Cannon siege cannon, the real one!

Measure twice, cut onc… wait what!?

So, there I was being all proud of my Ass cannon, and the accuracy I put into the sculpt.

https://evillittlebuggers.blogspot.com/2018/02/the-chronicle-siege-gun-or-better-yet.html

The eye for detail, the exact measurements, the facial expressio… Hold on just one second, what did you say there? Eye for detail? No no, the other one. Exact measurements? Yes that one, slowly repeat that and then look at this picture….

Darn… It…

So what went wrong here? Well since I was using pictures to measure the cannon, and i was using the chaos dwarf models as the reference, because I actually owned them, and they were in the picture with the cannon, it had to be spot on. Wrong!

I used this picture from the ccm wiki:

http://www.collecting-citadel-miniatures.com/wiki/index.php/File:Limited_Release_-_Chaos_Siege_Cannon.jpg

I guess I messed up the measuring because now that I own the original…. Holy smokes that thing is tiny!!! My sculpted cannon looks like Big Bertha: 

(https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Big_Bertha_(howitzer))

But anyway, my Chaos Dwarf collecting saga has almost come to an end, I still miss a few of the regular Citadel Chaos Dwarfs, but none of them are rare, I just haven’t found the time yet to figure out which ones I don’t have yet.

A quick review of the original cannon, it’s a mediocre sculpt at the most, details are soft and it looks a bit bendy as if made from rubber (cleary Nick Lund rushed it). The cannon balls supplied with the cannon are anything but round... but… the overall model is just so much fun! It’s a deamon, that is a cannon, that shoots cannonballs out of its arse and they are put there by Chaos Dwarfs, what’s not to like!!!

Really happy I managed to find one, I’m still really happy with the likeness of my own sculpt (despite the size) and I hope everyone that got one from me is not too disappointed about the size difference J

By the way, what ever happend to Nick Lund?

Filling Ali's gaps part three

So almost there, work started on the last two in the series. For background information see here:

https://evillittlebuggers.blogspot.com/2018/04/filling-alys-gaps-hmmm-that-came-out.html

and here

https://evillittlebuggers.blogspot.com/2019/08/more-of-alys-missing-warrior-sculpts.html

The last two in the set are: Khane the Mighty and Brogar Brainbeater, after that MM90/7 and MM90/8 are done!

From first to last, see below:

My favourite sculpts: part 1

I felt like reminiscing over my past achievements as a sculptor, that’s actually the only reason for this topic. 

A long time ago I wanted to up my sculpting game. I had been sculpting Chaos Dwarfs and other stuff in the 90’s feel of miniatures, strongly influenced by the Herohammer style of miniatures.

However I just painted an Ilyad miniature based on the Black Moon Chronicals that really impressed me a lot. The mini in question was the Ilyad Snow Troll (example here is painted by James Wappel).

Especially the chain mail was so fine and realistic, simply amazing!

So i wanted to sculpt a Chaos Dwarf (like, what else right!?), whilst pushing my sculpting skills to the limit. Aditionally I just discovered Procreat, a sculpting medium that allows for a sharper finish than regular green stuff.

So off I went, i based the helmet of a drawing my talented brother made for me and the overall style is further influenced by the Roman/Greek armour of the time (yes, I had just watched the movie 300).

As you can see the bulk of the model is still made with greenstuff, this is because i prefer greenstuff for the more organic shapes. I wanted him to have a Greek style chest plate that mimics muscle tone, and i wanted a 300-style cape/mantle, so thats why I started with greenstuff.

Now it was time to start adding details and this is where the Procreate comes into play. Luckily the two mediums combine very well together. So started adding the beard, basic armour plates and the right hand gauntlet. I wanted the gauntlet to look almost dark elf like, sharp and menacing. This I could not imagine doing with greenstuff. Also I wanted to do realistic chainmail, with real rings. Eventhough the chainmail looked cool in real life these rings would have been really huge. Thats the difference with sculpting a 2.5cm figure as opposed to a 12cm tall Snow Troll

Eventhough the helmet was already done, I could now use the Procreate to sharpen it up a bit and make it less organic in appearance and additionaly complete the armour. The monstrous dog was added because I really wanted to add as much to figure as possible and again push my sculpting a bit further.

For the whole WIP thread, see here:

http://www.chaos-dwarfs.com/forum/showthread.php?tid=8366&page=1

The mini found it's home at my friend Clam, who has casted it, so if you want one have a look here:

http://claminiatures.blogspot.com/search/label/Sjoerd%20Trouwee

And Clam had him proffesionally painted by Mikkel Nyboe:

http://mikkelnyboe.blogspot.com/2013/07/ewal-dvergars.html

Filling Aly's gaps, part 2

So a while back I started sculpting the missing chaos dwarfs from a cut and paste sheet from Aly’s scetsch book. See this link:

https://evillittlebuggers.blogspot.com/2018/04/filling-alys-gaps-hmmm-that-came-out.html

Now i have finsished numbers two, three and four.

