Monday, April 23, 2012

Ecclesiarch Number 2 Ready for Painting

As the title states, Ecclesiarch #2 is ready for painting.  I decided to change the weapon loadout slightly by exchanging the inferno cannon for twin-linked heavy bolters -- I'll give them some rules out of the Sisters of Battle codex like inferno rounds to compensate.  I also added a little different 'bling' on the launcher.  Each of these should be a unique animal.  As you can see, I've started a bit on painting some of the weapons -- these aren't glued on yet.

Thursday, April 5, 2012

Ragnarok Revisited

A while back, I built a Ragnarok style Leman Russ.  I followed the time honored tradition of starting with a Chimera hull, double-tracking it and adding a big square KV-2 style turret.  I used a few side armor plates from the Baneblade as turret sides etc.  It looked OK but fell a bit short of my expectations in terms of appearance.



I subsequently rebuilt the hull but left the turret largely the same, only adding some green-stuff 'welds'.  Now the riveted Baneblade plates just looked out of place with the welds.  This time I cut out the riveted plates, replaced them with plain plasticard and re-did the 'welds'.  Much better.

I replaced all of the surface details on the top of the turret and added 2 Baneblade Periscopes.  Also, at this time, I rebuilt the Mantlet, to give the tank a beefier feeling.


Since I planned to use this tank primarily as a Demolisher/Executioner, I wanted to give the sides a more heavily armored look than just Chimera sides, I decided to add armored skirts, using Dave Taylor's excellent Vostroyan style Ragnaroks for inspiration.  The skirts are two layers of plasticard plus some plasticard 'C'-channel as framing.


Finally some details -- the steps on the side are made from C-channel cut to about the same length as the steps on the door of a Rhino.  The 'Iron V' insignia for Vostroya are castings as I outlined in a previous post.

I primed the model black, then used a brush to get any spots that the spray-can missed, then I did a high-angle, light over-spray to pre-highlight.  The main color is base-coated with bestial brown followed by successive dry-brushes of Graveyard Earth, and successively lighter colored dry-brushes up to Kommando Khaki.  I then washed with Devlin Mud, and finished with a final dry-brush of 50/50 Khaki and Skull White.

The gold bits were base-coated with Tin-Bitz, followed by Shining Gold and Burnished Gold, then washed with a mix of Dark Angels Green and Hawk Turquoise, and a final highligh of Burnished Gold.

 The tracks were painted using the 'Jeff Rust' method over at Pirate Viking Painting.  The lenses were painted following the formulae in "How to Paint Citadel Tanks'.  Here's the finished product: