Necron Army Work in Progress pics: 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.