Number two is based on the crouching axe wielding warrior. And i get why Aly never sculpted this guy. Trying to pose a fully armoured human sized warrior is a challenge, let alone trying to do this with a dwarf, lacking knees and almost no arms to speak off. Anyways I managed to crank something out:

And then off to number three, a mini version of Slambo. Although officially this one was not on Aly's sheet of warriors, see my previous link and this blog:

http://eldritchepistles.blogspot.ae/2016/01/aly-morrisons-marauder-miniatures.html

I just felt that Slambo deserved his own mini-me. We have a double hammer wielding Marauder Chaos Dwarf, but we needed a proper one with axes and nobody wants to cut up original Marauder Chaos Dwarfs, now do we!? This mini almost sculpted itself it went without thought, as if Hashut himself guided my sculpting tool in order to get this tribute to one of the most iconic chaos miniatures done.

Number four is the scythe wielding warrior. Again due to lack of reach of those tiny dwarf arms combined with their fat bellies, I had to improvise on the pose a bit. I went for a horizontal scythe hold instead of a diagonal hold (yes Clam, it's going to suck to line them up). Lovely minature to sculpt, I added the croissant horn later, just to pay more tribute to the original minature. This was my first time sculpting chain mail gloves and my last, and i hate them, wouldn't be practical in combat and they look stupid...

Group shot and a shot where they are amongst the original Marauder CD's to show off size and style compatibility.

And the size comparison shot:

Two more are in the making, update to follow soon!

Filling Aly's gaps (hmmm, that came out wrong...)

Alright, this is about something completely different than the title suggests. A few months ago I wrote a post on my love for the MM90 Marauder Chaos Dwarfs.


http://evillittlebuggers.blogspot.ae/2018/02/the-marauder-mm90-chaos-dwarfs.html


Shortly after publishing this post I received a private message on the CDO forum from fellow member Threadbare, pointing out a post in Steve Casey's blog. This post contained pictures from Aly Morrisons personal sketchbook from his Marauder days.


http://eldritchepistles.blogspot.ae/2016/01/aly-morrisons-marauder-miniatures.html


Apparently Aly did a lot of sketches of miniatures he was planning to sculpt, so the post is full of lovely pictures of sketches that became actual Marauder miniatures. And of course my attention was drawn by the sketches of the Chaos Dwarfs!
A total of 17 of the ultimate 24 MM90 Chaos Dwarfs are sketched very recognizable in the book. It's impressive to see how close the actual sculpts turned out compared to the sketches, really shows that Aly knew what he was doing.


In the book there are not only sketches, Aly also used to paste some pictures in there for reference and inspiration I assume. And one specific page drew my attention; a page with 27 cut and pasted pictures of Citadel Chaos Warriors. Some of these pictures were crossed out while others were still blank. We all know that many of the MM90 Chaos Dwarfs are Mini-Me version of Citadel Chaos Warriors, and here we see the actual selection process went into that project.


But there are still gaps in the picture, and those gaps sparked my interest! Have a look at this picture:

In the picture I have crossed out all the Citadel Chaos Warriors that have a MM90 counterpart and I have circled the ones that were selected by Aly but never received their Mini-Me in the Marauder range.

Now I’m by no stretch a sculptor of the caliber of Aly Morrison but do manage to crank out a decent Chaos Dwarf on occasion. So that’s why I decided to start filling the gaps (finally, there is your topic title).

As my friend Clam has pointed out many many times I am not a fast sculptor. Besides work that requires me to travel a lot and my feeble attempts of building some sort of social life, sculpting isn’t a number one priority. But!!! I managed to make a start:

 

Frothwight Crabclaw sculpt

So why am I making this post, since it’s not about a 3^rd edition Chaos Dwarf (as the Blog sub title suggests, which I now quickly changed) but a recent sculpt. Well first of all it’s because I can do want I want (nehneh ne nehneh) and second because in a way it actually is about a eighties Chaos Dwarf. The story is as follows; a friend of mine and fellow 3^rd edition chaos dwarf collector sent me this picture from an old Games Workshop novel from the eighties in I believe 2007 and asked me to sculpt him this figure.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 This is the only picture I could find online and is of poor quality, but if we zoom in a bit more at least one can make out some more details. It is an axe wielding Chaos Dwarf, the Chaos bit is clear since he has a third crab shaped arm. The name of this height challenged evil creature is Frothwight Crabclaw. The picture comes from an old Games Worksop novel (pre Black Library). My friend loved the character from the moment he read the novel and saw the picture and has used the name Frotwight for many years as an online username. If anyone has more information on this novel and the character please let me know.

 

Only once before had I sculpted from a picture (normally I just go with my own creational flow) so it was a good exercise for me at the same time.

 

 

The sculpt was sold to Hasslfree and later on the rights of production transferred to Macrcosm, as part of their dark dwarves serie, but allas without the crab arm L