Anvil Industry Regiments - Heavy Weapons

Hobby time has been woefully short as of late, any spare time has been spent learning zbrush!

I have however managed to squeeze in a few bits and pieces...

Heavy weapons for the Martian Orbital Fusiliers from Anvil Industry. Excellent kits as usual. And, some undercoats for my greek mythology test sculpts.

Afterlife Null-Zone #1 - trooper thumbnails

I'm learning digital sculpting, and my pals at Anvil Industry are kindly hosting me at the studio in London for some training this week.

Here are some ideas I'm taking along. This was a free for all idea session, I could have done another 4 pages like this (I may still yet). I'll talk through the ideas with Anvil's creative director and hopefully take some elements from these to the next stage of design.

More on this project soon. Exciting times.

Terrain swatches

Anyone every done this?

I highly recommend it for trying out new techniques! The pieces are kappa foam (high density foamboard/foamcore), I pressed the detail in by hand - the blocks, cracks, patterns and indents. Really easy.

Stick it to a bit of card and then practice different colour schemes. I wrote the technique beside each swatch as I went along.

On show here are basecoats, drybrushes and washes. Some didn't work, but that's why it's an experiment!

Afterlife by Anvil Industry - Ephraim Bolivar "the Mechanic"

This guy has a real comic book manga feel to him, the muscles immediately reminded me of Colossus from the X-Men.

He's described as a weapons developer, obviously a little mad who likes to test out his creations in the field. With that in mind I went for a simple metallic colour scheme. The white casing on the leg power assist rig is brand new - no damage to the paintwork, yet.

Anvil have already stated their intent to expand the Crane Corporation line next year, I hope we see some one off mechanical abominations to take to the field with this guy.

Pick him up here - http://anvilindustry.co.uk/AFTERLIFE/Unity-Council/Ephraim-Bolivar

Here's the next Afterlife unit I'll be painting up soon... (started ages ago).

Heroic conversion parts... rescued from the depths

Should really get these cast up don't you think, scaled for grim dark.

Sculpted a while ago but for one reason or another didn't make it into the Anvil casting schedule. Lets try again...

Painting tutorial: Afterlife C-48 Warden Autonomous Mech

Here I'll go through the steps I take to achieve these rough and quick paint jobs!


1. Undercoat

I used Uniform Grey spray from the Army Painter

2. Colour Blocking

In this order based on layers and physical depths (to minimise mistakes):

• Skavenblight Dinge for rings and washers.
• Leadbelcher for metal areas, including features on the base
• Ceramite White for the armour plating
• Mechrite Red for the eye lenses

3. Wash

Nuln Oil over everything, even the base!

4. Highlight (the make it pop stage)

Fine edge highlights for this stage, I sometimes call this 'mechanical' painting - it's all straight lines.

• Ceramite White for the armour plates, and a little dot at the top left of the eye lenses
• Russ Grey for the main casing of the Mech
• Evil Sunz Scarlet for the bottom right half of the eye lenses
• Runefang Steel for all the exposed metal areas

5. Battle Damage - OPTIONAL STAGE

You can skip this if you want! I use this step to add character to miniatures, and to tidy up any mistakes I've made along the way.

• Skavenblight Dinge - Paint some chips and scuffs. Pick out the edges and the corners: areas where the paint will get chipped off during a stumble in a concrete warzone, or where stray bullets make contact.
• Runefang Steel - Paint thin streaks of silver on the Skavenblight Dinge, leaving the dark grey showing around the edges.

6. Finish it! (Base)

Before we do the base paint a tiny dot of Macharius Solar Orange in the bottom right of the lenses.

• Drybrush the base texture with Adeptus Battlegrey.
• Drybrush the metal base features with Snakebite Leather.
• Do a final drybrush on the base texture with Ulthuan Grey (see the final note regarding line dynamics on this).
• Chaos Black for the bevel edge of the base.

DONE!

