Hobby: Making tiled floor bases

Following on from my last post on Sim29, I thought I'd do a simple tutorial on making tiled floor bases which is what I've done on my McMourning crew.

I've refined the lab base technique I originally trialled with the original McMourning who now really looks like he needs rebasing in comparison to Sim29 and Miss Pack (which I've now done, see below).  The technique is very simple to do and looks pretty good I think.  Here's how I did it.

1-  Fill in the slot in the base with GS, Milliput or whatever.  You're going to be applying pressure to this later, so you don't want to be pushing your green stuff through the slot.  Let this dry before moving on to the next stage:

2 - Cover the base in green stuff.  I think I used Milliput on my original McMourning, but that doesn't work nearly as well as GS.

3- Smooth out the green stuff with your preferred sculpting tool to roughly spread it over the base:

4- Use something smooth and cylindrical (thank you, titter ye not) to roll the GS flat, even and smooth on the base.  I use the plastic tube that my green stuff comes in.  It'll end up nice and smooth like this:

5- Smooth out any bit where there are fingerprints showing or it's a bit uneven.  If necessary, roll it out again.  I don't get too hung up over slight imperfections here, as I figure that McMourning's lab floor is pretty far from perfect.

6- Score lines over the GS in your preferred tile pattern.  I use a fairly blunt hobby knife to do it with.  I usually start with a cross in the middle like this:

This cross then guides the rest of the lines.  Try and push down with this rather than dragging as you don't want to be moving the GS about on the base.  You could use a ruler or something to get straight lines, but I just do it by eye.  You should end up with something like this:

You might end up with the odd wonky line or slight bend (I've got a couple here), so just run up and down any lines again taking care to press rather than drag where possible.

7- Leave to dry then mount the model on it.  Ideally you'll want to pin it to the base.

Here's a finished example, minus the miniature:

As I'd made this, I decided I might as well rebase McMourning with it, so here he is:

There's a Flesh Construct still to come to finish off this McMourning specific part of the crew.

Malifaux: Pirate Gunslinger WIP Part 2

I've got some more work done on the pirate gunslinger:

I've added the jacket, and the epaulettes.  That's going to be a medal on his chest when it's painted.

The back of the coat needs a little more smoothing out so that's next on the list.  After that, I think I might be done with one.

Malifaux: Pirate Gunslinger WIP Part 1

The Convict Gunslinger is pretty cool.  He's got cool rules, he's good in game, and anyone can hire him.  The model is nice and chunky, and he looks pretty bad ass.  The only thing I'm not so keen on is his head.  His face looks a bit odd, and I really not a fan of his little mohawk.

So I knew I wanted to change this and kind of make him a bit more bad ass.  My initial thought was to make him look a bit like Sirius Black in his wanted poster:

So he needed new hair first up.  First thing that went was the mohawk, then the greenstuff hair went on.  I was largely making this up as I went along, so I went with adding an eye patch as I was on a roll.  This gave him a Snake Plissken sort of look.  But then I hit on what I was really leaning towards... a pirate!

First thing a pirate needs:  a tricorn hat.  Second thing:  Big beard.  Here we go:

I'm liking the look.  The hat might stand a bit more smoothing out with some liquid GS, but I guess a pirate convict would have a fairly battered hat anyway.  He's probably going to get some form of coat next, maybe some epaulettes.

Ordo Malleus Inquisitor Conversion

This is something I've been working on on and off for past couple of months. It's an Ordo Malleus Inquisitor for the all Inquisition Grey Knights army I'm planning on doing:

This is easily the most ambitious sculpting I've ever attempted and I've learnt alot about doing it in the process. I'm pleased with the result, and I hope to do a decent paint job on it.

The conversion is based on a WFB Chaos Warrior, with a leg swap to give him a more power armoured look. The head is taken from the Space Marine commander box. The remainder was endless green stuff work.

Two major lessons I learnt from this project:

1- Only ever work on a small part of the model at a time, don't be tempted to do big swathes of it at once or you'll spoil what you've just done.

2- You always need less green stuff that you think you need. Some of the amounts I ended up working with on this model were minuscule.