Brother Argos

Yesterday in the hobby I got the B&C working again.

Today in the hobby I did some maintenance on the Bolter and Chainsword server.

Today in the hobby I encouraged people to donate to the B&C a bit more so we can hit our donation drive target!

It is in the bottom right hand corner of every page of the B&C - David A Techmarine / Master of the forge always :)

No need to be Brother Arkley, I just miss being able to paint properly <grins> Go and paint a marine for me!

I am jealous Brother Arkley :)

Today in the hobby I encouraged my Space Marine Brothers to Support the Bolter and Chainsword donation drive. http://www.bolterandchainsword.com/topic/308146-yearly-board-fund-drive-begins

Good to see you working on your Raven Guard Chris :lol:

It was a good day today, I got the final piece of a jigsaw puzzle I have been working on for the last 15yrs. In that time I have often photographed miniatures, but it has always been a casual thing, I never had the quality of image I desired. I have slowly improved my camera till it did what I wanted, never the best as they cost a lot of money, but I have a reasonable camera for taking pictures of my miniatures. My wife has a better camera than mine in most peoples perceptions, it has 10 megapixels to my 5 megapixels, almost the same optical zoom and a slew of options for taking pictures on the fly and getting a good shot. What mine has that makes it work for me is a power socket so I can power it externally from a wall socket, therefore it never needs charging. It has a good macro option with a x5 optical zoom and finally I got a wireless card for it, so that when I take pictures they magically appear in my Pictures folder sorted by date for me. So a camera I can leave on all the time, that transmits the pictures to my computer automatically and has a good macro ability is what I have, its a Casio Exilim Pro Ex-P505 for those interested (a bit old now). However one of the important parts about taking decent pictures is the lighting and in that area I lacked significantly for a while till recently I discovered a supplier of cheap photo studio lamps! They are a bit pricey at £30 ($45) each, but come with a very good 135w (light output not electrical drain) set of daylight bulbs. Over the last 3 months I have been buying one a month and the last arrived today, so I got to setup my "Studio"! Here you can see the setup for yourselves: - My Camera is mounted on a small Slik Mini tripod, the lamps surround the area and I do not need a light tent as I have diffusors that cover the bulbs (being fluorescent they are not that hot). There is a "Lazy Susan" turntable in the middle with some white plasticard stuck to it. I have marked the centre of the plasticard/turntable so I know where to put figures and it is aligned with my camera on the tripod. Behind the turntable and stuck to the wall is a sheet of plasticard to give a decent white backdrop. Luckily it in a position which is semi permanent, the only thing I would need to use there is the book scanner its sitting on top of, which to be honest is used rarely in these days of black library publishing electronically. Here is a close up view showing what I see when I am taking a picture, Note I use the grid setting on my camera for alignment on my shots and have a Histogram display showing the light range so I could in the past try and adjust for poor lighting. The diffusors covering the lamps help to distribute the light evenly over the area and reduce bright reflections, my wife thinks they look like small shower caps <sigh> The bulbs are an odd umbrella shape which you can see in the two pictures below: - From the side: They throw out a huge amount of light, approximately 405w into a tiny space and have the significant advantage of being a constant colour, unlike before where I had a mix of incandescent bulbs, halogen bulbs and fluorescent. With that degree of diffused light, you can get a decent bright well lit photo without too much photoshop work being done after! From on top: Its taken me a while to get the components I wanted, but I am quite happy with the result. You will get to see some of the results yourself in my next major post ... which will be a Green stuff / sculpting post ;)

The new Sons of Medusa chapter master in IA10 would do a NICE job of that role ... I plan to use him .. retasked to the Iron Hands obviously.

Here is a current group shot .. If you want to see closer there is a MUCH larger version here! Not the best composition or lighting I could manage but at least it shows the work :)

He took a long while and quite a bit of fiddling, but finally the heavy weapons marine is complete ... The rust effects took a while to work out, but in the end a small amount of downward stroke got the feeling I wanted into the rust on the wall, it bugged me for ages, but I had repeated a similar technique to how I had done the flooring and it just felt wrong. All it took was some simple soft brushwork to add a small feeling of downward movement (gravity), the change is hardly noticeable now it feels right. It was from the right hand side of the figure I was most worried about balance ... there were a couple of times when the damned marine would just not sit right on the base but in the end it worked! There is shading on the white tube ... but no amount of coaxing gets decent white shading out of my camera (always an excuse to upgrade), I tried Vallejo's pale wash and it worked nicely, it is specially built for pale colours/white. I just wish I could actually show you! You might also notice I have "upped" my photo technique a little ... for ease of production I have setup a mini-studio next to me and have a wifi-card in my camera to send straight to my computer. This means I can leave it all setup and just pop a figure in for its shot! ... More on all this later though ^_^ He took way longer than I wanted and slowed me down a bit, but the result seems worth it to me ... I hope you like him?

I think you will find they can be rear loaded, certainly in my version of 40k (although possibly not in yours), especially as I opened up the end of the launcher to allow it! ... but discussing how things work in 40k is all conjecture anyway :)

Its been a weekend for daughters and family, but I did work on the Missile Launcher some more :( First off I was asked to show the Puppetwar heads on a marine body to show "fit" ... I think they fit pretty well to be honest .. what do you think? Moving on to the Missile Launcher, I finished the base off in a night of effort and rusty walls. I tried lots of different techniques with the bullet holes but I think I finally nailed it. You should also notice the tread on the bottom of the space marine boot made from plasticard and the rear of the wall where the impact marks of the bullets on the other side show through. Obviously there is still more to do ... Servo Arm Rust weathering on the marine Decals on Shoulderpads, Purity Seals and Missile Launcher. Tidy up I will be doing most if not all of that tonight while I watch Star Wars II with my daughter Amelia (the 10yr old). One thing I was thinking of for the next squad will be "making" the room they are in and ensuring all the flooring styles "fit better" rather than just being grouped by the "rusty floor" theme. I think it would also make for a wicked diorama with a squad of marines under fire in a space hulk.