Red Corsair - Studded | WIP III

Phew, just finished with the Corsair's armour trims and studds. I decided to keep the trims very simple and less ornamental - like if I had the skills to make them that ornamental at this point. I'll leave it to the painting state to really bring those flat areas alive. Got to say, gluing those tiny studds (cut off from dish brush hair) wasn't really the best bit of this project...

And here's a close-up from the trophy skulls pierced by the shoulder pads spikes (Sorry Molotov, majority spoke and I decided to keep the skulls). Like JB suggested, I will paint something catchy on the other shoulder's shield to balance the upper body. Also, the massive fur mantle that I've planned to "frame" the Astartes will make the trophy skulls pad look lot smaller.

And finally a peek to behind. This area will probably be mostly covered by a massive fur mantle that'll trail behind the Corsair.

If everything goes well, the Corsair is well on its way to be finished before the end of the month. I was thinking of expanding this project a bit, giving the Renegade Astartes a small companion, a helmet carrier on a seperate base, to make the massive character look even bigger.

Red Corsair - Trophy Skulls | WIP II

Onwards with the Corsair...

The posture is now a bit more vigorous than it was in the blue tac stage. I widened the chest area a bit more from the sides and the back area and added a round of thin piece of plasticard around the Marine's waist to give the upper torso more mass. Little things like grenades and small pockets give an extra effect to make the waist even thicker.

Red Corsair - Get Bulky | WIP I

Here's a small update on my current progress with the Red Corsair project...

After being satisfied by the pose, I started cutting, filing and cleaning up the bits for the conversion stage. I use greenstuff while sculpting because I'm fond to its consistency and rather lazy to try out other materials.

I started working on the legs and chest area, giving them more of that much needed bulkiness. The chest is now a bit bigger than it used to be, but still not enough bulky in my opinion. I'll work on that later. The waist is also way too thin at the moment and needs another round of the greenstuff - or maybe a narrow batten made out of the plasticard.

And here's the power hook in process. I decided to remove part of the plasticard shielding the hook to reveal more of the machinery powering the arm. Two long green strings are small cables still waiting for binding.

I use my thumb nail both as a palette when painting minis and as a base for the modeling putty while sculpting. The nail is always close to what you're working on with and hence very optimal place for these kinds of things.

Red Corsair Blu Tack

Here's an update for the Red Corsairs project. I did some blu tack concepting and ended up choosing this posture for my first Space Pirate Marine. I was looking for static posture with a little hint of periliousness. The way the Astartes takes his step will reflect his unconcerned nature. His head will follow the path and the arrogant expression on his down looking face will pin the idea.

He still looks very much like a standard Astartes and the Corsair isn't that visible yet. The powerhook is already getting some shapes though.

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This evening a postman dropped a long waited package in my mailbox. This package included something that I had hoped to own for a quite some time now...

 

After my last drawing session I decided it was time to improve my equipment. So I did. I went and ordered a Junior set of Rotring Rapidograph pens. The pack included three technical drawing pens (0.10, 0.20 and 0.30) and a fine lead mechanical pencil. I hope that with this high quality set I will raise my spirit of drawing to another zealous level. Got to test them this weekend.

Detour Project - Pietr Bucis

While scouring my box-o-bits for some pieces for my true-scale Red Corsair project, I found this cool Space Wolves Astartes head that I had planned to use in some of my projects. While giving it a closer look I suddenly had a pretty clear vision of what I'd like to do with it. Before I even realized it, I had put together a quite simple yet pretty nice looking kit-bash composition, which only needed some paint on its surface..

So I decided to put my other projects on the side, take a little detour and have a quick painting session...

Ritterman Pietr Bucis

The Ritterman took me good one and a half evenings to finish, which is pretty fast in my standards. I'm relative satisfied by the result, even though it had been some time since the last time I had picked up a brush. I gave the base some extra effort and tried to emulate the effect J.B. uses in his bases.

This detour was very much welcome. I found some new spirit to go for my ongoing projects. I'm quite sure this gave me that much needed momentum and will kick the Punk Moth's Caterpillar phase in to some serious movement.

Space Pirate Astartes - Red Corsairs

"Burn. Burn the ship. Burn the pathetic weaklings with it, alive."

So this is it, my next "grande" project - a true scale Adeptus Astartes. Actually I'm talking about making a bunch of them, three renegade Red Corsair Astartes to be exact. With power hooks, eye-patches and fiery red armours... Yarrr!

The idea of making a true scale Space Marine has been lurking in my mind ever since I finished the first Horus Heresy book. It was Migsula's fantastic Alpha Legionnaire that gave me the spark to start this project. I'm quite sure that my Astartes will have a lot in common with them, what comes to the shape, size and the overall feeling of them (or at least that's where I am aiming to), after all, they have inspired me a lot ever since I first ran into them.

So once again I grabbed a pencil and started sketching...

Champion of the Fleet (black ink pencil)

My main goal was to try to render the hulking embodiment of an Astartes the way I see it. The armour is very bulky, worn and scattered with trophies and ancient liturgies. The head is like a small pin, a pinnacle that over-emphasizes the magnificent frame of the Astartes. The massive fur coat rims the figure, making the warrior look like a barbarian of the far future, something that I've always thought that the Astartes fundamentally were.

With this visual reference I've started gathering the bits that I would be needing to get as close to this vision as possible. I hope that I'll soon have something relevant to show to you, as I'm more than eager to put the pieces together!

New Year, Old Tricks

So the year changed.

The past month was pretty quiet in the rat nest, humble apologies for that. But we have not been totally jobless! The Punk Moth project has been taking some small steps forward, even though the Caterpillar stage was yet again restarted. After moving to the new flat I realized that the diorama style gaming board wouldn't have a change to fit in my new space. I had to make a hard decision and toss the almost finished plates away, get back to the drawing board and rethink the whole process from the roots.

Well, I can only hope that third time's the charm. After some pondering we decided to make the scenery to stand on their own shaped bases made out of Forex Classic foam PVC sheets. This way every piece can be made look like an individual building (or a ruined part of one) and together they can be used to form a larger structure. We won't either be tied to use the terrain for just this one scenario but can actually re-use them in our future plans too.

For the board I was thinking of Zuzzy's elastic Terra-Flex Gaming Mat. I ordered couple of speciments from them (cheap as they were) to check out the surface detail and the overall quality of the mat. If any of you have any experience of Zuzzy's Terra-Flex mats, please feel free to share your thoughts with the rest of us!

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So that is what I've been able to pull together for the Punk Moth project's Caterpillar stage so far. I still need to add some serious amount of junk and other bits to make the ruins look more lively, like if something had really hit them while bombing the planet.

Mikko will be taking a journey to the Caribbean Seas in the end of the month, so I guess it is up to me to keep this blog alive for the next couple of weeks to follow. Speaking of the Caribbean, I have a little announcement to make that has something to do with my next project - but that can wait 'til the next post...

Stay tuned!

- Kari