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!

Press casting shields (Scibor style!)

Alright, for my MM90 painting project I will need a lot of Marauder style shields. Fortunately I do have a few originals, but I don't have any of the coffin lid shaped ones. These are the original ones made by Marauder, they are the same shields used for their undead line of miniatures:

On ebay I found a lot of the round ones with a Bat and a Rat, so I have plenty of those now, but I decided would sculpt some coffin ones.

Here's the start, a coffin lid shaped piece of plastic and then adding the details with putty.

What I learned was, that next time I will start with the rim edge and then add the details in the middle, because it was really hard to make the rim nice and straight due to lack of room and access, ah well, we live we learn.

Then I took the finished product, lightly brushed it with Vaseline and created a shell of putty around it making sure it was pressed firmly around every little detail.

After the shell was dry, I brushed the inside again with some Vaseline and then pressed a blob of putty into again making sure it filled all the details. Let it harden and then, voila, a duplicate of your shield design!

Tutorial; making tiny frikking rivets.

So recently I repaired two chaos MM90 Chaos Dwarfs that were mutilated, FUBAR:
http://evillittlebuggers.blogspot.ae/2018/03/repairing-two-mm90-chaos-dwarfs.html


And for this repair I had to sculpt 9 of those ietsiepietsie teenieweenie little rivets that are used on all the MM90 Chaos Dwarfs. I did the free style by placing a small bit of putty on the spot and then trying to get it to stick and shape it into something roundish.


This was frustrating and time consuming, I needed to find a better way. I tried a fineliner pen with the tip taken off but these rivets were too big and left too much putty around the edges. Fine liners are great for making indented rivets but not for protruding rivets.


Now I'm in the process of sculpting several Chaos Dwarfs that will need a sh!tload of the pesky tiny rivets, no a very tempting prospect. See here:
http://evillittlebuggers.blogspot.ae/2018/04/filling-alys-gaps-hmmm-that-came-out.html


So I had to come up with something to make this process easier, so I made a tool:

I used an old pen, made a tip out of putty and then used a needle to make a small hole in the middle of the new tip. I then covered it with superglue to make it a bit sturdier (putty is quite flexible). So why is this better then a fineliner, I hope this illustration explains that:

Where the fineliner will make a nice round rivet, it is however too big and it will leave a lot of putty remaining around the edges at the same height as you want your rivet to be. The tool I made will flatten the putty around the rivet, making it easier to smooth it into the surface and with a lot less residual putty.


So how to use? The best I way I found was to roll a bit of putty out and while holding it on the spot where you want the rivet, you push the tool onto the putty, but don't forget to lubricate the tool or the putty gets stuck to the tool:

The second picture shows me pushing it down on the table top and not the miniature but that's because I only have two hands, one of which had to hold a camera, but you get the idea. After you push the tool down pull the putty away.

And voila, you have a perfect tiny rivet, smooth around the edges a bit if needed, but that's it!

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:

 

The Marauder Sorcerer MM90/1A

In the early years of my 3^rd edition collecting quest, I was but a mere student, with little to no disposable funds. I was paying for University and at the same time we had a young lad crawling around the house (diapers are not cheap!). So I had to rely on Ebay bargains and lucky lots (meaning to find a few desirable figures in a bigger lot of mostly less desirable figures, hidden gems).

I was doing quite well, having secured a large part of the Perry Citadel miniatures and quite a few of the Morrison Marauder line. However one figure was eluding me, the sorcerer. This figure was selling a minimum of 5 fold what any other Marauder miniature was doing at that time, sometimes going up to a 100 Euros for the individual miniature. Yes it's a very cool miniature, great pose, awesome helmet, but I figured there should be just as many sorcerers around as there are other Marauder Chaos Dwarfs around. This price was not only absurd but also just simply too high at that time.

Since back then I was trying to build a playable Chaos Dwarf army completely out of 3^rd edition style figures I had to come up with a solution. I didn’t know of any other suitable miniature candidate for the sorcerer role so I decided to make my own. Now mind you, I absolutely had no experience in sculpting whatsoever, all I had done was some green stuff gap filling and some small conversions, so completely unchartered territory for me.

I gathered my tools, a tooth pick, a big needle stolen from wife’s sewing kit and a roll of GW green stuff. Luckily the internet was there to lend a helping hand. I found some tutorials online explaining the basics of building a frame or armature and some other useful tips. So I set about by plugging a paperclip into a piece of eraser and started bending it until I was satisfied with the overall shape. I made sure it was height wise comparable to the other 3^rd edition Chaos Dwarfs miniatures.

Then it was time to make some design decisions. One part I always really like about the marauder chaos dwarfs were their full plate armours. And I especially loved the miniatures with the plate armour feet, as seen on MM90/2D. This design seemed achievable to my novice eye. So I set to work and started with the feet, this was tougher than I thought, especially getting the armour plates to overlap convincingly and to keep the feet approximately the same size and shape.

Then the pose, I wanted the sorcerer to exuberate a menacing and scheming feel, truly evil sorcerer-like. At the same time I wasn’t comfortable yet with the idea of sculpting a complete plate armour torso. So to solve this problem I went for the fully cloaked body, this way I didn’t have to sculpt anymore armour, because the feet had been tough enough. Then the decision on beard yes or no; hands bare, chainmail or glove; weapon staff or axe. Since I was quite proud of myself solving the plate armour issue with a cloak I decided to cloak up everything, beard, hands, arms, all of it! So I outlined the rough body shape of a slightly hunched dwarf that was hiding something under his cloak, plotting away on all kinds of evil plans (insert evil laughter). Again the cloak was much tougher than anticipated, making folds look realistic is quite hard. I achieved it by rolling up tubes of greens stuff, positioning them on the right place on the body and then smoothing them into the miniature shape. I think I must made a made at least 3 or 4 layers until I was happy with the result.

Then on the last part, the head; face or helmet or combination (open helmet). Again I opted for what I thought would be easiest to sculpt a full metal helmet. For the design I took inspiration from my favourite MM90 dwarf, the ball and chain wielding MM90/4B. I love the helmet on this model, it even resembled the back then newly release plastic chaos warrior helmets.

The toughest part of the helmet was to make it symmetrical and actually suitable to put on a head, like eye holes in the right place etc. So there you have it that’s how I ended up sculpting Chaos Dwarfs (and some other stuff). Oh yeah, of course the result, I present Azhback the Grey (roughly translates to ashtray in Dutch, I had a reason for that name, but can’t remember it anymore@

first picture from stunties.com, second picture painted version by Clam with added horns http://clamshellsandseadogs.blogspot.ae/

By the way, one thing still eludes me about the MM90/1A sorcerer, why is he carrying a hand grenade on his belt? (painted by DAGabriel)

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And in the green, courtesy of Clam: