Continuing work on my Emperor’s Knuckles squat marine army for warhammer 40k, here’s Dozer, my master of the forge and part time thunderfire cannon operator:

Took me awhile to come across one of the old squat techpriest minis from ebay for a decent price.  I cut off the shoulders and odd pistol to give him a minimized bolter and mechanicus pauldrons, greenstuffed in some of the chaos looking sigils and constructed his servo harness out of spare bits and styrene tubing.

This is Sgt. Tally-ho, my counts-as Tellion model.  Made from an old squat adventurer with the scatterblast or whatever it was he had replaced by a modified bolter.  I like the little cape on this mini as it ties him in to the ratling snipers I use as scouts.

For my non-sniper scouts, I’m using some Grymn from Hasslefree miniatures.  The detail on these little guys is great, and the poses give them all a bit of personality.

Everybody says that Land Speeder Storms are crap, but I’ve been able to use mine to good effect (particularly in the relic mission).  The pilot and gunner have been cut up and greenstuffed back together qith squat proportions.  The front flooroard of the gunner compartment is filled with an ammo box that he’s standing on.

I finished up one of my old style rhinos for the Knuckles.  I still have to go back over and do highlights, but I’m satisfied with it enough for the tabletop right now.

When the escalation league I was taking part in saw everyone spamming flyers, I had to come up with something to deal with Heldrakes and Necron Croissant factory.  Hence, my papercraft template for the Space Marine Stormraven was put to use for the Emperor’s Knuckles.  I went back over the template and came up with a hurricane bolter option that is magnetized to washers built into the inside of the door area.

Other than the Thunderhawk, which was mainly just a simplification of an existing template done by the very talented Patoroch, this is the largest paper template I’ve yet designed.  Since no model exists in 28mm for a knight titan, and the only other examples of one we have are from the old Epic 40k game, I had to design my own version of it.

The knight stands right at 8” tall. just a little bit shorter than the Eldar’s new Wraith Knight, but much more robust.  This model is just the prototype version.  The final model will have swap-able arms for different weapons with better detailing and textures of the upper body.

The template uses 8 pages containing 118 individual parts (not including optional weapons.  some sort of plastic tubing can be used to enhance the kit, as seen from the wires going from the sides of the head into the torso.

The legs take up most of the time spent building this model, due to the large number of spacers required to hold the armored plating in position around the lower legs and feet.  The legs are not articulated, but can be glued together in a variety of poses.  Rotating the foot connector before gluing allows you to adjust the angle of each foot.

I should have the template finalized for release over the course of the next week.  I may end up doing the final release without the imperial iconography or mechanicus sigils, since it qualifies as an original design (more than 60% changed from the source material).

Sorry about the long delays between posts lately.  I nearly got crushed by a tree that fell on my room and I’ve been busy doing odd jobs to make ends meet since this freelance thing has really severe ups and downs in terms of cash flow (of you need graphic design, have a paper model commission, or need a cake sculpture PLEASE HIRE ME).

Anyway, here’s the finished version of that papercraft Eldar Wave Serpent I was working on.  I have the other weapons options for it now, but they’re unfortunately 2-d cutouts as well.  The nice thing is, if you have a plastic wave serpent’s extra weapons lying around, you can paint them up and use the real ones with the paper kit and just bypass the flaw in the kit.  3D weaponry, while possible, would be extremely difficult to construct at this scale, even with lots of skill.

I put a lot of effort into trying to get the underside of the vehicle to look right, which is sad, really, since you’ll hardly ever see it after posting it on a flight stand.  One thing I like about the paper kit is that you can glue a magnet to the inside of the main hull and just snap it to a flight stand, so you won’t constantly be breaking it off of the tiny plastic peg like the real model.

Once more, all my paper models based on Games Workshop designs are freely available under the fair use limited exception to the copyright (they qualify as fan art). I make no money off of providing the templates to people.  If you would like to get a copy of the PDF templates, just email me stating which models you would like to build and I’ll send you the files.

Well, it took a combined total of twelve hours in design and test building after a friend let me borrow the plastic kit to measure, but I can now make Nephilim fighters out of four sheets of letter sized printed cardstock instead of a ridiculously overpriced kit from GW ($75 for two sprues of plastic).  Send me an email if you want the PDF.  I also have cut files for the Silhouette desktop cutting machine if you have one of those handy.  Also keep in mind I’m for hire if you want anything commissioned in papercraft.

Jarl Kurk Thunderfoot in artificer armor.  Since I use pistol weaponry as the rifle versions, I had to hunt down an old style plasma pistol to differentiate between which was which.

Barney here is a Rogue Trader era (1987) Dreadnought with twin linked autocannon arms made from imperial guard heavy weapons team autocannons, greenstuff and some extra eldar weapons shields.  I think I went a bit overboard on the knotwork.

