[Event report] Lock and Load photodump 1

I didn't take as many photos as I had hoped at the event, and my attempts to get the cabinets are terrible (and others got photos elsewhere, so I am sure you have seen it all by now).

Here is the first of two photodumps of the 2013 Lock and Load, mainly focussing on terrain ideas I want to steal.

[Personal Work] Convergence of Cyriss - Light Vectors

I thought I would start out my chronicle of the building and painting of my Convergence with some of the jacks. The main draw of this force (for me at least) is the chance to run far more jack heavy than I would in my usual warmachine games.

I started with the light vectors as there would be no magnetising needed. Due to the way PP sell their light kits, you don't end up with multiple weapons configurations per box, so there would be no need to make any combi-jacks.

Opening up the five kits I had aquired, I was faced with a mess of parts (only three of the kits are shown here).

Each vector has the same core chassis, three legs, a lower and upper chassis and enough knee pads to cover their modesty. The slight difference comes with the Mitigator and Diffuser, which use the small round plug to attach the arms, and the Galvinizer which instead has those arms plug into its head unit.

I had decided to abandon my plans of clever colour schemes and top end painting as I want to get the army on the table as quickly as possible. As such I have resigned myself to the studio scheme (something I rarely do) and am not doing as thorough a clean up job as I normally would (just as well as restic/hard plastic/spruless plastic continues to be a pain to properly clean up).

Just as well as I found all five of the kits had suffered the same miscast on the lower chassis. Each one has three engine block details , and one of these had been blown out in molding in each case.

In terms of building, there is nothing too drastic to worry about with the kit. The only issue I had was that there are two leg designs with the kit, one of which is extended straighter. I found that upon assembling the mini, I was left with a very lopsided jack, with one longer leg, leaving the other two feet floating.

I decided to mitigate this by matching up identical legs where possible (on of the benefits of buying on masse I suppose), which left me four jacks standing properly, and one that will need a small rock to prop up his one smaller leg.

Having messed around with the heavies, I found similar issues, and this may well have been dealt with by heating up the legs and reposing. Certainly this was necessary with the heavy I have assembled so far.  Its not the end of the world, but something to keep in mind when building your vectors.

As previously mentioned, the Galvinizer, with his buzz saw arm, assembles slightly differently to his fellows, with his arms in his head, and the connection points at his waist cleverly serving double duty as "glowy bits".

I pinned the guns of the other two jacks onto the chassis for extra stablity. The connection point is fairly small, and I get impatient waiting for superglue to dry, so a quick pin (drilling into plastic is as easy as it gets), saved my patience and let me crack on.

The only other thing to pay close attention to is that there are two different knee pads to match the two leg designs. The only difference is in the connection socket on the back of the part, so pay close attention. I shaved all the plugs down anyway to get the parts as tight to the leg as possible, but if you are going for a stock assembly its worth keeping in mind.

I will return to update this post with the final jacks once I get some decent pics.

Till next time, where we look at some servitors.

[Commission] Viktoria Avatar.

The Convergence construction marathon has begun, and Restic (or sprue-less plastic, or utter crap as I like to call it) is still a thing.

In the interim, I finished up a commission that I started before I left for the states.

These are the Viktoria avatars from Wyrd's Malifaux range. Good fun to paint and having two similar models in the same scheme (one is sort of the evil deamon twin of the other) made for fun.

Enjoy.

[Personal Work] A convergence is coming.

Yup, I bought in to the shiny new faction. Though what I am planning is not so shiny (not using metals as the main colours I think).

I'm going to try to do some step by step stuff for this as damn these kits are pretty hectic, so hopefully the blog will become a resource of more than just ego stroking for a while (but don't worry, that will still take place too ;) )

First up, the group shot.

I picked up everything that was available at the event, ending up with the following:

2x Battlebox (for the lights)
2x Heavy Kit (for magnetising)
Diffuser
Prime Axiom
Aurora
Axis
3x Angels
2x all four servitors
2x Token Set

So a pretty decent starting point for the faction (though I would have preferred a few more infantry to get us going, as good as the Axiom is).

Hopefully I can get things glued together over the next few days. This is going to be a gaming army not a display army so don't expect too much from it.

First up I think we shall tackle the light jacks.

[Personal Work] P3 results are in.

Its been a while since I posted as I was working on something for the 2013 P3 competition at Lock and Load. This ended up taking up a lot of time and I didn't paint much else.

In the end I managed to secure a silver for the model (as well as a silver for my Revenant cannon which is on the blog if you want to check it out). I'd hoped to progress to a gold, but was just off the mark. I got a lot of good feedback from Meg and Matt and  have lots of stuff to focus on this year in hope that I can return to the States in 2014 to try again.

If nothing else this model is much brighter and more contrasty than anything I have painted, so that's progress.

It almost makes me think about painting a Troll army... almost.

So, here he is, Krump of the Hunters Grim.