A second Vulpa Warlord for a second Golden Demon

 I've always been happy with how my previous Vulpa Warlord turned out. And seeing the reaction from other players has always been so encouraging; the pose, the energy, it's just great. But, it wasn't really competition material; not only because it's really rough and unpolished in places, but also, it used 3rd party prints, making it ineligible to enter GD.

So I made another one!

It's basically the same thing, but it incorporates so much that I've learned since making the 1st one 4 years ago. Let's go over what I really wanted to improve.

The Titan

I really liked the original, so I didn't change much. But, I did bring everything up a level.

The armor plates I'm really proud of. They're stippled metallics over black, with inks on top to color them purple or orange/red. This results in a really cool finish in person; as you move the model around, different parts of the plates shimmer differently. It's interesting, and it looks worn and old.

Compared to the last one, I didn't stop there. On top of that, I reapplied some metallics, and reapplied inks, both in subtle amounts, again and again. That created more depth; some dots were more metallic, some were more matte but still bright and saturated etc.

Also compared to the last one. I also embedded transfers in the process. The varnish around the transfers removed some of that shimmer effect, so I camouflaged that by spongind different varnishes on top; a random mix of matte and satin made the effect come back.

My weathering-fu has improved a lot over the last few years. Instead of just messing with enamels and calling it done, I painted on rust and verdigris in controlled locations to focus the eye.

Finally, the face I painted for this one is just so much more interesting. The eyes look like they glow, and that's hard to do on this model since the eyes are set so deeply in the face. I was just braver with my color application, darkened the areas around, and added a hint of flourescent lime to the color near the center - as green doesn't appear anywhere else on the model, it makes the eyes pop significantly. Mind, they're not green, just a coldish yellow. It works.

Fixing the fireball

The Skaven ball is a perfect fit for this concept. But, it's only built out of two parts; the injection mould made it so that one side of the flame is sculpted much better than the other one. On the first Warlord, I got this wrong, and the bad side was facing up. So, I flipped the orientation to allow the good side of the fireball to face up.

Then there's the chains, oh the chains. On the first model, the chain holding the fireball is built of out of plastic; I cut up the Skaven ball chain and rebuilt it to wrap around the first and hold the weight of the fireball in motion. It looked good, but the problem was that it was very fragile. It broke on me a dozen times, I'm not exaggerating; after a while I started coating it in superglue and varnishing the gloss down.

The chains under the pauldron were jewelry chains that I superglued stiff, link by link. They're super brittle; you look at them wrong and some of the chain links would get unstuck. Again, something I had to fix time and time again on the old model over the last 4 years.

So for this new version I had other options; I got a 3D printer a few years ago and I can do my own 3D modelling. While resin prints tend to be brittle, they don't have to be; there are flexible resins out there. These resins have downsides (smell, cost, they print very slowly, and flexible prints have flexing supports so you see printing issues unique to these resin) but if it works, it works. I designed my chains in CAD, bent them in Blender, and printed them in this resin mixed with my usual 8k resin 1:3. So far, all the chains have been steady, and I've handled the model a lot while painting; the flex worked! I found myself accidentally pushing on them several times and nothing broke.

The base

I wanted this to be a strictly competition piece and tell a story with the base.

The shape of the base is there to force a perspective; the front is wide so that the little guy looks smaller, and the back that the Titan is standing on is narrower to make him look bigger. I don't know if the pictures show this, but I think it works.

The floor of the base is a Khorne logo, I really wanted that secret to be in there. At the convention, some noticed it but not everybody did, so I think it's not on the nose enough. I should have pushed the colors out a bit more as the light really focuses the eye in on the center portion and not on the arms and teeth so much.

In the crate, which you can see from the outside, there's a little ritual site. It's all runes on the inside, some miniature piles of skulls and a pool of blood. I wanted this to refer to how, when Terra was being invaded, infiltrated rituals and cultists were there in advance to weaken the fabric of reality and allow Daemons to come. I don't know if it worked, it's a complicated story with too simple an element, but oh well.

The pictures

Here are the pictures of the finished model and some WIP pics. Thanks for looking.

Repainging all my Legions Imperialis bases

Hey,

I've started collecting Legions Imperialis a few months ago and painted up a small force. And it looked good, I was proud of it. But, the basing schema wasn't working well. The grey blends with the metallic models too much. I tried to make the models a warm metallic and the base a cold grey, but honestly, at this scale that's too subtle.

So, I started looking into repainting them. Mars basing is well known to work with IW; the bright colors create an effective backdrop, and the tones are similar to rust so nothing stands out too much.

I tested the scheme on 4 bases. One base would tell me a lot, but this is a game of large scales, so I feel painting up a single base would make me focus more on the detail of that single base than the general mood.

I liked it a lot! Enough to repaint some 40 bases of infantry I had already painted.

You might be wondering, how to repaint all those bases without ruining the painted models? Isn't that a chore? Well, yes and no. I already glue the little guys on the base before priming anything - I really need the plastic cement to take, because I don't want the models to pop off during handling. Especially considering my bases are all magnetized, and the base is too thin to grab, so the models are really what I handle all the time.

So, it's fine. I just painted around them. What's hard to reach doesn't need much attention, as long as it's some shade of brown or orange it's good enough. I used a small drybrush where that was needed, and it's only needed in open areas and edges.

Here's the recipe:

• Before priming, glue on some pebbles, or pipes or barrels or random bits for interest. Especially if the base is looking a bit sparse in places.
• Prime in black.
• A random wetblend of Scale75 Brown Leather and Mars Orange. Two layers should be enough. It should look random so don't bother smoothing things out, and apply paint thick, it's just a base.
• Lightly drybrush a mix of Mars Orange and Proacryl Warm Flesh, or some other beige you have around. Just lightly, mostly to pick out the rocks, and to bring up the edge of the base up a bit. I wanted the base to form a halo around the models.
• Paint all the rocks in gray, with edge highlights dots in light gray towards white.
• Wash the whole base in Guilliman Flesh. Mid-Heavy towards the middle, lighter towards the edge; if it's too heavy towards the edge you can use a clean, wet brush to dilute it a bit while it's still drying.
• Reestablish a bit of gray towards white on the rocks and such, where you feel it's needed. The rocks should still belong to the same environment, be reddish, but still be seen as different from the ground.
• Paint the rim in Musou Black.
• Edge highlight the rim, all steps and all panel lines on the base in Tau Light Ochre.

I also started applying some of the same paints to my tank tracks but I didn't finish that work yet.

Here are some pics of the collection with the new bases and a bunch of new stuff I have painted since. Thanks for looking.