The Codewraith

I am in the signals. I am the hiss of static from an untuned radio. I am the flicker of snow on your screen. I am the blocky glitch in the video, the hitch in the music. I am the frequency on the edge of hearing, the colour you can't quite see, the ghost in the machine. 

And I am here for you. 

This was a simple little noodling about with a ghost. It wasn't started with any sort of a plan, just one of those nice evenings sat in front of the bits box and seeing where the muse takes you. In this case, it led me here. I took the opportunity to play with my new greenstuff cable maker which allows me to produce something a little more flexible than guitar strings.

Overall very happy with the final outcome and it's given me a couple more ideas to so with some ghosty chaps.

A Thing Which Has Not Happened For An Age

" 'I am not going to tell you my name, not yet at any rate.' A queer half-knowing, half-humorous look came with a green flicker into his eyes. 'For one thing it would take a long while: my name is growing all the time, and I've lived a very long, long time; so my name is like a story. Real names tell you the story of things they belong to in my language, in the Old Entish as you might say. It is a lovely language, but it takes a very long time saying anything in it, because we do not say anything in it, unless it is worth taking a long time to say, and to listen to.' "

"They found that they were looking at a most extraordinary face. [...] But at the moment the hobbits noted little but the eyes. These deep eyes were now surveying them, slow and solemn, but very penetrating. They were brown, shot with a green light. Often afterwards, Pippin tried to describe his first impression of them. 

   'One felt as if there was an enormous well behind them, filled up with ages of memory and long, slow, steady thinking; but their surface were sparkling with the present; like sun shimmering on the outer leaves of a vast tree, or on the ripples of a very deep lake.' "

One of the most wonderful surprises I got for Christmas was an original metal Treebeard. I started work on it almost immediately.

Sticking it together was the usual pain, requiring a lot of pinning and a Heath Robinson construction to prop it up while the glue dried.

Then came the greenstuffing. Oh, so much greenstuffing. Still, at least sculpting the bark is easier than sculpting scales.

Painting was largely drybrushing and washes to build up slightly different wood tones.

The biggest decision I came to was to leave off the sculpted leaves and replace them with model foliage to give a more realistic finish. I think this was definitely the right choice, especially when I added some leaf scatter in some places.

Carnosaur Part 1

Well, this is turning into a more complex project than I had anticipated, so it seems worth creating a little blog within a blog - one of those project blog/plog things - to keep track of it.

So, to recap:

The carnosaur arrived and it looked like this:

I've stripped it until it looks like this:

And the next stage was to pin and glue the various limbs. As always with older GW kits, you tend to find that one side of the various fits tend to be quite tight but you end up with a yawning chasm on the other. On this kit, pleasingly, the outside edges with the textures tended to be solid. However, pinning seemed to be necessary to add some security.

Then, tonight, it was time for some greenstuff and sculpting. Alas, my sculpting tools have vanished so all I had to work with was a broken smoother and a scalpel.

The next step is to undercoat it and make sure it's smooth enough for airbrushing.

Bits and Pieces

Well, I have survived another Ofsted visit and my unbroken record continues unabated - I appear to a +3 Cloak of Invisibility To Inspectors as I haven't been seen since 2003. 

Anyway, as the dust settles, I can start to turn my attention to the workbench. This has been an evening of bits. First, the tree; this is designed to give some further height to the rear of the model and well as make the Witchhunters appear smaller and thus more vulnerable. 

A few twists of garden wire 

Et voila. Throw in some greenstuff seeing as I bought so much of the damn stuff and we have a reasonably well skinned tree: 

A few more bits on the furthest branches and some tatty foliage and we can call that one done. 

As per usual I mixed too much greenstuff and so used it up by adding some detailing to the other job this evening, the fence marking the edge of this godforsaken graveyard: 

Not the neatest job in the world, but it will add a touch of visual interest and saves me clipping pins to make nails. 

Hopefully I'll get the tree finished and mounted at the weekend and then it's just a matter of painting and greenery. 

The week should end well in gaming terms though - by a freak confluence of events, tomorrow sees me fight my first game of Warhammer Fantasy Battle in nearly ten years and Friday evening will see me dragged out of retirement to run my first RPG in almost as long. Having read the new edition I can say something I never thought I'd say - I'm actually looking forward to a game of Dungeons and Dragons. 

I'll let you know what misadventures befall. 

It's ALIVE! - sort of Zomtober

It's true what they say; no idea you have after midnight is a good one. I performed surgery on the thumb with a pair of snips. Although this restored some movement it did give me a few more issues.

However, the most important point was that I was able to move my digits about enough to crack out the sculpting gear.

I've never been a particularly good sculptor - the Top Secret Filler Project will amply prove in a couple of weeks - but it's nice to see the techniques come dribbling back. So what did I need to do?

The cut and shut and method of the conversions on the walking dead was fine for tabletop use but for a diorama it's worth going the extra mile.

So this chap had some hair added to cover the complete lack of neck and to help blend the head into the existing shoulders. I also added a couple of tears and rents in the material of the coat - fairly simple musket damage.



This chap needed some raggedy bits of material and flesh to show where the leg had been ripped off (sorry about this poor photo)



As to leg thief this one wasn't a conversion so much as an issue with the original miniature; the Zombie sprues, although excellent, sometimes go from rotting corpse to skeletal too quickly depending on the choice of pieces and so it was with this chap. So a bit of torn material added around the shoulder joint helps sell the transition.

I actually forgot to take a picture of him, so you'll have to take my word for it.

Finally, this fellow needed some extra attention. As he'll be leading the charge and so will be the most immediately visible of the horde, he needed a little extra attention. The zombie arms did not really fit well with the ECW body, so the jacket was extended and torn to help blend the two pieces together; at the same time I added some tears in the trousers and jacket to make him look a bit more beaten up.



I also decided - based on rewatching Mark Gatiss' Horror Europa at the approach to Zombies in The Living Dead At The Manchester Morgue - I'd like him to have an obvious cause of death; so a quick edged trauma to the head was added.



These chaps, along with the gravestones and a couple of bits for the Top Secret Filler Project, were undercoated today; so my Half Term Plan is to crack on with the painting tomorrow.

Incidentally, you can see in the background there the ridiculous amount of greenstuff I bought off ebay by mistake. I thought I was ordering 6'' and instead got 36''. Still, I'm not going to run out any time soon, eh?