Iron Sleet: John Blanche – The Voodoo Forest

Hi ya'll!

Just thought to remind you of our new home Iron Sleet (www.ironsleet.com). Don't miss all the great things happening in there! For instance, yesterday we got a nice set of John Blanche's newest art, The Voodoo Forest, that we had a great honour to publish in our new blog. Check it Out!

Farawell Spiky Rat Pack?

Many of you good and loyal followers have noticed how the activity of Spiky Rat Pack has been shamelessly quiet for quite some time now. There really is no excuse for this negligence and that's why we sincerely want to apologize this from you. You guys are the reason why we've kept this thing up and running as long as four years! And crazy four years it has been!

The header of this post is a bit scary. We have discussed about Spiky Rat Pack's future numerous times, namely talking about what we should do with the blog in the future. We still love to make distinctive miniatures and love to share our work with you guys, so we still want to keep blogging. But we think the Spiky Rat Pack as it is has came to its end and that's why the header actually is true.

But like all the pests, rats don't die and give up so easily!

Here's the twist! We've had long and interesting discussions with Migsula of Legion of Plastic – whose inspiring work we both admire and appreciate a lot – about putting our forces together to establish new joint blog for our creative projects. It kind of made sense to us all; we all come from Finland, share the same vision regarding the 40k universe and like to explore and widen our artistic nature with great passion. The new blog is now up and running and is know as...

>> IRON SLEET <<

The new blog will be mostly about our beloved 40k universe. We also want to keep sharing our insights regarding the hobby and keep inspiring you guys with numerous different ways, such as nice illustrations, rousing poetry, great stories and fantastic ambient music. There will also be interesting guest contributors every now and then...

We are very excited about this and look forward to keep blogging together with such a great talent as Migs! So if you still wish to see and hear what I and Mikko are about to do in the fields of miniature hobby and the scene around it, follow the link and start following the Iron Sleet. I promise you won't be disappointed!

The More the Merrier

The second Corsair has been ready for a while, but only now I had time to photograph it for the blog. The rich red colour I used in the first Chaos Astartes was quite peculiar to copy for the second one. I used several different techniques to achieve it but didn't keep any record of the methods used. Other than that, it was fun piece to paint and the end result sits pretty well alongside the previous Marine.

The skull on the tilting shield is a transfer, as are the numbers on the Marine's shoulder ornament. It has been a while since I used one of those, but this time I wanted to try and see how would they sit in my current style. The skull needed some dimming down as it was way too bright. I'm not so sure if I like the shield the way it looks like, but for now it may stay the way it is. I think I'll stick with the freehand painting though.

Red Corsair #2 – WIP II

I started painting the second Red Corsair a few days ago. Not much has happened, but I still thought to share some teaser WIP shots with you.

It is funny how you go blind to certain details when you keep working on with a single project for longer period of time. In this case I notice couple of mistakes and oddities just after I had primed the miniature, things that I need to fix before continuing with the painting process. For instance, the waist trim looks very odd because of the lonely spike sticking out of it. I need to rethink it and make some sort of shield in place of the spike, maybe sculpt a small skull motif in there. Also, some of the spikes on this guys shoulder armours look like they've just been glued in the place – yeah, that's true but I wanted the spikes to look like if they were growing out of the armour.

Red Corsair #2 – WIP I

Four months. Four bloody months since the last time I wrote a posted in here. That is a damn long time and I must apologize for it...

To wrap things up I need to start from this summer. I had just started my well deserved long summer leave – five weeks to be exact – and because it felt that I had lots of time in my hands, we decided to make some small renovations in our apartment. That "small" project prolonged in to three week task and took a lot of juice off me. It was a creative task all right, but physically very stressful, so I decided to take some time off from the hobby and other not so urgent stuff and just take it easy.

Few months later I felt that it was a time to get back in action. But it took me some time to reignite the engine.

When painting the Plague Marines before the off-time I noticed how hard it was to give them my fullest attention. It was fun project to do, tried some new techniques while doing it too. But something was off... I pushed that project forward and finished the whole squad, but I felt kind of left without the much needed umph afterwards! And I knew why – They weren't in true-/art-scale. I believe it's the curse of the true-scaleism; Once you've built and painted one of those, there's really no turning back, is there?

There was a spark, ignition and fire. I decided to continue one of my "side tracks", The Red Corsairs. So I dug in to my bits box and started putting pieces together, finally making a bits sketch based loosely on one of my drawings. Below is the first part of the story of the project presented in the set of WIP shot...

Third or so bits sketch of the renegade Astartes, which I chose for my project.

Adding some weight and bulkiness.

Glueing some studs. For studs I used hair cut off from washing-up brush.

I decided to change the weapon arm to less "aggressive" so that he'd match up better with the pose of the Champion of the Fleet.

Brothers Astartes Malus

Primed and ready to paint!

Adding Mobility - APC

Wanted to built APC for my Squat infantry units. I wanted it to look tough & brutal. No unnecessary decorations, just a bulldog delivering the troops into the thick off a fight. At first I struggled hard to find suitable base for the APC. Didn't just wanted to  choose Rhino with some Squat freehands on it's sides. Instead I wanted to create vehicle that was built using GW plastic kits but would still look completely original (pretty much what I did with my dreadnought model earlier)! Phew… Harder than I thought it would be. I was stuck for a long time not been able to find perfect starting point... until GW released their latest goodie… – Space Wolves Stormfang Gunship!

Whoah! It was perfect! no tracks but still sharing the Space Marine design language. I was thrilled, I rushed to get my copy right away, I also got the Rhino kit to go with it, since I wanted my Squat APC to still look little bit like Rhino since, after all my Squat force is still basically Space Marine army.

I started to play the game of mixing with the two kits, I wanted it to have the same access-points and weapon combinations as Rhino had, so I had some sort of plan to follow. At firs it was going to look more like one of those WWII Assault boats at Normandy but quite soon, almost by accident I flipped the whole chassis upside-down and Bam! There it was, totally fresh look that looked nothing like GW had done even tho it was made out of their own kits. I was very happy.

So here it is, the first one of the two Rhinos I still need to build. It actually ended up looking so good that I pretty sure I also need to ad Predator variant to my force in some point. Paint job was very simple - The same blueish-grey basic colour that I have used throughout my whole army. Tactical markings - White stripe for infantry & orange to mark the company (12th company) lots of weathering and simple freehand on the side & there it was. Really hope you like it!

WIP!

Company Standard Bearer - Thorsten Järnkall

Squat Engineer Tech Smith -