Deathwing WIP: An Army in 5 weeks! Part 2!

So here's the follow up post to http://sanguinesons.blogspot.com/2011/03/deathwing-wip-army-in-5-weeks.html?showComment=1299446643308#c2834650141944289548 - which showed the first week of my under taking of this task to get to Brighton with a brand new army. This work (bar a couple of the later pictures which were done a bit later) was done pretty much all in the same week as the first post - but I felt it would read better if I separated the Deathwing and Ravenwing - or at least to start with!

So the bikers, these pretty much provide the support and mobility, and another threat value to the force. 20 Terminators are scary, outflanking, scouting or turbo boosting fearless melta is quite scary in its own right. Not to mention using that T5 as combat support and so on.

Again, I wanted something slightly unique to the Ravenwing bikers, and was looking to continue the semi-Grey Knight theme to the force - and with these being the only variant in models - I felt style wise this is where I needed to try and break out something a little special. Now, I am a stratosphere apart from the level of conversion of Atriedies, he runs rings around people with his work (seriously can't wait to see his next army), but I have the experience at least to put something together. So without further ado, here's the WIP on the Ravenwing:

WIP: Painting the Bikes

So I'll use this post to show a bit of the painting formula I use for the entire army, I'll cover it again with detail on the next DW post as they have a bit more detail on the actual models in relation to highlighting, but this allows me to demonstrate the layers/blends that I use. 

First stage is incredibly simple. Base coat the entire model (in the case of the terminators) and the entire chassis for the bikers. For me this is my mix of paint (Dark Angels Green and Hawk Turquoise) To follow this, the next stage is to add the first level of blending, now due to the paint being a mix, and I mix with a brush, I judge this by eye, I really should get something to measure it, and definitely when it comes to my Grey Knights I'll actually make a pot of the paint itself. So on this we see the second stage and the darker base coat.

The 3rd or 4th layers of blending are where you start to get the contrast between the "low" and "high" on the these models, and the paint is considerably more "blued" by this stage. Despite there being an incredibly low ratio of Dark Angels Green in there, it still has a very green effect. I continue on and now add the more "extreme" high lights - this has a fair whack of white into the mix but is still not at that full highlight level just yet. So in this picture we now see a transition of 3 layers on top of the base coat. This still is yet to have the final main highlight then "small extreme" hightlight's added.

I now add the final really extreme "light" highlight - I try to avoid going crazy at this stage and pick out the bits I want to be accentuated. I am yet to finish an entire bike - as I am yet to decide how I want to do the engine and front wheel, but the exhaust and rear wheel, plus the rest of the bike look like:

So that's the bikes as of yet - I have all 6x bike chasis's and the attack bike chasis's done up to this - so just detailing and find assembly / painting the riders to be done - which will be the Ravenwing post 2 hopefully.

On to the conversion!

So thus far nothing out of the ordinary for the modelling wise obviously, enter the Sargent's for the Ravenwing!

This, truth be told, was a some what tired and maybe slightly drunken idea I had upon returning home one night seeing a Grey Knight marine and my hobby saw laying on my desk. No regards for the rest of my house and the sawing noise I was making at 1AM, I went about creating this paraplegic marine.

Upon returning to the desk the following day I was actually quite pleased with my work, and decided to go about making another one. Then I was obviously faced with the task of making it fit onto the bikers legs - as they have a hump at the midriff - I didnt think slicing it down was an option as it would remove some of the height of the biker in the process. Thus the electric hand drill that I'd just "borrowed" came into action - and used a large drill piece to create a hole in the GK's midriff - unfortunately I forgot to take a photo of this - but one simple thing I did was to keep checking how it sat on the bike and if I needed to take more off - if you go to far green stuff will of course take care of the rest.

You'll notice in that photo that the Storm bolter only has 1 barrel - that was me turning it into a bolt pistol for WYSIWYG - I've checked with the TO and verified with a picture - it is fine - it cant be a SB without 2 barrels! I've also drilled out the barrel for the sake of completion.

Now the next bit was to give him a suitable weapon - the nemisis force weapon is no good as I dont have power weapons on my bikers, and a normal marine chainsword wouldn't look quite right ... I needed to combine the two! A quick bit of sawing (again), pinning (very VERY important when dealing with metal models) and green stuff (and some filing) and I had this bad boy:

Nemesis Force Chain Sword! Hell YEAH! Incredibly simple, but I think oh so effective.

And together as a package:

Again the arms are pinned to the bodies, I've used green stuff to help solidify the joint as well - I really cant stress how important this is with models like these - they are quite large and do have a tendency for moving on say things like hills or terrain - you just don't want to put faith in the strength of super glue on metal.

So that's it for the Ravenwing - the next update really will be them completed as really all I have to do is detail the bikes (computer screen, wheel, engine and the riders themselves, except the sarge's, are v.easy). The next post will be a couple of Deathwing squads deep into paint mode plus my command squad pre-primer/basecoat - as of writing I am basically 4 weeks out from the Tourney and in quite a good position - I have 2 full squads to paint and then basically detailing - I am pretty confident!