Keeper of Secrets - Avatar of Shaah Complete

Well, this was one fast project. I started work on Saturday; picking up where I'd left off in the build 2 years ago, and started painting on Thursday morning. 24 hours later and I'm done!

To be fair, the speed of the paint process was mostly due to the nature of the model. I also maximised the amount of work I did with the airbrush, so I spent about 2 hours on that part of the paint. After that, it was just a matter of sorting out the details. Oh, and fair warning, this post contains moderate resin boobies!

For those who aren't familiar with the model, this is the Avatar of Shaah by Raging Heroes. It's about 8 inches tall to the top of the sword and is all resin. I've written a review of the kit lower down, if you're interested.

My favourite part of the paint is the glowing eyes. They didn't take a lot of work, and I'm really happy with the final result. I basically just airbrushed them with dark angels green, then Vallejo escorpina green. After that, I washed around the area with a little Biel-Tan Green and then just highlighted the central eyes with a ever lightening mix of moot green and white.

Considering the time spent on paint, I'm really happy with how she came out. It's also nice to take something out of the cupboard of shame and get it finished for once. I'm planning to pick up a Lord Discordant tomorrow, and I never thought in a million years that I'd actually finish this model before then.

Anyway, that about rounds it out for the Avatar itself. Due to some difficulties with this kit, I've also written about the process of building it (which is basically just a massive page long complaint), but if you're just here for cool pictures, you can skip that bit.

Kit Review

I'm happy with the look of the final model now that it's done, but honestly it was a horrible experience to build. Resin can be hard to work with, and I've gone through plenty of resin models in my time, but in a number of ways Raging Heroes really dropped the ball on this one.

A gap in the claw you can fit your thumb in...

For one, the kit was rather shiny and coated in a very noticeable quantity of release agent which was resistant to cleaning and took a lot of work just to prep. The fitting for the individual parts was also quite poor, and even with the best will, there were a number of gaps that you could easily fit a thumb nail in all over the model.

I expect to spend some time with greenstuff filling gaps, but the position of the seams was just plain terrible, and the kit honestly feels poorly designed. Often seam lines between parts seemed to be arbitrarily cut straight through crucial rounded areas that were next to impossible to fill cleanly.

Looking at a mock up of the model before paint or greenstuff, if you enlarge the picture, you'll see that there are seams running though every inch or so of the claw on the right. The front side is the better fitting one, and let me tell you it took quite a bit of time to fix all of that.

The worst seam on the whole thing? the butt. For some reason, they decided to cut the legs at the hip to the groin (which you can also see in this picture). That would've worked well if the avatar had clothes, but with a bare demon ass to contend with, it basically left a large horrible seam right across the body that was really unnecessarily hard to fill and work with. Why they didn't follow the line of the chains, I'll never know.

Detail pickup is ok, but far from ideal as well. It just feels slightly blunted and lacking in the crispness that you see in other manufacturers (eg: Anvil, Forgeworld, Prodos, Black Sun, Wargame Exclusive, Nocturna, even Finecast). Overall, if you like the model, I'd still get one, but just know that it'll be a ton of work, and honestly don't even go there unless you're an experienced model-maker.

I don't like slamming a manufacturer, but I've got other Raging Heroes models from the kickstarter, and it'll probably be a few years till I can face working on any of them either. It's a shame, but that's the reason I shelved this project in the first place, and it's a real problem. Does it look nice now? yeah, but I had a ton of work just getting it together in the first place, and it's mostly down to poor design choices.

Emperor's Children Venom Crawler Finished!

Well, Monster March is over, but I had a spare week after finishing the Shadowsword and I didn't want to let it go to waste. I picked up Shadowspear on the release day, and I've been working on the Chaos models since.

Obviously, the Venom Crawler was always going to be a nice thing to add to my army. I use a lot of Daemon Engines, and it's a cool design. I have to say that it was a real pain in the ass to paint though. It just has a lot of legs and a lot of filigree to get to grips with - so pretty much any painters worst nightmare! (which pretty much describes anything Chaos anyway)

I'm really happy with how it came out though. I've used my usual scheme for my Emperor's Children. The only differences are that I've moved to using the airbrush for the purples, and I also used some Blood for the Blood God on the tongue and demon maw bits on the side of the body. It's a nice high-gloss effect that I really like in moderation.

I haven't seen a lot of Venom Crawlers around online yet, so I think it's quite interesting to get a look at the model from different angles. Personally, I think there's a lot of cool details to be appreciated. I'll be working on some of the other Shadowspear models soon, so hopefully I can showcase them as I go. Next up is probably the Obliterators.

I'm looking forwards to the wave of new models we're seeing too. In particular, I'll definitely be looking to add a Lord Discordant, and one of the new Keeper of Secrets models to my army soon!

Monster March - Week 3, Shadowsword Complete!

I finished the Shadowsword with time to spare. It still feels like it took long enough though. There's just something about painting tanks, even when you do it quickly. At some point I always come to the realisation that I'm basically painting a house brick with added relief!

