don’t have all the details yet on that. Once I’m through researching I’ll have more info on that.

One of the convenient things about using the Mark VI armor is that they all have the “beaky” helmets which seems to fit nicely with the avian theme of the Raven Guard.

These are the pictures of the different suits of power armor below. I put together two marines using blue tac, just to show the differences. The two torsos to the right, I’m not sure which era they come from, still doing some research on those. They may be Mark III or a modified Mark VI/VII/VIII. Maybe for special weapons marines?

Close up of the Mark VII/VIII power armor below. The noticeable differences being the non-"beaky" helmet, the raised edges to the shoulder pads, the imperial eagle on the chest plate, and the knee pads.

Mark VI Marine below, which is the style I will use for my Raven Guard. Notice the "beaky" helmet, the left shoulder pad with the studs, the right shoulder pad without the raised edge, the chest plate without the eagle, and the legs with no knee pads.

Below is a pic to show the left studded shoulder pad. They used the studs to add on extra armor during the heresy era. The idea was that the left shoulder was pointed towards the enemy and therefore was the one requiring extra protection.

Below is a closeup of the right shoulder. I took a normal Mark VII/VIII shoulder pad and shaved down the edge with a hobby knife. Then I used a dremel tool to smooth it out. It still needs some work, and I'm still working out the best way to do this conversion so that I will have a nice smooth finish to the shoulder pad.

One problem with using the Mark VI only approach is that the poses are quite limited when it comes to the legs. So I am thinking I'm going to have to do some converting, by cutting legs and using greenstuff to try to mix things up a bit. Also I probably will use some of the mark VI running legs (from the assault sprue) as well.

That's all for today....

Dreadnought Part II

2009-01-23T11:21:00.000-08:00

Press play for some theme music!

All right.... so part II of the Dreadnought build.

Below is a closeup of the converted imperial eagle with greenstuff to fill in the gaps. I'm not real happy with the way this turned out. But I think it will look "good enough" once it's painted

Picture of the weapon arms after many brushed on coats of white. I can't wait to see what a difference spraying these will make.

The Airbrush

The cup I used for the spraying

I used clothespins and a tweezer to hold the weapon arms.

I really had a hard time with my airbrush. I had to stop multiple times to clean the the tip. This just goes to show how out of practice I am. I don't think I had the paint thin enough.

Post Air brush pics.

This picture just to show where I'm going with the color scheme.

Picture of my airbrush parts soaking in acrylic cleaner. This is the downside of airbrushing, having to clean the thing after you use it. But it's extremely important to clean the airbrush as soon as possible after use to keep it in top shape.

Here now I start showing some pictures, after I put another brushed coat of white, and filled in the areas that will be black or that needed a black base coat.

I'm not happy, at all, at the way the brass raven looks in the pic below. It's gonna take a lot of work to make it look right.

So it's starting to shape up. I need to spend some time cleaning up the over brush mistakes, which by the way are very easy to to do when painting black on white or vice versa. But in order to make contrasting colors like Black and White look good you have to get it as close to perfect as possible for maximum impact.

Also the next post will show the start of shading as I will be using some inks to shade the recesses of the white areas. I ultimately plan to use some weathering techniques that I have seen used in historical modeling and also in some of the French style miniature painters.

In keeping with my raven guard theme of olderstyle equipment I purchased a mark IV Dreadnought close combat weapon off of ebay. It has that kind of claw effect that should mix in perfectly with Raven Guard.

I've also started getting some parts for my marines, so I will post some pics of that coming up shortly.

Dreadnought Part I

2009-01-20T16:41:00.000-08:00

Press play for some theme music!

I am starting this army from scratch, so I wanted to test out some color patterns before plunging in full blast. I have a space marine dreadnought that I had originally planned to use for my Ultramarine force. So I decided to resurrect it from my drawer of stuff for testing. Unfortunately I had already put a base coat of ultra marines blue and put an ink wash. So of course this will make the painting of the white parts much more difficult.

The first picture is of the resurrected dread with the ultramarine icon removed. I had to sand down the area where the paint and icon met. (On the left side of the sarcophagus)

Closeup of the sanded area.

Here are some brass etch I plan to use and also some plastic imperial eagles from my Bitz box. there is also Warhammer Fantasy Dwarf standard I may use, I may use the wings off of it for something, not sure yet though.

I decided to try and use one of the ultramarine eagles, unfortunately filling in the ultramarine symbol with putty turned out to be harder than expected. So I just put a purity seal over the symbol. You can see some of the putty I used to try and fill the ultra marine symbol. The putty worked OK but not good enough for me. So I keep telling myself that this is just a test model.

If you look at the top right you can also see where I cut an imperial eagle in three and glued it on the top.

I need to use a little bit of greenstuff to fill in the gaps. (I'll show this later this week)

These are a few before and after pics of the weapons. The after pics are after a few coats of wolf grey-GW equivalent = space wolf grey. I got to tell ya I usually thin my paints really well to keep a smooth finish but thinning light colors and then trying to paint over black is a huge pain. I should have just started up my airbrush and been done with it. Which I will do for the main body, also will do to finish off the weapons base coat of white.

Before & After

Well that's all for tonight...

Next time, some pics after using the airbrush to finish the white base coat. Also plan to go into the particulars of Raven Guard and how I plan to build them.

First time blogging so here it goes.....

2009-01-19T13:52:00.000-08:00

I thought I would start a blog to track the progress of my latest modeling project. That is the Warhammer 40,000 Space Marine chapter of The Raven Guard.

I will start posting pics and build information as I go.