I See Fire.... burning the Nazgul

...but it's far from done. In applying the putty and trying to make fire shapes straight away I realised I had made a big mistake. Luckily, only one wraith was going to be done. The putty wasn't staying put as I tried to manipulate it.

I am far from done with this one. In light of what I learned getting it this far, I will go back tomorrow and make more separate tongues of fire by building off the ones that are already there, and add lots of small bits in between the giant spikes that are there now. A couple of spots look okay from some angles, but overall it looks incredibly awkward, and I won't declare it done until it looks good from all angles. It's definitely going to be much more of a challenge that I initially anticipated - and I didn't expect it to be easy back then. I can't wait to get this Derpwraith to a better place.

I'm not totally down about it - I have learned about how to approach largely unsupported areas with an armature (unsupported as in "not enclosed like Boromir's arm"), and it is at least a step in the right direction to a point where visualising the final image isn't so far fetched as it was looking at wires. It's left me with an outlook on the project that is both sulky and eager.

Aragorn has also seen some work, and he too will need another session to thicken his arm and work some more on making his hand to thumb transition look better, as well as rounding the dagger handle a bit to make its cross-section elliptical instead of rectangular. For now, I'm a lot happier with him than the Nazgul above, and he's been a lot more forgiving to the same mistakes that I made on the wraith.

I also mentioned in my last post the need for more tools. Last night I rigged up a temporary tool using some twisted wire and the back end of a woodcut knife handle. It's good enough for working on smooth curves that aren't too deep, and i used it for Aragorn's arm a lot. It and my compass will remain my mainstay choices until I can make some more permanent tools using THIS GUIDE which is makes it quite achievable to make one's own professional quality tools.

Until next time, may the wind under your wings bear you to where the sun sails and the moon walks (and me to my dinner because I'm hungry)!

You're Fired!

Some time ago, I recall seeing a conversion of some Nazgul to be set on fire done by One Ringer ukfreddybear. With the image in my mind, and some spare sub-quality Wraiths sitting around, I thought I'd try my hand at something similar, though to begin with, all I had in mind was that I wanted bigger flames than the ones I'd previously seen - walking bonfires in their full glory.

Example of poor quality pre-conversion Wraith:

Even though in the movie not all the Ringwraiths at Weathertop left in flames, I wanted to make five in case scenario play has a different outcome in the future. I decided that the following poses were best suited to escaping the flames. The undercoated one is from my first Nazgul set, and his sword is made of styrene, the other four are from the replacement set.

The next step was to figure out how I wanted to approach the sculpting. Wanting big flames, I decided that a wire armature would be in order. Were I just doing smaller flames, I probably wouldn't bother. I proceeded to drill several holes in each model where I wanted the largest tongues to be. Drilling onto the convex, high-curvature surfaces of outstretched arms was a bit of a pain, but I got there in the end. Bubbles in the finecast turned out to be quite useful here, and most of the holes I drilled are where bubbles used to be. Swiss cheese anyone?

Next, I cut up a bunch of wire, each piece about 3cm long. I have no intention of making the flames this big, I just wanted to have too much to work with than too little. At this point, I can't decide whether Vlad has been doing too much impaling, the Iron Throne has somehow come to life and attacked them, or if they have the same fungal disease that causes spiders to leave some pretty interesting corpses. It may also be that they're mutating into hedgehogs. After gluing the wires into place, and bending them to reflect the movements of each model that would have led up to their current poses, I cut the wire to a more appropriate length. As you can see in the second picture, one wraith will have the stick stuck in his face from the movie.

I have also recently obtained a few goodies:
Aragorn, Gimli, Lurtz, Merry and Pippin from the Ambush at Amon Hen set
Pippin from the vs. Grishnakh set
Arwen on foot with her sword in one hand
Gandalf (Heroes of the West)
Twilight Wraith with his sword raised
Three Kings of Men that I was missing
Sam from Weathertop, and the one drawing his sword
Frodo that goes with the Sam drawing his sword
Mirror of Galadriel.
There's also an Uruk Battering Ram in the post.

