A Great Unclean One (based on the LatD illustration)

There's an Oldhammer project happening at the moment which is to create something from one of Tony Hough's amazing illustrations. Now a lot of his work is 40K based and therefore not for me, but having scanned the wonderful images in the Lost and the Damned, I came across one of his illustrations of a Great Unclean One, on page 12. It's certainly an illustration which I'd seen before but it's not until I have a ulterior purpose that I actually stopped and studied it properly, even more the case when I'm about to create a sculpted version of it. 

Now I'm not usually one to post wip photos, but I'm particularly happy with this as it's taken a fair amount of work, thought and observation. 

Part of the thought process for this type of project, is about what materials, parts, bits, models etc to use. I already owned an incomplete classic, 3rd edition Citadel GUO and I had the head of one of the more recent ones (from some old project many years ago). Now it's a head I don't usually like but I could see a resemblance to Tony Hough's drawing, both in terms of the wide shape of the head, the wide, toothy grin and the shape of the horns. Hopefully you can see that here:

To complete the scene I needed a couple of naked admirers and found these courtesy of Hasslefree miniatures. Both have had head swaps, the female heads being snipped away and a skull and a Tyrannid(?) head replacing them.

With the miniatures all gathered it was time to do some cutting and sculpting. The classic GUO legs section was far too narrow for what I had in mind, so I sawed through it, off centre in an area lacking in details, in order to space and then bulk out the gap between. I then wanted to change the pose of his left arm so made a snip at the wrist, so as to reposition it. I didn’t own a right arm and looked briefly on eBay but wasn’t willing to pay £15 for one, so decided to fully sculpt that appendage. As always Nurgle sculpting, thankfully, is quite forgiving!

The next stage was to start to put it all together, to see whether I could actually realise my intentions and keep it as close as possible to the illustration. This involved a fair amount of careful drilling and pinning to join respective parts together and to make a solid base for all the sculpting to follow. Here you can see that I chopped off the original horns and inverted them so that their shape was more reminiscent of Hough’s illustration and removed his goofy bottom jaw so the head sat more comfortably on the torso without any sign of a neck. You can also see the armature for the right hand here. I had the torso of the GUO ready to go without any changes (yet). The left leg had to be substantially repositioned, so an admirer could fit on his thigh, this created quite the gap and quite the forward step, but I figured I could reduce the space by extending the belly outwards to fill the gap.

Thus began the process of sculpting. I started off with milliput to bulk out the model and fill all the gaps (sorry no photo here, I was in a sculpting frenzy and didn’t want to stop the flow) and then green stuff for the details and texture. You can see that I’ve added a plastic tongue (from the Giant set?) and lots of postules made from dried seeds, pushed straight into the wet green stuff. At this stage I had to make a crucial decision - do I sculpt over the lovely mouth belly to maintain the Hough homage or do I keep it exposed for nostalgia sake? Obviously the former won out. Here you can also see me experimenting with the GreenstuffWorld green stuff roller to create some of the ribbed intestines protruding from his open belly.

There are lots of little details in the illustration that I wanted to include in the sculpt, so I will share those here too, as these are intrinsic to trying to capture Hough’s style of work. When an earlier wip photo was shared on the Oldhammer Facebook page, it highlighted that the illustration seems to be quite renowned for the uzi toting Nurgling that hovers in the top left corner of the picture. So I found an old spore (?) model and sculpted over it to create the Nurgling. The top hat is made from a plastic tube off cut and a circular bit of plasticard for the brim. The uzi is the nozzle from a gun off the Gaslands sprue and a snip off a cable tie:

Here you can see, in more detail, the lounging admirer. A greenstuff tongue was added as if to lick the man breast and some hair and spikes adorn her head. Her left leg also had to be snipped and repositioned at the knee to both fit on and to represent the illustration. You can also see a tendril wrapping itself around her other knee and the completed belly, sans mouth.

A close up of the head shows some tiny rolled maggots infesting his horns as well as a four legged, hairy skull creature on top. I was really pleased with the sculpting of the GUO’s head, I think I hid the goofy, quizzical look of the original sculpt and created a more sneering, malevolent look of the illustration. You can also see the sculpted bile coming from his mouth, this will be added to with some stringy UHU glue after painting. 

