Last of Leviathan and General Sturm

Hi folks, another quick update for you to round off the week, this time the very last of the Leviathan command staff project and one of them was rather a lot of work...

Lets go in order of difficulty, which means the first will be the Rommel X on the left there

Readers with good memories will remember this chap from this post. Well, while the head I'd used looked ok unpainted, once finished, neither the client or I were quite happy. So we agreed that I'd ditch the head we had for him and replace it with one of the eisenkern heads. It still isn't quite right, scale wise, but better than before. Happens sometimes.

Next up is one of the Lupus chaps from the Flecktarn Project. This fellow is their liason to the command staff and so has divested the normal gas mask that the Flecktarn suited sorts normally wear. I've talked about how to paint the camo in some detail before so I'll just leave that link there to explain. The head is again one of the Eisenkern accessory heads. I've mentioned in the post about them that Dreamforge are better at solid objects than organic ones. The faces on these are non-existent. All the features you see granting him any expression have been faked in there with paint. Without that you would just get nose and mouth. Not too much of a problem if you've been painting a while and have a grasp of facial structure but could be an irritation if new to the game.

Finally, we have the very last of the Leviathan command staff. This is a vostroyan looking-chap from the same regiment as the others. He's based off the lord commissar model but the brief was to make him both vostroyan-ish and to have the combined mini storm bolter/lightning claw weapons that General Sturm wears in the Dawn of War computer games. This turned out trickier than I first thought. I went ahead and sculpted my best interpretation of the classic vostroyan gas mask and furry hat combo. My sculpting still needs to come on a looong way but I can cover a lot of sins with paint. The weapons though were problematic. First, I thought that the grey knight storm bolters would be a starting point. Nope, those things are massive on an imperial guard arm. Ludicrous size. That's ok, thought I, I'll make 'em out of two bolt pistols, file them down on the inner surfaces, glue together. Nope. Still huge. So finally I realised that I would have to straight up fabricate them to scale.

They're made from stacked plasticard strip. The bottom strip was left about twice as long as the others and then the claws carved from that. Brand new blades for the knife the order of the day for this job. The stack is glued together and then sanded and scraped smooth. I rounded the corners a little in order to stop it looking like just a box. I cut the back end of a bolt pistol for the mechanisms at the back and used the magazine on the side. Finally a thin cut bit of plasticard strip carved to shape formed the familiar iron sight ridge along the top. Worked better than I'd imagined. Shoulda just jumped in to fabrication first rather than fiddling around with the first two options. Live and learn.

With that, the Leviathan project is finished! Just Inq28 and Corsair tanks to go.

TTFN