Adeptus Mechanicus - Knight Castigator painting complete!

Not much in the way of hobby time this week, though I did manage to get the waterslide transfers and some weathering on the Knight Castigator, enough that I'm calling it complete!

  

Pretty straightforward - went with the big house Krast symbol on the left shoulder, and the lion on the quartered sections to tie it in with the Paladins. Trimmed down one of the shoulder cog symbols for the left leg, and the crossed reapers to tie in with the armament.

Lastly I wanted to take a 'model's eye view', it's definitely an intimidating looking beast! With all the cool knight kits FW has been showing off of late I'm pretty sure that this won't be the last Knight to join House Krast...

Adeptus Mechanicus - Knight Castigator painting begins!

Pretty busy this week with Real Life(tm), however I snuck in some paint time Saturday afternoon and got the main colors blocked in on the Castigator, and got the armour plate secured in place:

  

In keeping with the general heraldic color scheme found on the two Paladins, I alternated blue and yellow panels - the yellow shoulder pad and shin plate will get the quartered red-and-white-striped motif as well.

  

I'm still coming up with some fluff for him, but I knew that I wanted his nickname to be "The Bastard Baron". As such, he got the house colors as a bar sinister across his upper carapace, and I'm thinking I'll repeat that on the blue shinguard as well. Cleaned up the metal trim, which will be getting a shiny silver drybrush to help it stand out from the more oily steel undercarriage. All the hoses and gold trim need highlights and shading yet, as does the sword. I'm not totally sold on the alternate blue power-weapon color, I may instead go with the green of the miscellaneous power hoses. Thoughts?

Finally, a pic with the Castigator alongside one of its Paladin squires. So far so good, but lots of work yet to go!

Adeptus Mechanicus - Knight Castigator build complete

Managed to get the Castigator built up to the point that it's ready for primer! I have to say I thoroughly enjoyed building this kit, though there are a couple things I'd do differently next time around knowing what I know from the initial build.

I kept all of the armour plates separate for the time being, which will allow me greater access to the under-chassis of the model and facilitate painting. That means the model is a little skeletal looking at the moment, but once the plates are on it definitely bulks up! The model is currently separate at the waist as well (currently just held in place by a big ol' honkin' pin), though the arms are permanently attached.

  

Quite pleased with the overall pose, opening up the arms from the body and rotating the torso and head gives it an interesting sense of forward motion - not running as I'd likely do the Lancer (and I am much more inclined to pick one up now), but a solid advance while mowing down infantry with the gatling bolter. I was slightly disappointed that the sword arm is solid at the wrist, so you're pretty much stuck with elbow and shoulder for posing on that side. Nevertheless, I like it as a counterpoint to the reaper chainswords on the Paladins.

 

Now THAT'S an ammo hopper! In retrospect I would have actually been better off building the left leg bent at the knee and the right leg straight, as I found the more extended rearward placement of the leg interfered somewhat with the available torso rotation options due to the ammo belt hanging so far down. As I'd cocked the gun outwards about 25 degrees I ended up needing to hot-water bend the ammo belt into place to fit the two receiver sockets anyway, so incorporating the leg position wasn't a dealbreaker. With the leg up and out of the way however, I think one could get some really interesting posing out of the gun arm.

Here's a scale shot of the Baron compared to the paladin model - definitely think the two paladins acting as Squires is fitting scale-wise when they're on the table, though I do still contend that either the FW knights are slightly too big, or the GW knights are slightly too small. The Castigator is nearly the height of the 25mm Dreamforge leviathan!

Adeptus Mechanicus - Knight Castigator build begins!

After getting home on Sunday late afternoon, I immediately pulled out all the FW goodies and got 'em into some warm soapy water for an overnight soak. Yesterday morning I got them all scrubbed and laid out to dry and got a jump on assembling the Castigator that will be used as the Baron for my knight household!

I knew from the outset that I wanted to have the model be in as dynamic a pose as I could manage, after being disappointed with the somewhat static leg positioning of the paladin/errant kit I was delighted to see that the FW kit allowed for all sorts of posing options! I started off by building a little damaged pumping station that I could have one foot standing on, then got started posing and pinning until I came up with the stance shown. After that it was a surprisingly simple matter of attaching all the various pistons and cables, most of which went on very easily, though I did need to extent the hip piston on the upraised leg slightly.

On the rear however I found that some of the cabling will require a fair bit of hot water bending to allow them to attach to the extended pose, but that should be fairly painless. The way the instructions for the upper torso and weapons are written seems to indicate that the left-arm gatling cannon has much less of a range of motion available than the right-arm sword, so I kept the left leg straight and out of the way in order to give the ammo feeds as much room as possible. The intent is to have it splayed around to the left a bit and the sword in a sweeping motion up and over the raised right leg. We'll see how that goes, I suppose!

I'm still not entirely sold on the scale differential between the Cerastus pattern knights and the plastic paladin/errant kit but with the Castigator intended to act as the Baron for the household I thought it would be appropriate for him to be a bit more imposing than his squires (represented by the two paladins). Nevertheless, he's gonna be BIG! Hoping to get the torso and weapons built over the next few days - assuming I ever get out of work. Being gone for a week means that I have some drifting piles of email to wade through and work to catch up on. Oof!

Adeptus Mechanicus - House Krast Knight Paladins Painted

Pressed on over the weekend and got the waterslide transfers and some weathering onto the two Knight Paladins!

 

 

I envisioned the two paladins as being a pair of trusted retainers for the Baron (for which I intend to use one of FW's upcoming Knight Castigator). I rooted around through the big box o' transfers and found a few old Epic Titan Legion and Brettonian sheets that had some useful icons, and paired those with some of the transfers from the Knight kit itself. Once those were on I started sponging in the battle damage here and there, though I tried to keep it relatively light overall.

 

No battle damage on the rear of the Knights though - they always face their foes! Overall I'm quite pleased with the kit, though I wish it had a bit more native posability out of the box like the Eldar Wraithknight did. Nevertheless, I think the two of them have a sufficient difference in their posing to make them seem individualized.

In other news I busted out the Dremel and the respirator and set to sanding off all the huge casting gates from the King Russ tanks, as I feel I've painted enough stuff of late to warrant rewarding myself with some build time! Once all the parts are sanded, they go back for another soak and rinse and after they dry it'l be time to start the assembly process - woo hoo!

Adeptus Mechanicus - Knight Paladins livery painting

I've been feeling a little burned out on painting Thousand Sons recently and have been frittering around on various models trying to find something to 'cleanse the palate' as it were - I picked up and put down a number of units over the last week but nothing was holding my interest. Eventually my eyes fell upon a couple monsters lurking at the back of the painting shelves and I thought they might be just the thing!

I'd put the knights on hold a few months back as the boxes of resin crack from Forge World had arrived, but now that I've more or less cranked through all of that, I wanted to get some of the livery started on the Paladins. The old color scheme for House Krast included some red and white striped panels along with some cruciform icons. Pretty pleased with how they pop against the blue and yellow!

Still a long way to go before they're done! I need to sort out some further waterslide transfers as well as some weathering. The more I look at them the less happy I am with the edging as well - Trying to decide whether I need to go in and thin the light blue lines out by blocking in more dark blue, or add another even lighter blue as an extreme edge highlight at the corners of the plates. In any case, it's a welcome change from the swathes of crimson and gold I've been working on of late!

Adeptus Mechanicus - Knight Paladins painting continues

A bit more forward motion on the knights!

Finished the trim on the second paladin and starting sketching in some livery ideas in pencil. The upper right shoulders will have a quartered yellow and white/red striped pattern, which will add a little spot color to the blue and yellow armor plates.

Was able to get the second paladin assembled as well. At this point it's all detail work and basing, but the heavy lifting is done!

I'd snapped a couple pics early on in the build process and apparently never posted them. Here's a shot of the GW knight as compared with the 28mm Dreamforge Leviathan Crusader. The Crusader is significantly larger, and pretty much cements my intention of running it as a proxy Warhound (which means I need to build a second arm weapon).

They're quite comparable to my BigDaddy/Blight Wheel knights, perhaps a little smaller but not appreciably so! Overall I have to say I'm in love with the GW kit, and I'm sincerely hoping that they (or more likely Forge World) end up doing some of the other variants. The codex does mention the Lancer and Castellan which gives me hope! Forge World has confirmed that the Knights will be included in their upcoming Heresy books, which I'm rather happy about. Pretty much assures that they're going to be doing upgrades/potential full kits!

...Man I'm gonna be broke!

Adeptus Mechanicus - Knight Paladin(s) panting in progress

Well it should not come as no surprise that I ended up picking up a couple of the new Knights! I started with a pair of Paladins, to get a feel for how the kits go together before I tried any serious conversion. While the kit allows for quite a bit of pose options with the upper torso, arms and head, the legs are more or less required to be built in the standard pose (unlike the Wraithknight which just requires a little peg removal to 'unlock' the legs). The ankles are essentially cast at an angle, so will require a bit of engineering to reposition.

I followed the suggestion to leave the armour plates off in order to allow easy painting of the under-structure, which does definitely speed things up. Super fast metal basecoat/wash/drybrush and it's 90% done!

I decided to go with the colors of House Krast (see minor rant below), as I thought the blue and yellow would set off nicely against the red and white of the Adeptus Mechanicus I planned to ally them to in my Heresy armies. 

The plan is to paint one up as a squire and one as a knight, and the third as-yet-unbuilt one as a senechal. The squire will be predominantly blue, the knight in alternating halves, and the senechal will be in a quartered pattern.

After getting the silver edging on one set of armor plates, I tacked them together to see how it looked - I quite like it! I still need to add in the various striping and iconography, which will add in a little spot color and flair.

...And now the minor rant. I was pleased to find the copy of the Knight Companion book I'd ordered when I stopped home for lunch today, and I was eager to read up on the expanded fluff on house Krast. Flipped to the relevant page and surprise! Their livery is now apparently red and white. What the?! The fluff all ties in well with the little tidbits that were previously alluded to in the old Epic materials, but there is absolutely no mention (that I can see) about the old paint scheme. They are mentioned as having sworn fealty to the Mechanicum during the Heresy, so I'm going to be justifying it as the blue and yellow being their original scheme prior to their re-dedication (when they would presumably change their colors to the new red and white). Problem solved!