The fat bastard's done :)

Kulo......well, my interpretation of him anyway. His done & dusted, on the mini shelf and ready for pretend space war, and late for Orctober (as per usual). Here's some gratuitous shots of him for you to cringe at and enjoy;

Smile for the camera big guy.....I SAID SMILE YA UGLY CUNT!!!!!

Oh well, his not very cooperative at the moment, so let's get on with his equipment check instead shall we?

Two suspensors to offset Mick (a.k.a. Stomach) and his primary Bolt-pistol, check!

Neuro Disruptor and an overhanging gut, check!

Secondary Bolt-pistol and Power-pack, check!

Evidence of poor eating habits and a Power-fist, check!

Three "skull & crossbones" tattooed on forehead, check!

Bad arse shoulder pad art, check!

Okely dokely, there's not a whole lot left to say about him now is there?...................................mmmmmmmmmm, ok, what do you guys think about him? Is he a rockin space MOFO or a god awful green blob?

Cheers fellas :)

Kulo for Orctober.....in November :)

Better late than never hey? :D

Here's the kick arse illustration Erny did for Orctober.

This has got to be THE longest project I've ever undertaken, so far. And it's not even finished yet! Just a lick of paint and he'll be done. All the previous Kulo 2.0 "work" can be seen here, here and.....oh yeah, over here too. So, let's recap a bit shall we;

I started off wanting to create this fugly hombre in miniature, so......

....I procured this guy, and after much hacking, glueing, converting and green stuffing.....

.....I ended up with this. What a friendly looking fella he is too.

Next up is a few pics, accompanied by a whole lot of waffle some info about the mini and the items that Kulos' carrying. Let's begin;

If you look on the right side of his belt (your left) you can see two small round things....their his dual suspensors, to offset
his ample weight, so that the poor buggers still able to get around......and hurt things.

Here you can see his Neuro Disruptor hanging from his belt. And his gut too, yeah, it's showing a bit isn't it :)

I carved it from an Eldar Las-pistol. 

This is what I was trying to replicate, picture taken from the the bible....Rogue Trader

His armoured shoulder pad can't really be providing much protection now can it? I mean, look at his bloody arm!

Power pack for his "other" armour, the kinda armour that you have to turn on.  Oh & his second Bolt-pistol's there too.

The power pack also provides energy for his power fist. There's a club hanging from his belt too, for mashing his spuds with.

"I iz Kulo, I'z da boss Ork here, got dat!!!!"

I've coated his exposed skin area's with a kind of "GS slurry" of sorts, to hide my ordinary sculpting skills, all the joining marks & the super smooth bits of GS. I'm not sure if this will give him a nice & rough, rugged appearance or a rather shitty chalky looking skin tone instead. I guess I'll find that out over the coming days when I start painting him won't I.

Cheerio :)

Kulo 2.0.....the next bit.

Ernys' running Orctober again, Yahoo!!!! And as such I thought I'd offer up Kulo as my entry for this year. This is the awesome illustration Erny put up for the competition....his really talented isn't he!

Anyway, here's some WIP shots of THE fattest space bastard in the known universe;

Belt straining under his ample girth.

Power fist "borrowed" from a Reaper mini...can't remember which?

Bolt pistol made from a plastic gretchin pistol
 & a magazine from one of my custom Bolter's.

Belt was carved from the original FB Minder mini, the
one I half heartedly attempted to make the first Kulo from.

For scale, Thrugg approves :)

So, now all I've got left to do is fatten up his head & mount it, make another bolt pistol, fabricate a Neuro Disruptor.....and, oh yeah, a lot of GS too :D

Realistically, I don't think I'll have him ready for Orctober, but that's ok. I was late for it two years ago! Anyway, it's all good. He'll get done, soonish.

Cheers fellas :)

An Ork for Orctober 2016

It's somewhat fortuitous that I'm working on an Ork at the moment, seeing as it's the month of Orctober and all. Kulos' getting closer to being finished, which means that my objective of completing the required Wolf Time mini's is slowly eaking it's way to completion.

Last post I talked about a potentially quick & cheaty technique that I was going to try. One that I hoped would save me a lot of time in the sculpting side of this conversion. Well.....it kinda sorta failed, but I'll describe my "cunning plan" anyway, as someone "may" find something of use in my hair brained scheme?

