Tuesday, January 24, 2012

WIP: Swordmasters of Hoeth Part 1

Next in line in my project to build an army of high elves around the hero that is the elf prince of Tribute to the Fallen, today I start the WIP series of articles on the Swordmasters of Hoeth. I hope you guys follow and enjoy this new series which will go on for a quite a long time, I'll try to be as fast as possible!

The miniatures are from the Warhammer: Island of Blood box, just like the High Elves Sea Guard I painted in 2011. I am going to follow a very similar approach to the painting. I'll perform some little conversions, specially to the armour scales, too big for my taste, and also modify the banner so that I can paint a nice freehand instead of painting some boring reliefs that I dislike. Then I will use airbrush as much as I can so that I spend as less time as possible, and get the best out of it.

There is another thing which I'm going to do differently this time: the basing process. What I learned from the previous experience is that even though it is much more comfortable to paint the miniature separate from the base and glue them after they are all painted, it is much more time consuming, because you paint things in the base which you don't need to paint, and also, gluing and basing after the paint is done is also quite dangerous, you can destroy the work already done. So this time, I'm going to convert first, create the bases, glue the miniatures to the bases, and then I will start painting. Let's get to it!

So first of all, let's take the miniatures out of the sprues and clean them.


No mercy for those horrible mould lines!


As I said, I hate those nasty reliefs they did on the banner, so I'll trim them off very carefully with the knife. I said very carefully... I can't stress this strongly enough. The less care you give to this trimming, the more putty you will have to use to correct defects afterwards.


Of course, you can always go for the chaotic approach, destroy all the reliefs with a dremmel or similar and then cover all up with putty. Whatever suits you best. But I'll be careful this time.


I'll also pass the knife around the edges of the flag, that way I'll make them thinner and more like actual cloth, and not thick and unreal.




And I will also dig a hole on the horn of the musician. There's nothing worse than a horn or a gun nozzle without a cavity, it's so unreal!


I can't forget to trim out the reliefs of the hero's sword. What a bad idea from GW designers to do this stuff. I hate when they do that!


Ok then! Ready to start with the putty! Formation!


WIP: Swordmasters of Hoeth Part 2

5 comments:

Space Hulk Enthusiast said...

It's neat to see what people do to prep their models... removing certain things, repositioning others, cleaning up this and that, etc.

Pet peeves that we all have and try to fix on our models.
Looking forward to seeing these guys come together.

Ron
From the Warp

Lloyd said...

Good to see the army progressing - I've got myself some spearmen to practice the techniques from the last tutorial!

Anonymous said...

What about finishing the imperial fist airbrush tutorial? :(

Rafael García Marín said...

Don't worry about the Imperial Fist!! Everything will be done on its own time! :)

milbenplage said...

It's good to see how you prepare and paint a whole army. Looking forward to learn some things from your approach.

I was kinda surprised as I saw your trimming on the hero's sword. I find it's way easier to keep the relief and paint on it.
I'am curious to see what you're going to do to the sword.