People will often criticize the old style of 40k, but with just a bit of conversion, it can still be usable with the newer models.  I’m quite pleased with how the conversion part of this build went as well as the final look of it.  I will have to go in and clean up the highlights at some point before I can actually call the piece finished.

And last but not least are my sniper scouts.  These are completely unaltered Ratling Snipers.  I’ve seen the older ratlings, and these guys are much more dwarfish in size than they are.  It’s almost as if they were intended for Squat snipers and were quietly reclassified by Games Workshop so they could still be released without causing a fuss.  I absolutely love the little sculpted details about the minis here.  One has an eldar soulstone as a charm.  Another has a half eaten bag of apples and cheese behind him and a discarded apple core at his feet.  Some of them have little rat skulls collected as trophies (I imagine they’d be hard to hit at a distance with a sniper rifle, thus would the skull prove their skill with the weapon).  They also come five to a $20 blister, which is one of the few bargains you’ll still find from GW.

So I decided my Emperor’s Knuckles Space Marine army (Squats, AKA spess dorfs) needed another HQ choice to go with the terminators I made.  My original plan was to get another 2nd edition plastic terminator sergeant and bling it out to make a captain, but then I came across this fellow:

This is a 1st edition Space Hulk Terminator Librarian from the Genestealer expansion.  Being plastic was a plus, as converting it was a breeze.  I didn’t even really need to shorten the legs by that much since the model is a fair bit smaller than the current terminator armored figs anyway.  The arms were another story, as they seemed to have been sculpted in a larger proportion than the legs, so I had to relocate them as well.  I got the dwarf parts from this guy:

Unfortunately, Finecast, despite being fragile when you drop it, is actually pretty hard to cut into if you want to do an extensive mod like this.  I ended up having to cut off the bits of the guy I wanted in larger chunks with a sprue cutter before whittling out what I could with a hobby knife and finally breaking out the dremel tool to get to the finer points.  Freeing up the beard from the pistol was a chore in itself.  I wanted to keep the geared hammer and replace the axe head of the force weapon as well as a few of the runic pouches, charms and random bits from the backpack.  Here’s how he came out.

And here he is with the terminator squad.  Due to librarians wearing blue armor and my characters having little red toboggans, he came out looking a bit reminiscent of Papa Smurf.

I’ll take some better pictures later, but here’s the first of five terminator armor clad squats for my Emperor’s Knuckles space marine army.  I have a standard power armor squat and a Dark Vengeance terminator in the pic for scale reference.  The squat terminators are made from the second edition plastic terminators with the thigh from the legs chopped down and the shoulders dropped a bit.  A single power armor pauldron was used to close the faceplate.  While not being that much shorter overall than a standard terminator figure, they do make it seem as if the wearer wouldn’t be that tall due to the lowered arms and hidden face.

I thought I would be done with this template by now, but parts are getting very difficult.  The vanes on the front fins went through several revisions (mainly the little humps they connect to) before I found one that had a good balance between simplicity and looking the part.  Now the weapons for the upper turret, the underside weapons and antennae and the undercarriage detail are giving me hell.  I also have to take breaks on this to finish my articles and build various print & play games to review, so its going to be another week or two before this thing is finalized.

The paper version is on the right in both pics.  The model in the left is a plastic kit I assembled and painted that I’m using for reference.

Slowly working my way through painting 23 ork grots/gretchin/snotlings/runtz/whydotheyhavesomanydifferentnames.  I don’t even play orks or plan on using them as allies ever, so I’ll probably sell them once I’m done.  Thinking about auctioning them off for charity.  I usually do something for Toys for Tots every year, so I’ll probably donate the proceeds to that.  Heh, “Grots for Tots”, anyone?

Anyway, this little guy is mostly right off the sprue from the kit, minus the extra bits from the base.  I drilled out the barrel of the big pistol and swapped out the whackin’ stick for the pointing hand.  The base is covered with various grenades, a promethium tank, a small bomb and a meltabomb on a timer currently at  0:03.  The gretchin is pointing at his wonderful find of ‘splodey ‘tings and calling out for his buddies to come look.  I like making scenes that tell a story.

I do need to get a better camera for macro shots (between papercrafting and gaming its about all I shoot).  This was hell to get a steady shot from a borrowed Sanyo X1400.  I’m thinking of picking up a Cannon Elph.

So here’s the work I’ve got done on making a paper Eldar Wave Serpent today.  There is still a lot of work left, but the basic shape is done.  The engine intakes need to be adjusted to look properly round from all angles, then the paneling detail around the edges and the vents behind will be worked into the engines.  The troop compartment is done, as is about half of the underside.  I still have no clue how I’m going to go about making the weapons options for the turret.  Flat weapons wouldn’t work for something this large, though rounded tubes would make the bright lances look more like long barreled lascannons.  Oh well, I’ll figure something out.  I should have the intake vents and the engines finished tomorrow.  If all goes well, the kit will be online before I leave for the beach this weekend.