Because he was missing his left arm, Aragorn was thrown into the mix for free. With the help of One Ring member valpas in the form of a photo of the model, I've been able to get an idea of exactly where the missing arm should be in relation to the body. So far it's just a bit of wire and a cut out dagger (you can see the dagger before I cut it out in the first picture in this post). Even though the dagger handle looks a bit big, it's actually the same width as the sword's handle.

I hope to get to sculpting in the next couple of days. I'm a little hesitant to start yet because I usually use the spike of a compass, and I'm not sure how useful that will be for getting the smoother parts of Aragorn's arm and the Wraith's flames to look right, so I'll look into alternative tools before I start.


Until next time, may the wind under your wings bear you to where the sun sails and the moon walks!

I am no man

But I'm not here to announce a sudden gender reassignment either.

I've been working on this a little bit over the last week. I've never made a box like this to display models on, and thus was completely unaware how difficult it would actually be to make a seamless cuboid. Black foamboard surrounded in 0.5mm Evergreen sheet styrene, and paper glued over the top to try to help hide the styrene-styrene joins and styrene-card joins. The... well what would they be called? ...plaques, I suppose, are made of balsa that I etched with a 2000mW handheld infrared laser pointer (I spent a lot of money earlier in the year buying up lasers right before NZ law changed to make them practically impossible to get), and surrounded in more styrene painted gold, and held in place by "nails" of brass rod. There are identical plaques on both sides. The problem with doing my own laser etching is that any variations in speed, or in distance to the laser, end up fairly obvious in the final product.

The balsa was stained with watered down Steel Legion Drab, followed by watered down Rhinox Hide, and then black to give a similar look to walnut wood (I've like the colouration of walnut ever since I got myself a one ring replica from Weta that came in a walnut box).

I've yet to progress beyond the base because the Witch-king's sword hand was missing (luckily the guy I bought these off found it, and at the same time I've bought a bunch of other stuff off him which should arrive later this week/early next).

Even though I've already glued the Fell Beast's head on, I might go back and repaint its skin because after applying a second black wash to it, it's looking a little shiny. I'm also tempted to add some Woodland Scenics Field Grass to that base to eventually hide Merry's jawline, because the sculpting of his jaw (and face in general) is a bit of a let down. More than anything, I think that will depend on how it goes painting him though.

I've never really bothered to paint my models to be weathered and dirty, mostly because I'm always concerned that I'll screw up a nice paintjob if I do. I think good weathering is quite difficult to achieve with paint, both in getting the right dusty colour, and in application so as to actually look like dust ingrained in fabric. These models deserve the extra effort.


Until next time, may the wind under your wings bear you to where the sun sails and the moon walks!

Re-shoot

I ended up taking new pics of Galadriel after I did a little more to the metallics. I managed to get better lighting and saturation on these, which makes me very happy.

In place of a Dark Lord, you would have a Queen...

"...not dark, but beautiful..." etc. etc. and so on.

My entry for the One Ring August competition is finished. This was, without any doubt, the most confusing model I have ever tried to paint. Since the iconic look in the films was done mostly with intense lighting techniques, I began with no idea what colour her gown was supposed to be. This left several options to painting:
A) Paint her with grey/white cloth like it would have been in the films before they threw blue light at her.
B) Paint her with grey/white cloth, then throw OSL onto the model.
C) Paint her as if the gown was the blue/green/grey that it appeared after the lighting effects in the film.

I went with option C for the following reason:

For the most part, I exclusively use the layering technique when painting models, as I forever struggle to keep paint wet long enough to blend properly. However, on surfaces with a "high gradient" (ie. change in elevation on the model over a short distance), layering is very difficult, and on Galadriel, there is continuously high gradient across the vast majority of the surface of the model. Thus, C being the easiest of the three options, I chose it to allow me to focus on adaptation of my highlighting process, which ended up a funny combination of layering, edge highlighting, and letting natural light do its thing.

Another challenge was choosing the colours, and I spent several hours this morning figuring out what paints to use. Such an "unrealistic" colour scheme is just so alien to me.

I can't say I'm totally happy, but she'll do because I don't want to go back to her again.

