Eisenkern Command

Hi folks! Remember these chaps? Well, we're back with some more, this time from the command box set:

I'm just going to come straight out and say this, these fellas just do not photograph well. The combination of the always difficult to shoot adjacent blacks combined with the gloss annihilating shading and highlighting means that they look waaaaaay better in the flesh. But ho hum! This is what we got so just engage imagination and press on. These were made with Dreamforge's Eisenkern command set and were then modified to have GW weapons to make them more Imperial Guard. I will say, I was a little disappointed with the options included. The set really only allows you to make exactly what is on the box. No real opportunities to play with the configuration. They're mix and match though so if you have other Eisenkern sets they cross-mojinate. In this case mercifully we had some spare arms so the special weapon squad could work.

Speaking of the special weapon squad. My client thought there were only five models in the box so the extra unit was a pleasant surprise. We decided that they would work well as a small squad of special weapon wielding dudes and that a "breach and clear" affair could be fun. Two meltaguns to crack open that tank/bunker/starship airlock and three flamers to hose the resulting breach. Nasty. As with the last squads of these, painting is fairly straightforward, the brief was "Tie Fighter Pilot" so shiny black the order of the day. To separate areas of the model, the undersuit is Ammo Rubber and Tires, the armour German Grey and then everything got washed black. The armour got another glaze of black before highlighting with the Grey and the gloss.

The command squad itself includes a nice long range comms/scanner thing with a nice little laptop. Strapping a medical auspex and a bunch of pouches to one of the Eisenkern and combining it with a white medic helmet made a decent field doctor. The flag comes with the kit and as with all these CAD-made less-than-a-millimeter-thick-details is a bear to paint cleanly. Seriously guys, we need either more height or a wider detail. Finally, the officer is just the standard Eisenkern with a chaos plasma pistol. If you ever want a nice baroque plasma pistol, go chaos, they've got lots of lovely exposed wiring. Makes it look dangerous.

And that's all folks, short one today with not being able to see lots of cool detail. More next week!

TTFN

Eisenkern Mules

Hi folks, a quickee today, I mentioned in the Eisenkern Imperial Guard article that mechanisms and devices were the strength of the Dreamforge kit. The jewel in the crown of the Eisenkern though are their luggage robots... no really:

These are the Eisenkern Mules. Luggage lugging robots designed around the same principles as the Big Dog robots being developed for the US army. They're ingeniously designed - if a little fiddly, three part legs etc. - and allow an insane level of posing. Really, really nice kits that I can heartily reccommend. You can see better pictures of the posing below. I thought about making cargo for the top but then realised just how easy it would be to make "drop in" cargos, casualties etc. for scenario specific purposes. It freed them up for multiple uses to leave them empty.

The first of the Mules I painted in a sort of military fatigue green. with bare metal everywhere else. I picked out some of the areas of the "head" to be glass covered sensor arrays. Most of the work on these was actually done with weathering. A few thin layers of thin rust and dusty enamel washes lent them a "middle of a warzone but without the presence of mind to dust self down" vibe. Other than that, some oil washes at the joins and Robert's your father's brother.

The second of the Mules I decided to go with a more "civilian" vibe. I used the sensor-ish head for this one and it felt like a warehouse cargo hauler rather than a military load lifter. Black and the ubiquitous 40k hazard stripes were given the same treatment as the military one with the weathering. The two feel very different despite much the same processes being used which pleased me (they're designed to be shared among the client's Inq28 groups).

And that is it for today. On the workbench are a pair of Inquisitorial rhinos which are looking fairly spanky and should be finished tomorrow, expect piccies!

TTFN

Eisenkern Imperial Guard

Hi folks, today I'm showcasing some of Dreamforge game's relatively new Eisenkern figures press-ganged into Imperial Guard service with some judicious weapon swapping:

Dreamforge's weapons are nice enough but as these were part of the Inq28 commission my client wanted me to get some good solid Mechanicus approved firepower all up in their grill. I was happy to oblige. Most of the swaps were easy enough, you do need to shave down some of the stocks and sadly in a few cases remove them entirely for them to fit - the Eisenkern have some very tight poses in their arm pairs - but for the most part they posed no problems. The flamers (below) needed a bit of tweaking as the flamer tanks needed to be incorporated with the backpacks to look right. A length of ProCreate hose draped naturally around the model made for a decent enough rubber piping to carry promethium to the business end.

For the painting, the brief I had was "Like a TIE fighter pilot" so within the ability of a model to appear so, that's what I did! One of the difficulties is that you can't just paint them gloss black. Doesn't work. It'll look like you did no actual painting. Instead I painted the undersuit and gas mask in the AMMO Rubber & Tires paint - gave it that NBC-suit look - the armour in Val German Grey darkened with a little black. Painted the weapons and then hit the whole thing with a careful wash of Black Ink (with the usual Lahmian Medium and water added). After that it was a simple matter of picking out the details. Selectively gloss varnishing the armour plates, Brightening the metal where needed and basing. They look good and threatening and didn't take forever. Worth remembering.

apologies for the weird light levels on some of the colours, getting these things to resolve on camera is more difficult than vampires

While we're here, lets chat for a moment about the set itself because I've been watching Dreamforge with some interest. Its a kit that seems to straddle two eras of design. Like most modern kits there are a host of lovely, lovely extra parts on the sprues - like the nifty battlefield computer in the pic above - and the quality of the casting is superb. Then we go back in time with the cutting and spacing on the sprue, you have arms paired but in different places making you hunt for them, there are a lot of componants that could have been sculpted together to make it easier for assembly. The variety is nice but each trooper comes in at least 10 parts. That is with no optional extras attached. Like I say, two eras of design. I'm sure they'll get there though, this was their first infantry kit after all.

Something I will point to though is the posing. Like a couple of other companies, Dreamforge haven't quite nailed some of the organic details. They're great at the mechanical (the Mules are brilliant and coming soon) but the stances are often a little... off. It's tricky to see but the sgt above is a decent example. You see, when people move they go through a "controlled arrested fall" which involves pivoting the centre of mass of the body over the leading leg. In order to not fall over you need your weight centred over the foot on the floor or close to it, we also wobble from side to side to keep our weight over the foot on the ground. With the sergeant, he looks awkward because in that frozen moment that we see miniatures in he is falling over. His weight is way to the right and behind the leading foot and the rear one is a long way from coming through. Its subtle but you see it. Again, I expect this will improve in time and I can defiantly recommend their more mechanical offerings in the meantime.

That's all from me but I have two more items to share. Remember this fella? Well, a couple of days ago I got an email from the client who commissioned him. He'd finally managed to get Triarii Sinister to a gaming table after not quite a year! It was lovely to see some shots of ol' T. Sinister in the wild as it were and only lament that shiny model syndrome (and an eldar titan) kicked in and blew the poor fellow up:

And finally, I must direct you to Charlie at the Beard Bunker and a genuine labour of love. One of the nicest monster paint jobs I've seen in ages on a Banebeast Chimera. Lovely work.

Until next time folks.

TTFN