World Eaters: a veritable brigade of Berserkers

Cue: The Boys are back in town.

They are finished! All ten pre-Heresy style World Eaters in all their gory glory. I went through the painting process in quite some detail last time so I will just run the edited highlights of the latest five:

I deliberately went bloodier on some of the Berserkers to give a more ragged appearance to the squad. Believe it or not, even random techniques like the blood spraying can appear uniform if the whole squad has the same amounts of blood spatter.

Note that on the running Berserker, the blood formed two large slashed on his thigh, I had to dive in with a small brush and pull down some dribbles or it would have seemed comedically out of scale. Also, something odd happened with the gore mix for the chainswords. Whereas last time the flour and blood mix remained quite thin, this time it gooped up considerably.

Happily it is not too much of a problem. It just looks as though the chain blade has clotted with the volume of blood and tissue going through it. (NB: I really hope no one is eating while thinking about this!). Again, this helps to avoid uniformity throughout the squad.

The other thing I thought I would share with you is the set up I use for the photography these days. Having finally become fed up with the inconsistant nature of Cardiff sunshine (who knew? I hear you cry) I made a Heath Robinson light box to take shots with:

The first thing to notice is that there is a LOT of light going in to that box. Two 100W daylight bulbs are providing the necessary oomph there. The anglepoise lamps by the way are from Ikea and are the cheapest you can get (£8), I heartily recommend them for anyone with inadequate light while painting. Use energy savers in them for long term painting though as the incandescent bulbs get extremely hot and you will have them near your face.The box itself is made of five pieces of A3 Foamcard, simply masking tape them together into a five sided box. Before you add the lid you need to eradicate the lower corner of the box or it will show up in every single photo:

It's a bit tricky to see so I highlighted the curve in red on the second picture. Run a line of double sided tape along the front edge of the box and a two more lines about two inches from the lower corner on both the bottom and inside back of the box. A final line of tape on the top edge of the inside back and you are ready to rock. Don't expose the "double-sided" bit of the adhesive yet as it will make the job harder. Now take a long piece of white paper (I used wallpaper backing as it is dirt cheap) of an appropriate width - it needs to run from side to side of the box. Expose the adhesive on the front line of tape and attach the paper to it, then move back along the rows of tape glueing down the paper as you go so that the highlighted curve is formed between the middle two rows. For neatness I allowed the paper to overlap at both ends and folded them under with a bit of masking tape to secure them.

A good tripod is essential to miniature photography. I used to use a mini tripod precariously balanced on a chair, eep! But an early birthday present of this spanky new one has eliminated that problem (thanks Dad! If anyone is curious my actual birthday is the 30th!) The pillow is an optional extra and doesn't do a darn thing except look messy on photos, sheesh. Always use either a remote shutter control or use the self timer feature to eliminate hand shake. For gear-geeks like me: the camera I use is a Samsung WB500. This is an ace piece of kit. The most important feature it has is a 10x optical zoom. Now go look at how much it costs on amazon and then compare some other 10x optical zoom prices! For non photographers out there, the optical zoom is important because all that most cameras do is enlarge the centre of their field of vision to zoom. All this really does is crop the image and thus reduces the resolution every time you zoom in. An optical zoom uses all of the available pixels in the reader and just makes the camera focus all that resolution on a smaller area.

Well, that is enough rambling from me, time to go post a lucky client his brigade of Berserkers and his troop of Thousand Sons. There'll be a bit of a break before the next commission work arrives so I think I shall treat myself to some Blood Angel painting for my own army.

TTFN.