Overall, I'm really happy with how the Steel Panther came out. It's actually the first Super Heavy that I've painted for any of my armies, so that's cool too. I'm not sure how much I'll use it in game, as I like to play smaller games mostly, but having it finished certainly fulfils a childhood dream or two. 

Although painting started to feel a bit arduous towards the end, I find with tanks that they really come alive when you start highlighting all the metals and adding the last weathering touches, as it really blends it all in nicely. Using the airbrush was a real life-saver too, or I'd probably still be sitting there base coating the thing. I honestly wouldn't paint a vehicle without it these days. Not to say that an airbrush will all the work, but once you get your techniques down, it can be a real time saver for highlighting, cammo patters and smooth application.

The finished Shadowsword in my display cabinet

Other than the tank, I've built, undercoated and airbrushed the chaos half of Shadowspear as well, so expect to see some units from the set turning up on the blog soon.

With one week to spare till the end of Monster March, I'll have to think of something to do with my newly completed super-heavy for the final update...

Monster March - Week 2, Shadowsword Progress

Work has been continuing at a good pace on the Shadowsword. I finished washing around all of the rivets and other details and did the light drybrush highlight on the whole tank. After I'd finished that stage, I started the laborious process of picking out the details.

Most of the detail parts are still just basecoated at the moment, and I really have a long way to go with them.

In order to get a bit more finish on the tank, and to get an idea where I was going with it, I also added decals to it. I always enjoy that stage a lot, so I couldn't resist. I free-handed a name for the tank on the side of it; the "Steel Panther", and before anyone asks, it is an intentional joke reference to the American comedy glam rock/metal band.

"Become the king of your neighbourhood, like Steel Panther, and Tiger Woods..."

If anyone's interested in how we got to this stage, I did a full step by step tutorial for how I paint my Steel Legion tanks, so if you haven't read it already, it's available here (Link)

That about rounds it up. I'm hoping to blast the rest of the tank out pretty fast now, as I've ordered a copy of Shadowspear, and as an avid Chaos player, I'm hoping to have plenty of time to spend on the goodies within!

Monster March - Week 1, Shadowsword

Following on from my pledge for Monster March, I've been hard at work painting my Shadowsword. This is pretty much where we're at after one week:

Despite looking almost finished to the casual observer, there's still a long way to go. Basically, progress so far was all done with the airbrush, so in terms of time spent, we're looking at maybe 2 hours of work.

The new thing I tried was masking the tracks off so I could spray them silver. I absolutely hate painting tracks with a brush, so I'm really happy that it worked out well.

Other than the airbrush work, I've started the painstaking process of washing all the rivets and gaps with Agrax. It takes a long time, but is well worth the effort, and it has already added a lot of depth to the model.

Once I finish that stage, it's on to highlighting and then the bodywork will be complete. Hopefully I can get that done by next week - giving me the remaining 2 weeks to do all the detail work!

Blackstone Fortress - Traitor Guard, Slaanesh Cultist Unit

When Blackstone Fortress came out, I was immediately taken by some of the new chaos models, but I didn't want to fork out for a whole set. I also wanted to be able to integrate the minis into my force right away without having to use the odd little data sheets that were made for them for 40k.

With that in mind, I picked up a set of the Traitor Guard models on eBay and converted them for use as an ordinary cultist squad. I used a few standard plastic cultists to fill the gaps and also did a few head swaps here and there to get them all to match nicely.

I'm particularly fond of the head swap on their leader, which was pretty simple with some spare Mechanicus infiltrator bits. The models themselves had great detail, so I didn't want to change them too much.

I've painted them to match the rest of my Emperor's Children force, but I swapped the colours around and gave them white/bone colour armour and purple fatigues (as opposed to the usual Emperor's Children purple armour). They still match the force nicely, but it helps them look a little different, and it was quite fun to paint. I've actually built a second unit with hand to hand combat weapons, but I'm planning to paint them later, as finishing this unit was enough for the moment.

Monster March 2019 - Steel Legion Shadowsword Pledge

I'm taking part in Monster March this year, which is being run by Swordmaster over at Path of an Outcast (http://swordmasterofhoeth.blogspot.com/2019/02/monster-march-3-introduction.html).

The event is quite simple in premise, paint something big and scary during the month of March and follow along with your fellow entrants. For me, it seemed like the perfect opportunity to try to paint up the Shadowsword that I bought for my Steel Legion force. I think it should be quite manageable using my tank painting technique, as described in my Steel Legion Tutorial. So hopefully it should look something like my other tanks when it's done:

It's always been a bit of a dream of mine to have a fully painted Shadowsword for 40k. I think it all started when I was a kid and games of Epic were always being shown in White Dwarf. It just seemed so exciting, and I couldn't help but want a full size one. In particular the Shadowsword always had a sort of mystique to it for me; being the one that mounted the biggest gun!

Anyway, that's the pledge, so check back later to see how I get on!