Armor up

I've been working to try to improve my sculpting level at this scale. So far what you see is my 2nd or 3rd version of these modifications, with substantial improvements every time. Going back to my sculpting classes, which I wish I had the opportunity to have more of, I tried working with making rolls of different sizes as a fundamental part of my work and it really helped. The only thing that frustrates me a little is that this black stuff can have a hard time sticking to the miniature sometimes. Oh well, I'll have to get some green stuff later on.

  

Terminator Sergeant

Alright, I did this guy up today in about 2 to 3 hours. Basically the same treatment as before, except the legs were ok so I left them as is. The changes are a little more subtle, but in terms of body language that can have a huge effect. I also changed the torso armor a tiny bit since it complements my pose, see if you can tell :p

Who knew you could look this good!

Alright, here's my next entry, I hope y'all like it.

What you're looking at is made up of exclusively 1 Terminator model from the Black Reach box set. The only thing I added was some black stuff, crazy glue (works extremely well with black stuff because of the porosity), and 2 copper pins I made from wire. No other models were involved in the making of this one, no extra bitz, if anything it actually gave back some bitz.

Basically cut off the left leg, waist, and head. Cutting through the waist took a lot of pressure. For the head, first I cut below the chin, then scribed a bit with the knife, did the same on the inside where I saw stress marks, put more pressure at the neck, went all the way through the hood :s at least it made my job easier.

 Tried to paste the hood and chest parts together but it was very delicate and kept coming out of alignment. Finally said screw it and pushed some black stuff into the torso, put the chest in with partially attached hood and aligned it there. I molded some black stuff around the neck area to keep that stylish line, then put some more on the back of the head and pushed it in place, molded the excess and sculpted a ribbed duct on the neck area like what you find on the back of the knees.

So there it is, I think it looks a lot better, and here he is next to an unmodded one for comparison.

Choppin'

Alright, so I got to work on my black reach models. Wanna save the best for last so first up the dread-
I didn't like the limited options or the blandness of the power plant, so I chopped the bottom off (not so simple to do cleanly). If you have one of these and thought about doing this, you probably thought "Well, it would work but I'd have to do some other work such as..." and yeah, that's exactly what I did.

First up I removed the unsightly seam from the arm, just a couple passes with the micro weld- I cleaned it up after this pic with metal tools

As usual I drilled the multi melta barrels, but actually tried something different and did a little bit with the bigger  head and then did the rest with a smaller diameter.

Cleaned up the molded in plastic between the bars to give it a more dynamic look-

Here you can see where I added some "Black Stuff" and added metal pipes, also hard to see but drilled the ports up there.

And here's the clean up of the bottom half.

Basically I used the front part as a guide to cut the bottom off taking care not tu subtract anything because of the angles, then I used that front as more or less a place to cut the back part off, though I cut that a little higher so that it doesn't mess with some details in the molding. Gonna pin it later after it's painted and glued together (since it seems it'd be easier to paint before gluing on the bottom)

Alright and now my work with the Ork warboss. I actually modded some other boyz but I'll leave those for a later post-

Basically changed the head up, also used the putty to redo the neck, and made the claws a whole lot nastier. The putty wouldn't stay so I made a core out of some clamshell plastic I had, just cut it to a rough shape and put the putty around it, let it dry and then went to work at it with my files (diamond files make for some good scratched up effects, as if it were real metal that was worked) and hobby knife.