Did I get it finished? Let's find out!
Display Board
| The major piece that was done this week was the display board for my Adepticon Friendly army list. I started working on it a bit on Wednesday night, last week, and got the basic structure designed. Then on Thursday I skipped streaming and assembled it. The basic idea was to have a hill on it for the snipers to sit and the bulk of the force on the flat lands. I knew that I wanted to have some craters and dunes on the surface to go along with the craters and dunes on the bases of my models too. To make the craters I used some foamcore board and after deciding on a shape, I cut holes in it and beveled the edges with my hobby knife. I took the drop pieces from the main board and made mounds out of the circular pieces and raised sections along the edges too. This gave the board a bit of a dried out river bed feel, and I am really happy with that look. From there I used the last of my current batch of green stuff to make the craters more interesting and believable and added some dunes to the board. For the tank traps/barricades I just used blobs of hot glue and stuck them onto the board. It worked for the look that I was going for. Once the board was all assembled, I took my models and started laying them out on the board until I was pleased with the layout. I then popped washers on their bases and hot glued the washers down. After all that it was time for paint! I had to hand "prime" the board, because of the foam bits, otherwise the foam would melt due to the rattlecan spray. So, I bought a 2" wide brush and a crap ton of brown paint and a few bottles of red paint and went to town. The brown was the main base layer and the red was added in because that's how I prime my army bases and I wanted to try to keep the colors close. Once those were dry I used some Tuskgor Fur and coarse medium to make a massive batch of Martian Ironcrust. It wasn't an exact match, but it does look close enough for a display board. This was all globbed on with the 2" brush and I made sure to stipple the surface and add some interest to it too. That step took all night to dry fully and by the time I was home Friday night, I was able to get some Martian Ironearth (this time actual Citadel technical paint) on the surface and added the washes. After another overnight dry, it was time for the drybrushing. This time the 2" brush hammered out some Wild Rider Red and Screaming Skull to catch all of that sweet sexy surface texture. Finally, I painted up the barricades, which I should have painted first and then put them on the base (hindsight). Overall, I love how it turned out. I can't wait to get it to the Friendly tournament and have my whole force on the table. This has really given me the bug to build more Mars terrain to go with the vats I built a few weeks ago. I have a bunch of pink foam on hand that I can use to make some mountains and such too. But for now, this is ready for Adepticon. Speaking of which, if you're at Adepticon, the Friendly is Friday starting at 9am, some by and say "hi"! |
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Extra Rangers
| Due to a mix up with Battlescribe, I realized that my army list for the Adepticon Warhammer 40k Friendly was heavy 2 Skitarii Rangers. Ugh. Since I'm not sure how OK it would have been to show up light 2 models in my list, I decided to quick build a few more Rangers and get them ready for Adepticon. This threw my plans of the days between finishing the display board and leaving for the convention into a tailspin and Friday night and Saturday afternoon was spent assembling 5 new Rangers to take with me. The reason I decided on 5 was so I could take the 2 extra I needed, plus an Alpha and 2 more and use them as a separate squad in pick up games with my friends at the con. And since I would be batch painting them anyway, the extra 3 models wasn't a huge time sink either. I managed to get the pretty much finished in 6 hours on Monday night and just needed to add transfers, magnets and dust to them before packing them up and getting everything else ready to go. They turned out really well and I really like the new Alpha. I think he'll be the one I use during the tournament. |   |
That's it for now. I am on my way to Adepticon! If you're there, track me down and say hi! I'll be trying to post the goings on to my Twitter and Instagram.
As always, thanks for reading!