I first took a press mold of the Freebooter Minder with Oyumaru (Oh, by the way, I don't heat this stuff up with water anymore, introduces water inclusions into the mold. I just warm it up with my Heat-gun, works great!) and I tried painting the inside of it with PVA glue, hoping that I'd have a flexible skin to basically dress the base model in. It didn't work, too many bubbles. Mind you, I still think the theory is sound. Maybe a different glue would have yielded adequate results?

Here's a few pics of my mental method;

"Where's me leg's ya bastard?!!!"

And just in case your thinking about something crude, no, I didn't get overly enthusiastic :P

Bit hard to see in the pic, but there were far too many bubbles.

After that failed I thought about using some other type of material in place of the PVA, so I tried using GS. Unfortunately, I forgot to take pictures of this process, so I'll just describe it. I rolled the GS as flat as I could make it with a AA battery on a sheet of baking paper. Then I laid the "sheet" over the mold & pressed it in, working it into all the nooks & crannies with the end of a chopstick...as you do. The result? It worked out pretty good! 

Here's some pics of the head section that I made with this technique;

Flattened face of Kulo.

Secured his grimace with Super-glue & Filla powder.

Mug shot.

But in the end this only resulted a normally proportioned flat face....not the FAT face I was after. Oh well, I'll just have to bite the bullet and attempt what I should have attempted in the first place i.e. sculpt his face the old fashioned way:( Sigh! Ok, enough of my experimental diarrhoea, What follows is a modest description of the real progress that I've achieved this week. 

I decided to take take a press mold of the donor minis' chest. The previous post photo's didn't show it, but this guys a little too 2D for my tastes. I wanted to give him more of a gut, so I GS an extra one & stuck it to the original....here, have a look;

Not fat enough for me.

That's looking much better :)

So, after stuffing about for a few days, I made a mock-up (held together with Blue-tak) of the ugly bastard. Apart from assembling him properly & GS him, there's only a couple of things that I need before I can begin. Those things are; waiting for a bolt pistol to arrive in the mail and then to convert it into the style from the illustration. And secondly, manufacture a Neuro Disruptor out of sprue off-cuts. Then it'll be all systems go!

A rough WIP, gotta get the arm proportions right, add a belt etcetera etcetera.

Lastly, some of you may be wondering why I even bothered buying a mini to convert up in the first place? If all I was going to to do was to dismember him to the extent that he just became a blob of resin? And while it's true that there's not much left of the original mini, it still provided me with a proportional subject for me to work with. As a mental aid it was worth it (he was a dirt cheap mini anyway, so no great loss really) as it helped me to create a mental picture of what Kulo should look like in my head. If that makes any sense?

Ok, bye for now & keep you dick in a vice.

Guvna Kulo v2.0

Howdy folks,

If you've been following me for a little while now you'll recall my rather dismal attempt at trying to convert an old Freebooter Minder into a convincing Kulo. But, to be honest with you, after fucking about shoving GS into his face & gut for an inordinate amount of time, I came to the conclusion that I was fighting a losing battle. I just wasn't convinced with the shape he was taking & how the end product he was looking like becoming. Also, a few welcome critiques in the comments section helped confirm my suspicions as well. So I gave up.....back to the drawing board kinda thing.

Roll forward a few months, after I'd finished off my Bullock's and played a bit more with the Space Wolves, and I stumbled across this guy on the net:

Batter up!

I think his from some kind of Blood Bowl clone...or something like that. But his skull smashing abilities on the football field aren't what attracted me to him. It was his guts man! And the stance, and the.....the whole vibe of the mini (stellar movie reference for those in the know) that got me all excited. Also, he was pictured beside a ruler (always handy when you want to convert something IMO) and stood in at just over 30mm from head to toe. So I was quietly confident that his proportions would scale up ok vis-a-vis with an RT Ork.

Oh, and I forgot to mention he was cheap too. Always a concern for discerning, tight fisted grognards.


Here's a comparison shot for all you sceptics out there:

Here he is, pictured with Thrugg & another random RT Ork.....not a bad fit I reckon!

Immediately after the above photo shoot was concluded I began to carve him up good!

Mohawk gone, batless and no weird base.....but still waving his pointed finger at the sky though. 

I haven't completely abandoned the original mini that I tried to convert. He wasn't a bad choice as a donor mini. It was just my shortcomings as a sculptor that lead me to give up on him. He still has some redeeming feature that I want to try and incorporate into this new mini. So, into the acid bath he went, to remove all the offending GS that I'd abused him with. Then I propped him beside the new kid on the block, for comparison....and thunking time. About which bits to use and how I was going to go about melding the selected components into one.

My first Kulo mini on the left, after his bath vs Plastic fantastic on the right, now with his arm cut of as well!

I also decided to have a bit of a play on a drawing app I've got on my phone too. Mixing and matching heads & feet before I "really" started carving into him. Here's what I came up with:

From R-L; bog stock original, FB Minder head, Fattened up FB Minder head, and Thruggs' head.....all three concepts with FB Minder boots as well.

My pick of the bunch, hands down, is the second one from the left. The human head on the original, although nicely detailed, would require too much work (and talent) for me to fatten up. The standard FB Minder head on the next one is a tad too "normal looking" for a Kulo mini I reckon. And Thrugg? Well, he wasn't really in the running in the first place to be honest. I just wanted to see if another Ork head would look ok on the mini.

Now, the next step is going to take a fair bit of finagling. I've got a cunning plan you see, a plan, that if it succeeds will make converting this guy up a walk in the park. I'm going to try something new (to me anyway) with GS.  All will be revealed in the next post my friends :)


Good bye and........

MK14 Bullock Jet Cycle finished

Why, hello there my fellow lead fiend's,

Today marks an auspicious occasion on the Papafakis calendar, for I have finally completed, after many months, a project.....bloody amazing isn't it!? From a tiny little seed inside my tiny little brain I managed to carry an idea right through the inception, design, prototyping, construction and the production phases to completion. Sound's a little bit pompous I know (like I'm in charge of running a major manufacturing department at "insert generic car company name here"), but I can't help it. I'm over the moon that I've managed to finish something. It seems like a lifetime ago that I was able to call a project done. Oh, and I even managed to paint the damn thing too! No joke! Look, I've even got pics to prove it and all!!!

Like the illustration came to life or something yeah? :P

I was gunna try and freehand the skull motif, but I'm super crap at that, so I cheated & used a transfer instead.

"What you lookin at Willis?"

Can't think of anything to say for this pic.....so I'll just type some random shite instead :P

I'm still waiting on the Space Wolves chapter insignia. Then I'll wack it on his shoulder.

Who's badddd?

So, after I finished taking photo's of this dude I thought I might as well take a few shots of his companions while I was at it. Here they be:

I finished up these four at the same time as the previous one. They'll eventually complete the squad of five
after I get around to painting up the riders.

Can you dig the digital dash panel's?

"Zooom, Zooom".......and other pretend motorbike/plane noises :)

So, that's it I suppose? The only thing left is for the guys who nabbed a bike off of me for them to paint them up. I'm really excited to seeing what they do with them. Lornalims' already finished his (well in advance of the creator I might add :D) and it turned out ace! If your interested to see the great conversion work & paint job he did then head on over to the Oldhammer forum and have a look.

Ok, I'll leave you guys alone now, bye bye :)

Space Wolves WIP

Greetings gentiles,

Just thought I'd show you a couple of pics of my "Space Wolves in the making". It's all part of my "slowly, but surely" plan to finish all the required units I'd need to successfully run "The Wolf Time" scenario from the Book of the Astronomican. Their almost finished actually, base coating & highlights are done, just need to apply a few washes & some detail work and they'll be finished.....oh, and the basing too ;) On second thought, there's still a shit load to go isn't there!? Oh well, onwards & upwards.

Clicky click the pic if you want to see them more closer uppera!

I'm pretty excited to see how these things are gunna turn out too :)

I've mounted the five Bullock Jet Cycles on plastic chopsticks (as you do) while I attack them with my painting "skills". They'll be mounted, in the end, on those flimsy clear placky flying bases that are...well....pretty damn flimsy! 

Cheers :)