Making Feathers Tutorial

UPDATE: For a nice and quick tutorial on making cloaks, check out Col. Corbane's Veteran squad cloaks here.

Earlier this year I posted a pic of a couple of Ravenguard character conversions I did as a commission. Quite a few of you were interested in how I did the feathered cloaks. I finally got a chance to throw some putty on a sheet of plasticard and push it around for you. What follows is how I made the feathers for the cloaks on the models above.

Step One: Roll out a thin "sausage" of greenstuff. Lay it down on a flat surface. Ceramic tiles are quite good for this purpose.

Step Two: Use the burnishing (circular, flat-ish) end of your sculpting tool to flatten out your "sausage". You don't want this to be too thick or too thin. Practice will tell you which thickness works best for you. Use plenty of water on your tool.

Step Three: Carefully score a thin line down the center of your flattened greenstuff. Make sure you do not cut all the way through, and that your hobby knife is lubricated (I use my painting water to dip my knife in before scoring). Then start scoring in the "feather vanes" with your wet knife. Keep these small and tight together, and do not cut all the way through.

Step Four: Once you've scored the length of your flattened greenstuff, put it aside to dry completely.

Step Five: When the greenstuff has completely cured you cut start to "cut out" your feathers with your hobby knife. From a strip like the one shown in the pictures above you can cut about four or five. Once you've cut out all of your feathers you can start to glue them to your cloak. Glue them on in layers, starting with the bottom row first and adding feathers so that there's an overlap, the bottom of each row covering the top of the one before.

I hope you find this helpful : )

Cheers

Dave

Thank you one and all!

Well, as many of you might have seen, the auction for my (now former) Legio Custodes came to an end on Sunday having raised $3,800 for my two friends, John and Justin. Thank you to everyone who bid on the army, told someone about the auction, donated to Justin and John through their Paypal accounts, and sent messages of support through. Thank you everyone!

Thanks especially go to a great guy, Alec, who placed the winning bid on the army. I've spoken with him on the phone this week and I'm very excited that someone who is as passionate about 40K as I am will be taking up the mantle of "Custodian of the Custodes" (please, no janitorial jokes).

Alec is the guy behind the Apocalypse40K.com forums which are all about, you guessed it, Apocalypse gaming. In Alec's own words:

"Apocalypse40K.com is a forum for Apocalypse-sized battles in Warhammer 40,000. Some of the biggest Apocalypse groups in the country participate and discuss issues surrouding games sizes, rules, formations, DIY units and more. Battle Reports from World Record games and details on some insanely big armies are all part of this fun and informative forum."

I strongly urge those of you with a passion for the Apocalyptic to head to the forums and join in the fun.

As well as all that, Alec is donating a still-sealed-in-the-box copy of Space Hulk to be auctioned off. How cool is that? More details in the next week.

Anyway, I've been waiting a little while to show you these guys, a couple of conversions that are part of the last batch of commissions I've done. What you see below are some conversions done for a Ravenguard army. On the left is a "counts as" Sicarius. In the middle is a "counts as" Vulkan, and the metal chap is Lemartes with his Blood Angel iconography filed off. In the bottom picture you can see the feathered cloaks I did for Sicarus and Vulkan. I might have to do a quick tutorial on them.

Keen eyes will notice I have also modeled the two "counts as" characters with a style of armor first seen in the Index Astartes piece on the Imperial Fists. A member of GW France did some great conversions that have since spawned quite a few homages. One that I like a lot was done by blog reader Pulse, and his great work can be seen in this thread on Bolter & Chainsword.

Cheers

Dave