I had to think carefully about how to create all the webs and strands of organic goo that drape off the GUO. I had a eureka moment when the vacuum cleaner got clogged with a long, thin piece of string, so used it here, soaked in pva to make it solid. I also found some tiny roots from some moss that I had in a baggie and used them to dangle from his right hand. 

And from the back, not quite so much detail here, but you can see some beads squished into the milliput sculpting.

The last part was the base. Now this is me breaking my own rule (to a degree). I’ve never really appreciated display plinths, much preferring models to be properly based, but I was given this wooden one and decided to use it here. I’ve compromised by also basing the model on a round 60mm base and then magnetising both so that he can be separated from the plinth. It seems to be a sound solution...

Both bases required some added detail and interest, so I got to work with the greenstuff roller and made some more worms to scavenge around in the foreground and hit the bits box for a range of organic looking bits. In fact I delved to the very.p bottom of the box and pulled out some interesting shapes of off cuts and unwanted pieces, including bits of horn, a pouch, some sort of lip thing and bits of resin skull. On the left is part of a GW familiar, on the right a resin chap with gas mark that I was given at a meet up, sorry I can’t remember who. Obviously there is an old Nurgling at the forefront because it’s just too cool and a mistake of Tony Hough’s not to include one there!

So there we go, the model is made. I’ve just undercoated him today with a zenithal undercoat of grey and white and my intention is to monochrome him (adding a dark wash for shadows first) then with just some washes of very subtle colour, in an almost illustrative style. Hopefully my skills are up to the job, we shall see!

Quick Orcy Shields

As I continue the grind of painting 21 Rugluds Armoured Orcs, I'll introduce a few of the processes of me getting through the task where I have tried to combine speed with some quality. Always the toughest of compromises. This first tutorial here involves me creating new shield designs for the boyz, using old Citadel shield shapes, some greenstuff, modelling tools, beads, small silicon balls and some bits box bits.

Here's some examples of the finished sculpting and below there's a step by step which hopefully conveys the speed and ease of making these (two minutes!). I also have my first foray into videoing myself at work (actually filmed by my seven year old son) but I cannot work out how to shrink the file and upload it on Blogger.

Here are the tools needed, a collection of beads and small balls are pretty useful:

A blob of greenstuff to get us going:

Start spreading it around to the extremes of the shield shape. You may even start seeing a face at this stage (Pareidolia)

I always start creating a crater for the eyes (or eye):

Which is then quickly filled with small beads (different sized beads work quite well for added Orciness)

Gently push some greenstuff down over the top of the bead to create an eyelid. This also helps form the expression, a more diagonal line can create angry, raised = surprised, lowered = sad etc:

A few wrinkles on the forehead to exaggerate the expression:

And some wrinkles below and to the side of the eye:

It follows to add the nose beneath the eyes. Quite simply push your sculpting tool up into the greenstuff twice to create nostrils and the thickness of the greenstuff will make a more pronounced nose shape too:

Carve open a mouth and wiggle your tool up and down a bit to make lips. Sometimes I drag a small bit of greenstuff vertically to make teeth. Create a slight indent for the snot channel between nose and mouth:

And finish by re-forming the cheeks (plumping them up slightly):

If the video was here you would see that that took exactly 2.01minutes to make. Unfortunately a bit longer to paint though... The next post will show that painting in progress.

Oldhammer

Everyone has an opinion on what defines a movement, or indeed likes to broadcast what their interpretation of it is. And Oldhammerers do like to bang on about their perspective of it and how others have got it wrong!

Going to a community event (BOYL a few years ago) where someone has sculpted and cast a cool miniature and then given it away to attendees is pretty damn amazing and transcends any zeitgeist of a hobby movement. So this, for me, is Oldhammer:

Goblinoid Combat Cards - sculpting shields

As I toil away on a few other, quite large projects, I decided this weekend to have a break from painting and break out the greenstuff. I wanted to make the shields on my recreations of the Goblinoid combat cards, in relief, as I've always admired the shields of Kev Adams and Fraser Grey who did this originally. It's a chance to test my sculpting skills and to add my own twist to the iconic Goblinoids rather than a direct copy of the originals, which is what Jeff is doing in his same project (he started way before me though). The skin colour, when I come to paint these, will also be in my own style rather than the lurid greens on display on the cards.