Appendix. Line dynamics

If you look at the light grey drybrushed lines below you'll notice that they generally follow the direction of travel or attention of the miniature.

• On the left one, less noticeable, the selective drybrushing conveys a forward movement - the light grey runs parallel on either side of the right foot touching the ground. 
• On the miniature on the right, there's a very clear light grey line that runs parallel to the gun arm taking aim. This line is so pronounced it could be a pavement or road marking.

Either way, there's a method to the highlight - it's selective in such a way that complements the miniature and suggests action and direction!

The Crane Corporation. I'm pretty sure Anvil Industry are expanding this faction next year...

Fallen Dwarves - wave 2 paints

Quite pleased with how this little range is developing!

I'm itching to try another colour scheme and technique on them but alas I'm committed to doing the entire range like this fist (so that means I have 25 more to paint... before I sculpt the wave 3 miniatures).

Pick some up at the link below if you like them, huge thank you for the support!

http://anvilindustry.co.uk/Boutique/Miniatures-of-the-North/Fallen-Dwarves


On a personal note, these are for my own fantasy setting, but I also use them in the Lord of the Rings strategy battle game... they make great eastern dwarves of dubious loyalties. (...and I scaled the miniatures to match the LOTR range)

Afterlife - Unity Council C48 Warden Autonomous Mech

Another treat to paint from Anvil Industries Afterlife range - the C48 Warden Autonomous Mech.

I've omitted any markings for the time being, I might come back at a later date and add some detail. I have 3 more so will do a tutorial for them in the near future!

Pick up some for yourself here ; http://anvilindustry.co.uk/AFTERLIFE/Unity-Council/Warden-Mech

The Eastern Earth

I made a logo for my fantasy setting, basic GIMP skills on display here! Read all about the Eastern Earth and the Fallen Dwarves here:

http://miniaturesofthenorth.blogspot.co.uk/p/the-eastern-earth.html

I started another blog for Warhammer: Age of Sigmar...

Regular readers will notice my blog has gone back to basics!

After playing around with blogger for a while and flexing my Gimp muscles making some blog banners, I made a few alterations here. Goodbye black, hello white.

Anyway, I bought Age of Sigmar when it came out and had a stash of lots of plastic Warhammer frames I got cheap on ebay. The result is my new blog, with one post, Warhammer Age of Battle.

http://warhammerageofbattle.blogspot.co.uk/

Check it out and bookmark for future reading! Lots of content ready to post, well over 200 images waiting in my photobucket, the first post is about my Skaven cavalry conversions: Fangrat Outriders.

Thanks! More sculpts coming here soon, Black Praetorians and Occult forces in time for Halloween...

Black Praetorians - WIP sculpts

I sculpted a few of these a couple of years ago now I'm finally getting round to finishing a full squad!

The idea and design for these goes all the way back to 2008! At that time I was just getting into sculpting, and Troll Forged miniatures were casting and selling some of my stuff (I think some of my sculpts are still on sale there to this day).

This will be the second time I've sculpted the mini's! The first lot were more pulp sci-fi. I think they're probably stored away in a box somewhere at Troll Forged, never having made it to production. In fairness they were quite rubbish as sculpts go!

I've even got a full on mythology drafted for them, sci-fi based. This incarnation of the Black Praetorians are however clockpunk styled! So I'll need to edit the text and bring into line with the tech and setting.

In my last post I mentioned I really loved the Victrix ancient plastics. I also like their Napoleonic stuff...so it should be no surprise these are scaled to match that range!

More to follow on these in the near future.

Oh and while were talking Napoleonics, here's a little test I'm doing for some 10mm stuff!

### EDIT - oh shit look I found some really old stuff in my photobucket! Black Praetorians and Redcoats! This takes me back... my "House Crowmantia" stuff with Anvil Industry is also from this mythology. Very gothic horror, originally Sci-Fi, now transplanted to the 19th century!

All that should give you a rough idea of what I want to do with this range!