The blueness in the second and third progress pictures is more accurate to the final product, and the background I was using messed that up a bit. Getting semi-decent pictures was tough because of all the shadows the model casts, so I won't be going and retaking them.

Until next time, may the wind under your wings bear you to where the sun sails and the moon walks!

Fix ups are forever.

It's official, elveses for the August painting competition, and I will be doing wraith-Galadriel. I never know exactly what to call the model, but it's her 'What if I had the Ring" thing.

 Before I get anything more than an undercoat on her, however, I feel the need to deal to my latest batch of stripped and new models. It seems to be my curse that any second hand mounted heroes need a bit of fixing up. The way this is going, when I finally get hold of a warg attack Theoden, I'll probably have to sculpt an entire arm. In this batch, mounted Strider had a broken horse leg, hardly a complicated fix, and not worth photographing.

There was also mounted King Elessar, and Legolas. In this case, Legolas is a fourth-hand model. It originally belonged to my brother about seven years ago, then to me when he stopped collecting soon after. After that, I sold it to a mate, and now recently re-acquired it. Through this chain of ownership, I knew it had a miscast bow, where the top half was warped and shrunken. To this end, I removed the offending bow limb, and constructed a new one from two sheets of 0.5mm plastic glued together. I also had to fix up a hoof that I had mangled when I originally assembled the model for my brother.

Elessar was a little more complex to fix. I got the model through the interwebs, and all I knew was that it had been stripped of paint before I got it (evident by the discolouration of the metal). When it arrived with me, I found that I had been supplied with the sword arm of the foot version. I removed the lower hand on the sword, and drilled into the hand a couple of millimeters before gluing in some brass rod. Because I couldn't get a stable drilling surface directly beneath Anduril's blade, I had to cut the sword between the hand and crossguard, and move it around a bit. Some trimming was also necessary at the top of the arm to get it so sit right in the shoulder. The shoulder on the model now is formed by the underarm of the foot model. Finally, I sculpted the ornate shoulder armour on, and raised the cloak over top of the armour.

Because I had a little putty leftover after this, I decided to stick it on a base and replicate the rare invisible Frodo, essentially a base with sculpted footprints on it. A useless piece, but fun all the same.

When the putty sets, I'll get all the bases sanded and models undercoated. There's a total of eight mounted and twelve foot heroes to do in this batch. Afterwards, Galadriel will meet the brush.

Until next time, may the wind beneath your wings bear you to where the sun sails and the moon walks!

Gandalf the White: A Photo Journey

So I've just finished painting Gandalf the White for the One Ring Painting Competition (July).

I began work with about 35 hours until the competition closed, and for the first part, I was a little out of it on painkillers (recent foot surgery, hence my sudden activity with models). It didn't help that sleep was required in the middle of it (I started at 12:21am July 31st NZT), nor that some new models arrived this afternoon. Nonetheless, it's now about 4am, August 1st NZT, and I finished about half an hour ago - only 7.5hrs to spare! I think next month I will actually start painting at the beginning on the month. It might be a smart move, but who knows? *cue cheeky grin*

Here are pictures as I worked  on each stage:

Unfortunately, my iPod washes out the photos a bit, and the prevalence of white on the model doesn't help. Still, it does take better pictures than anything else I have.

I really hate painting white - more so than elven cloaks even. A bugger, therefore, that I still have about 22 models to paint which are predominantly white. It takes so many layers to get it blended right, and I'm not sure if my hand is arthritic, or I have a repetitive strain injury, but either way, it's enough to make me want to complain about it. I nearly gave up half way through because of it. White models are thus definitely ones to spread over a week, or a whole month.

Next month's contest is looking like either Mordor or Elven themed, though Rohan may yet take the vote. I have models for all realms to do. Gamling on foot with the banner for Rohan; Thranduil, Gil-galad, or wraith-Galadriel for the Elves; or Sauron, Shelob, the Witch-king, or an Orc hero for Mordor are my picks to paint. Don't know which it will be yet, but it will be started once my hand stops hurting.


Until next time, may the wind under your wings bear you to where the sun sails and the moon walks!