Monday, July 9, 2018

Miniature Monday: Skitarii Rangers


Long ago, when I first started collecting Skitarii, I grew weary of the shooting pose used for the Transauranic Arquebus. My first attempt to switch it up came in the form of the crouching sniper in my first ranger squad.

I knew that I wanted to run two squads of snipers, and that I would modify the other two snipers to switch up the poses from the aiming pose. But what to do?

On top of each Transauranic Arquebus is a grab handle. Which means, in universe, these rangers are carrying their sniper rifles by the handle while running from point a to point b. So, how better to convert them than to make them carrying the rifle by the handle?

I gave it a go one one ranger, planning to do a different pose with each sniper. But it turned out so well, that I had to make an entire squad of rangers running for cover.

To do the sniper rifle, I first had to clean off the old arm and butt of the rifle. The butt was replaced with a galvanic rifle's butt and glued into place as best as I could to make it match up with the design of the sniper rifle.

Then I had to cut off the fingers and the portion of the hand on the underside of the rifle. With the hand removed, I had to clean up the scroll work on the body of the rifle. On one of them I made it look as good as I could, on the other I had rough time and decided to cover up the scroll work with a pair of purity seals.

To get the hand to hold the rifle, I used a regular arm with a galvanic rifle on it and cut the gun away. I then created a valley in the palm of the hand to allow the handle to rest in the hand.

Since the handle itself it suuuuper fragile. I made sure to glue the body of the sniper rifle to the coat for support.

The next step was what to do with the prop rods. On the crouching ranger I had just laid it on the ground. But on these, they needed to be carrying the rods with them. So, I decided to cut them in half and put the rods in the ranger's hands. This turned out really well, but was super fragile and I had a few issues with them breaking off.

I've since used a bit better glue and they've held firm. That's a huge relief, because the rods are easy to accidentally hit while moving models around.  I tend to always grab onto them when picking up the models.

That's really all there was to it. I'm really happy with the snipers and I tend to use this squad more than the previous one now.

Until next time, you can catch me on Twitter and Instagram, I'll be posting pictures all weekend of my progress and the convention! Check out YouTube for the latest in the Let's Paint series. Plus if you like what I do and want to support the site and my painting endeavors, you can do so over on Ko-fi.