Floating head flame horror progress

Thought I'd drop a few pictures of the progress I've made in my quest to have floating heads for my Horror of Tzeentch units.  Overall I plan to have 30 Horrors (28 for the troops choices and 2 for blue scribes... still no idea how I'm doing that one).  Every one of the pieces I'm using is resin cast and ready for assembly/trimming.

This piece I've already begun trimming.  Next will be fine trimming, fixing any errors, and filling in the gaps.  Hopefully in the next couple days they will all be ready for priming/painting!

The bottom piece is indeed the drum Pink Horror from the old days.  The top of the head is resin cast from a mold I made using Sculpey and attempted sculpting flame from (which I'm horrible at!).  Here's hoping it looks nice after primed and painted.

I look forward to having 30 floating heads deepstriking onto the board alongside 17 Flamers of Tzeentch.

Ignore that last post

In the last post I sent out a request for help from you, gentle readers.  However, I think I found a solution to my conundrum.  What I wanted was a flame type model to represent my Horrors (fitting in better with the general Tzeentch theme of the army instead of the old big hand horrors).  The current solution involves...

Not my Horror...

I will take the 3 or so of these I have, chop off the arms and legs, and add flames to the top of the head area.  Later today I'm going to do some shopping around to find toy campfire flames that will fit in that area.  That way I'll have my floating horror flame balls which fit better with the whole army concept in general.  As they progress, I'll be sure to document my failures and successes along the way!

A request of help from readers

Hey everyone, I'm in a bit of a situation and need your help.  As you know, over the past couple of weeks I've been trying to upgrade my Chaos Daemon army, an all Tzeentch group.  What I have discovered is that while I love the old blue horror models, I am really looking for something which really fits their warpfire nature. 

What am I hoping to find?  I'm really hoping to find is a model which resembles the bombs from the Final Fantasy series games.  I've already started searching some of the various miniature companies for elementals and other things which might be able to work, but I am not good at this search thing.  If you have any ideas, please let me know!  I will need a little over 30 or so, so finding a decent price (or easily replicated) model would work best.

Thanks everyone for your time and here's hoping I can find something which fits better in the army!

Making your own figure bases: Daemon landscape

I learned long ago that the bases for your models can make or break how good your army looks.  Making a particular theme to fit with your army can take a really nice army and make it a fantastic one.  Today we'll see how to do this with just 2 part epoxy, some Insta-mold, and 2 part resin.  Final result will look like:

To start, take a standard GW base and your 2 part epoxy, whether it be Milliput or the traditional Green Stuff and cut enough from each part so that you'll be able to cover the base.  Mix the two parts together by kneading them together.  Next spread your epoxy evenly across the base's top surface area.

Using a hooked tool, choose a point to begin your first crater.  Pull the epoxy outward from that point.  Use the back of a paintbrush to make a couple (2 or 3) deep indents.  Move on to a ball point pen and make indents all around the  the rest of the top area.  Ball up small pieces to fit into indents made by the paintbrush. Wait 24 hours for the epoxy to cure.

Above are some Insta-Mold pieces.  Using a cup of hot water (180-210 degrees), melt the pieces together.  Kneed them together and cover the base.  

Either wait about 5 minutes or put the base in a cup of ice water.  After it has cooled, remove the mold and set aside the base you made.  Now you'll be able to easily make multiples of that base.

Now comes the tricky bit.  Resin epoxy heats up when it cures, so depending on how deep the Insta-mold casing is, you may need to mix some, let it cure, then finish it up with another mixing of resin.  From my own experience this won't be so big to cause the resin to heat enough to melt the Insta-mold.

Mix your resin in a cup and pour it into the mold.  Allow roughly 30 minutes for the resin to properly cure and remove it from the mold.  Prime it and begin painting as you see fit!  Below are the steps I took to finish my own base.

And there we go.  A suitably alien looking terrain fit for any Daemon army.

Soul Grinder update

Hello everyone, just thought I'd give an update on the progress I'm making on the first Soul Grinder (the other will be soon to follow).  Since this is going to be used in an all Tzeentch Daemon list, I want with Gotthammer's suggestion to highlight with yellow, and I think it really helps add some pop to the model which was missing.

There are a couple things which still need to be painted, though.  The fleshy bits on the front legs and claw are still in need of a paint job, and to be quite honest I'm reluctant to pull out the airbrush to try to paint them (though I will).  The current plan is to wait until the second Soul Grinder is at the same place this one so I don't have to tape off sections a second time around and might save a little time and paint.

I also need to add some highlights to the blades on the sides and the leg shields so they aren't so mono-colored.  The final piece that I'm struggling with are the hoses.  Should I go with the yellow, or keep them black with grey highlights?  Is there another color I should go with, or would that be too distracting on the model?

Hopefully I'll be able to decide what to do soon!

Personal Hobby update- on Daemons and Space Marines

Welcome back to the increasingly innacurately named Scratch Built 40k!  So much to cover, so little time!

First, the Space Marines have taken a back seat for a bit.  I've found that if I spend too much time on one army I get burnt out and stop wanting to work on anything.  Don't get me wrong, I've made progress!  20 Marines are put together, along with 5 Terminators.  Half of them still need some detail and line work, but they're almost ready for battle.

However, with the airbrush I've discovered that the Daemons I've owned could be repainted and improved in a fraction of the time they took the first time around.

As you can see, I have 18 Flamers (without arms... I hate those things) ready for battle.  The subtle blues to purples would have taken me forever to paint with a brush, and I would have relied too much on that oft despised drybrushing technique.

After seeing how easy the flamers were to paint, I decided to revisit the Soul Grinders.  The first time I hated painting them and I wasn't hot on how they turned out.  Very flat and hard to detail.  I think this is an improvement so far.

I know it's looking awful blue right now, but that is mostly the camera (I really need a nicer camera).  This was the first one I started working on.

At the moment I am struggling to find a third color to detail the model.  Any ideas?