When sculpting, I used very small blobs of greenstuff in the way that I watched Kev Adams work last summer. Building up in small increments from lowest areas to most raised seemed to make sense. Using some small sculpting tools I was able to shape the forms of the face before adding a last layer of detail when all the base work was complete and solid.

So first up, with an actual bead for a beady eye; a jolly shield, winking at us:

Followed by a backhanding, horned skull:

(Halfway through sculpting this, I realised that the horned skeleton was posed giving a backhand slap - needless to say it was way too difficult to sculpt this!)


And then the epitome of angry and evil:

And finally a burning skull:

This was a fun few hours/afternoon's worth of work and working on such a small scale has given me some added confidence going forward with my sculpting. The next shields I'll sculpt will be more in the Fraser Grey style, much more rounded, smooth and exaggerated features...

Bitzbox Warband pt2 - greenstuff (and warband record sheet)

I've been busy with the greenstuff and the sculpting tools in order to complete the next stage of putting this Bitzbox Warband together; prior to the painting stage:

The leader of the warband. I resisted the urge to greenstuff the fuck out of him, or more especially his palanquin. The unsightly gaps between palanquin and nurglings will be hidden by banners (see more below) and I decided to keep the texture of the balsa grain rather than greenstuff rugs/drapery on the surface which would have draped over the sides. I did add some cocktail stick spikes though. I may need to greenstuff some hands and feet onto the Nurglings which are on board the palanquin, as at the moment they are missing from having been clipped from their small plastic base. You can also see the small seeds and beads which I've embedded into the swollen gut of the Champion and on the sides of the throne I've added some textured/organic swirls which show the twisted and contorted figures writhing in the throne.

Here's the beastmen champion, old dog head, pointing into the distance, showing his steed where he would like to go. The only sculpting here (apart from gap filling) was the scorpion like tail of the Chaos steed and a bit of his mane.

The 5 beastmen. Most of the greenstuff here was used to fill gaps and of course create the occasional bloated belly. A flared trouser was added over the hoof of the gunner and a few dried seeds were embedded into the belly of the banner bearer. I have a freehand design in mind for his banner, which is based on an illustration from a, yeah you've guessed it, Fighting Fantasy illustration.

Added a typical fat Nurgle belly (with belly button) and some straps. Only a little bit of filling was needed on the tail join and he's ready to bang his drums. The pages on his flank with have musical scores on them.

I wanted to create an organic appearance to the shield, so kept the sculpting marks which were directed towards the center. Embedded in the center are 3 beads which represent the Mark of Nurgle, which I've repeated on his shoulder.

So next I'll start the painting, probably in the order of these photographs, starting with the palanquin leader - I have a feeling that it will be the most problematic to paint with regards to it's size and awkwardness. Painting all those Nurglings will be a chore and I'll aim to cover the gaps between them and the palanquin by having some banners hanging down from the sides of the wooden edge itself. I'm considering freehanding some of Holbein's "Dance of Death" woodcuts onto these banners, perhaps x5:

I've also created a Warband Record sheet which is pretty much copied direct from the back of the Lost and the Damned book, with a few changes which I found make it a bit more slick and usable. It's a good tool for recording your warband rolls and the adjustments to profiles, armour saves etc as well as future changes as your warband progresses. I've filled in the details of my Bitzbox Warband here: (please let me know if this link hasn't worked):




https://drive.google.com/file/d/0BzQY_hXqbv59Y2t1a2hBMUFBcUE/view?usp=sharing


And the blank template if you're interested:


https://drive.google.com/file/d/0BzQY_hXqbv59TWI4YVFmRjJ1UU0/view?usp=sharing








Time to start painting this lot up then, if I can avoid the distraction of a myriad of other projects....