Here is the cake I made for the North Carolina State Fair. This is the second time I’ve used this template (the first time the cake was a zombie dinosaur) although it has been scaled up from the first rendition. The underside of the body is a bent metal aluminum sheet going from it’s head to it’s tail with a shelf pop-riveted in for the lower jaw. The legs are cake molded to two clear acrylic shapes that support the weight of the top that I cut out at work. The metal plate has two tabs that have holes for the acrylic leg supports to screw into. The tiny arms of the T-rex are made with a thin foam board skeleton wrapped in fondant. The fondant had to go on in segments, which were difficult to hide, so the spots were mainly to distract from the seams. All in all, I’m pleased with the way the cake came out.
Bon Appetite!
Just finished the armature for a larger version of the T-rex cake I’m doing as an entry to the NC State fair cake competition. Going to deliver a flapping butterfly pop-up card a friend commissioned for his wife for their anniversary in the morning.
Oh, and I have an Eldar Wave serpent and some calipers out on my desk with corel pulled up. Guess what’s going to be in paper soon?
I took some leftover space marine bits and a plastic ork gretchin miniature and kitbashed them together to make this guy. The head had the rounded part of the neck filed flat and the back section drilled out to fit the grethin’s neck. Two holes were drilled in the sides and I carved the ears off of one of the plastic gretchin heads and glued them in. The chainsword had the middle section removed and was drilled and pinned together to replace the metal pipe the grethin was holding. The space marine bolt pistol was an easy swap since I just had to remove the big pistol upper half and could keep the same hand and handle. The backpack was a pain since I has to cut off the lower two exhaust ports, chop out the middle and fuse the left half to the right side. A little bit of sanding and a lot of liquid greenstuff helped. I drilled a hole in the underside of the pack as well as on the gretchin so I could mount it on his back. I added the frag grenade to his belt and modified his feet to fit the sloped terrain I made for the base. This little guy is now my favorite kitbashed miniature I’ve made.
Here’s my paint job for The Red Gobbo. A friend over at the local game shop gave me this figure a few weeks ago. I discovered that Gobbo here goes for $40 to $60 online, and the mini I was given was in perfect condition in the box. I told the guy who gave it to me and he lets me keep it anyway provided I don’t plan on selling it.
Phantom Capsule is a papercraft minis game developed by Little Roller Papercraft. The players take control of a CRADLE, which is a type of mecha used to defend cities from horrible creatures spawned from other dimensions intent on devouring the city’s perpetual reactor. I’ve been building a copy of the game to test out and review for a homebrew games article I’m writing for Games Magazine. You can download the rules and all the pieces required to play here:
http://littleroller.blogspot.com/p/play-phantom-capsule.html
Oh, and this is great background music to have playing during a game:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y5xfIcR4-tA
The Purplecrons now have a MONOLITH. Well, sort of. It’s paper. Twelve sheets, to be exact. Three more and I could have built a ‘friggin Thunderhawk. So many sub-assemblies and layers. Took quite a bit of ink to print out the swatches to match the paint colors too.
Closeup of all dem deathmarks. I first tried out the color scheme for the army on one of them, and it sold me on it.
The plain Necron lord with Rez orb was an interesting piece to build. I never do seem to get any good photos of the sculpting work on the cloak.
a shot showing the regular necron warriors. Painting 32 of these guys was an effort. 8 points of white, 18 points of silver, 7 points of green, 2 shade washes and 2 spots of black were applied to each figure.
The auction is still up on ebay right now. Please feel free to bid on it.
I’ve had these finished for a while now, but broke them out last night for some photos. T-Pain (Short for Talos Pain Engine) works amazingly well with my allied Wraithlord. Larry here usually bites the dust after he and his wracks burninate a squad, but Anthanaz and T-Pain are amazing in 6th ed. Need a bastion smashed? Warlord wrecked? Dominate a daemon prince? They’re up for it.
