Greeting and welcome back! It has been a bit of a hiatus here on the blog, but the hobby has been going strong here. I'm on a bit of a painting break while deeply enjoying all the new Horus Hersey models recently released. I do enjoy painting and I very much look forward to getting back to improving my skills there with a veritable smorgasbord of available projects to choose from. But wow, do I really love building plastic soldiers! 😅
I decided to try something new, since the Rapiers come with bases. I wanted there to be some evidence on the ground that the machines were actually trundling along on their tracks and didn't just get set down on the bases via a hoist or some such. For the first attempt, I masked off where I wanted the tracks and applied my normal coat of wood glue.
Then I applied my basing material as standard practice. After this had dried, I removed the masking putty.
So far so good. I was planning to lay down some devlyn mud or other texture paint and stamp the tracks into it. But this rarely achieves the effect of heavy tracks sinking in an leaving an impression in the mud - at least not at this small scale. I get the tracks clogged with texture paint and a somewhat gloppy impression on the base, rarely resembling track marks. So...I thought what if I used green stuff and "molded" the track marks into it?
This approach products the look I wanted, although we'll see how things come out in the end with paint on the base. I think I will be challenged to convince the eye that this gravel would break down to squishy track marks under the weight of the Rapiers, but we'll see. I think it'll still look better than perching the machines in the middle of the pristine gravel. There will be no doubt that track marks are coming out from under the backs of the rapiers.
The process seemed unnecessarily complicated, so I revised the approach to skip masking and simply applied the green stuff directly to the base prior to painting on the glue.
I could then press the rapiers into the green stuff to make the impression before finishing things off with the glue and ground cover. Not shown here is the process of spreading the glue out before ultimately applying the model railroad ballast mix I use for ground cover.
And there we have it. The ground cover really wants to stick to the green stuff here because I was too impetuous to wait until it had cured. However I actually hope the irregularity will help sell the final effect under paint. We'll have to wait and see! Regardless, there are two ways to got about getting some track imprints on a base using Greens stuff and other basing material.
Here are the Rapier Laser Destroyers with their new bases. The Graviton Cannon battery received the same treatment though I failed to capture a pick of the final results. and here's a pick before the base work with the assembled crew:
I used the last of the MkVI Dark Angels heads I had and one unique resin head I had in the bits box. The new heads with the rapier kits do look cool, but I am out of MkVI bodies and I had six heads to spread across the team. MkVI armor was known to have improved optics and such, so why would the legion specific helmets for the same mark not have the same improvements, right? :) Anyway, it's rule of cool here mostly in any case (I admit I do like my fluff too...).
Next up I built the new tarantula missile battery and sentry guns.
The sentry gun options are basically push fit at this point so I assembled all the options and didn't bother with magnets. We'll see how this continues when the paint starts sloshing on. With only the two gun mounts, I like the notion of being able to swap in appropriate weapons for a given game.
Then I finally broke into the new Saturnine box to build the Centurion and Saturnine armored Praetor.
I love the Praetor details and weapons, but I'm a bit meh on the pose. It'll grow on me, no doubt. The Centurion sure is fancy.
I also built a ten man Veteran Assault squad with disintegrator pistols, but apparently didn't take any pics yet. So I'll share that another time. I'm building the Saturnine Terminators soon, but otherwise waiting on the rest, I think. I need to start the new hobby season soon with a painting project - well, probably completing the DKoK siege gun platform I was working on...a couple months ago? LOL.
