The Black Parade

Icon Bearer 01 - Yeah he needs a name still....

Wow, so I have a few posts on my blog here and none of them except the histories are about the main topic. As you can see, and can be confirmed by the people that know me, I am a procrastinator. I will work a solid week on something then get side tracked into something else or not work on anything at all. In the weeks since my last post I have finished work on the first model for my Word Bearers army. I have been working on him for about a month now. Not that it takes that long to assemble and sculpt, in total has taken probably a little over a hour, I just like to evaluate and make tons of notes about what I would like to do for my army and not actually go through the process of executing.



I was out to lunch with a friend this week and he hit the nail on the head. He said, "The reason Chaos armies are so cool is that you can just go nuts with them". He was right, when building this army I want to go crazy with modification. Now I do want to stay with the history and fluff of the army so I am trying to do my proper research and make sure things are in order.

With each of my squads I want a focal miniature that expresses some flavor. I don't want a whole unit of just crazy stuff that looks mashed together just to say there was a modification. I want this army to blend and flow and not be so outrageous that its a turn-off.

I started out the army with a few simple modifications to practice my greenstuff work. The pictures you see above are still a WiP. The scales need to be smoothed out and blended together a little better, but just to make me feel better I wanted to post up some pictures of him to keep me up to date. I am just starting with this whole blog thing so I need to take more intermediate pictures to explain how I got to where I am with each miniature I post. For now I will just explain and hope to keep it interesting.

• I started out with a metal armature going from the bicep to the banner pole. at the end near the pole I made a 90 degree angle and drilled a hole inserting the armature in and gluing it together with superglue.
• I then rolled a sausage of greenstuff and smoothed it around the armature and into the point you see at the end that looks kind of like a snake or dragon tail.
  
• Before it dried I used the end of my sculpting knife to create the texture on the bottom of the arm similar to the underbelly of a reptile.
  
• After letting it dry I came back and laid out another sausage of greenstuff along the top of the arm. I then flattened it out with the end of my color shaper into the scales you see on the top.
• I came back a few days later...cough.....and sculpted the scales closer to the inside of the arm.
• During different times in this process I did work to the icon pole. At the bottom you see two strips of epoxy these were made by just simply cutting out two strands from the epoxy. I know you can't see them in the picture, but I used PVA (white glue) to make rivets. I will probably explain this in a later tutorial or another model. If you want to know how I did it just ask and I will post it is the comments.
• Lastly I am still working on finding something to make hoses for the backpacks. I want the texture of guitar wire, but with the tiny spaces I am trying to fill the steel core of the wire just isn't working out. I still need to investigate Nylon guitar wire in hopes that it works, but haven't made it to the music shop yet. Any suggestions are appreciated.

This week I plan to finish up the detail work on the greenstuff and get him cleaned, primed, and ready for paint.


Above is a picture of the sculpting tools I used to get my scales done. Two things about sculpting I want to throw out there. One, tools are EVERYTHING...and two, the hardest part about sculpting is keeping your fingers out of the stuff you have already done. Here is a link the the Color Shapers I have and the other tools are pretty standard in any store.

Again thanks for reading and more to come hopefully sooner rather than later.......