To help cover the cost of rebuilding and replacing things from the fire, I’m selling my Necron army I’ve been painting for the past few months. It’s up on ebay now at the following link:
http://www.ebay.com/itm/Pro-painted-Necron-army-Warhammer-40k-/320981244734?pt=LH_DefaultDomain_0&hash=item4abbf91b3e#ht_500wt_1414
There’s more pictures on the ebay page. The auction is for 2 night/doom scythe fleyers, 2 Catacomb/Annihilation Barges, a Necron Overlord, a Necron Lord with custom sculpted cape, Two Finecast Cryteks, 9 Deathmark snipers, 32 Necron Warriors and the new Codex: Necrons. I’ve got over $300 and thirty hours put into the project, and while I did enjoy building and painting it, I’m hoping to get a bit money out of it.
I’ll try and swap out the pictures tonight with some more recent ones. The bases have all been covered with black sand drybrushed in dark grey to look like ashes with a few skulls and bones scattered among the many bases. One of the barges pictured here is not finished in the picture, but it has since been completed. All the vehicles are magnetized to accept either vehicle option. The auction included additional paints and boxes to carry the figures and vehicles.
So I discovered this model kit while browsing Ebay a few months ago and decided to pick one up on a whim. It was about $30 after shipping. The box art may say “Metal Bug”, but this is without a doubt the tank from the Metal Slug series of games. I used to love playing Metal Slug back in the day, and thought it would be a great addition to the Emperor’s Knuckles army as a counts-as predator tank. I wasn’t certain about the scale at the time, but as you can see in the photo below, it is in scale with 28MM figures.
The problem with trying to use this tank as a counts-as in 40k comes when you realize that despite being in scale, it is supposed to be a small tank and all the tanks in Warhammer are Xbox huge. I ended up keeping the color scheme from the games with a lot of added weathering.
Now, the name gives away the fact that this is an obvious bootleg kit. Knowing that, I was expecting the parts not fitting together too well, but that wasn’t so much of a problem with MOST of the kit. The vulcan cannons on the side did not fit well, so moving them around would have been impossible without having to constantly pull them off and push them back over the pegs. I opted for using magnets installed into the holes in the round part of the cannons and on the ends of the pegs. This made the cannons stick out to the side an extra eighth of an inch, which is actually a good thing, since the natural placement was too close to the main turret.
Another gripe about the kit is the effort they took to make the turret have a dual ball joint connection that was supposed to give it mobility, yet the design of the pistons does not allow it to move at all. I thought about getting mechanical pencil springs and using them to make the pistons hinged and mobile, but there would have been no good place inside the hull wells to secure them. The makers of this kit would have been better off to either have the pistons not extend all the way into the turret or just design it so it doesn’t rotate in the first place. It was difficult and quite frustrating to get the ball joints in place only to realize the rest of the kit restricts any sort of movement.
One plus of the kit is it’s attention to detail. There are a lot of parts to the engine and suspension that are present, though they are not seen on the finished model. I would expect this from a higher end historic tank kit, and I personally enjoyed the extra detail it provides, but most people who would just want the model to look the part for a desk decoration or game piece will just be annoyed by all the extra fiddly bits. More extras are a little metal bullet that doesn’t really fit the scale of the tank, but the loophole on the back means its probably supposed to be a keychain charm. Decals were included, but I chose not to use them on my build.
http://www.flipitpapercombat.com/downloads/models/piratetemplate.pdf
http://www.flipitpapercombat.com/downloads/models/redspaceknightsheet.pdf
Here’s two models I made using the Flipit figurine template. The pirate was supposed to be for a fantasy version of Flipit that eventually turned into Mini Dungeon Adventures. The space knight Started as one of the Boxxorz figures I made:
They were never intended for a game, due to being too large. The template itself was a nightmare of tiny triangular tabs. I may revisit these guys at some point and try to fix the template design to make it less frustrating to build. The legs need to be sealed off instead of just left open and hollow inside. I do like the animated Lego look they had going for them.