Scratch built tau allied detatchment and chaos conversions

I am so tired of my flip flopping between armies in 40k and my buying and selling armies and half painted armies. It almost made me swear off GW for life, it is expensive enough without rebuying things because of idiot decision making. Anyway, due to this bad habit of mine I am not re buying tau for a third time so am sculpting my allied detachment of one crisis suit commander and 6 man firewarrior squad from scratch(wire armatures from modelling wire bulking with miliput and greenstuff for everything else) It is ambitious and I'm a little nervous but going beyond your abilities always seems to improve them... so don't be faint hearted all of you out there sculpt your hearts out it's fun and alot easier than it looks( not to be taken to GW store or Warhammer world, they might not like that)

Here are my tau allies so far 

These were my designs for the tau sculpts. Hopefully how they will look if I pull it off but with more dimensions

 I also have been sculpting a Second Hq for my cultist heavy chaos force he is about half way to completion I started with a marine torso and then greenstuffed arms legs feed and torso detail I need to go over alot of it to add detail finish off the lightning claws as they look crap as they are in their first stage of sculpting and the face.... I'm looking forward to sculpting a really crazy face but the jump pack is going to be hard, things with proper circles or straight lines are very hard to get right.

 Just for a bit of fun I converted this guy....he is a slaneeshi cultist with heavy stubber I made him from a guards man's legs and torso and one arm the rest is greenstuff except the gasmask head is from maxi mini.

I love the thought of him shuffling about around the hive in dark corners or whatever before the chaos insurrection took place hiding his monstrous mutation under his ragged cloak until the time came to strike when he joined his fellow cultists and picked up a heavy stubber with his hideous tentacled limb and gunned down the pdf or local enforcers or whatever lol. 

Not sure if anyone reads the blog anymore as I let it decay for a while but hope if anyone is they got something out of it hopefully the idea that greenstuff is awesome :)

Sculpting miniatures for star wars update

Last post we showed you my improvements to the boba/jango fett inspired mandalorian mini.
The improvements were minimal but made a big difference because at this early stage in my sculpting.... well let's just say every little bit helps! I'll be honest about this because I have nothing to be ashamed of, I knew this was over ambitious and was going to be impossibly difficult lol. If anything I have even for respect for Citadel/forgeworld and all the other countless studios sculpting all the amazing looking miniatures that make the hobby so great. To be honest I was feeling like it was alot of work for not much success so instead of chipping away at such a depressing sight I would take what I had learned from the experience and start afresh. Here is the work so far on mr Fett two point o ...

He is already more proportioned, lean and dynamic. He may look like a power ranger right now but just wait till he's rocking a kick ass jet pack and mando blasters you bunch of rebel scum ! Note what has been sculpted of the left arm so far.. I'm getting better at detailing such things as the folds in his sleeve material and the shoulder pad. If my camera weren't so crap you might even notice I added some battle damage to his helmet.

As far as the helmet goes I have only completed the front of it. This method is what you use when sculpting faces aswell, it helps you to get the detail of a minis head done more easily. With the tricky part done you can easily attack it to the body via an intermidatary blob of green stuff which can be sculpted to form a neck and the back of the head/helmet of the miniature. The legs and body also need a tad more filling out and a load of detail added to them plus he only has half an arm and no hands.. so all in all along way to go but all good exciting stuff.

I also tried sculpting a face just to see how tricky it really is .... the conclusion very tricky so very fiddly it's infuriating. the green humanoid face is my effort and S tried her hand at sculpting a rodians face (greedo was a rodian)

May the force be with you ... and don't get too drunk over christmas ;)