Corsair Armour

Greetings one and all, today I can finally, finally, say: I've finished the Corsair commission. It's done. Finito. Phew. It is a fair wager to lay that these will be the last Eldar vehicles crossing my painting table for a looooong time, if ever. But enough of that. Lets look at shineys!

First, the real meaty punch of the armour. This Fire Prism was made from the excess bits left over from the Warp Hunters and a Falcon kit. Sadly, Forgeworld don't include the crystal sprue (fair enough) and of course, you cannot get one from GW for love nor money. Seriously, I tried. A lot. Mystifies me, "Here, I have money, give me stuff! Oh, you won't? Oh.". But there still needed to be a Prism cannon so ingenuity, enter stage left. I used the plastic parts of the cannon to make templates of the quite complicated irregular pentagonal sections. I cut them out of plasticard and then glued them into place to fill in the lasing crystal. For the firing crystal I nicked a High Elf wizard's staff top. I tried a few different colours for the crystal - at one point sort of cloudy green - but none worked with the rest of the scheme. Finally I just used an old school trick I saw on the last edition Fire Prisms. Cross hatching with ever brightening shades of the gem highlights. A longitudinal catchlight cutting through them helps.

Next up is a basic Falcon. Transport for the hordes of Corsairs, well, six of them anyway. As with previous ones the grey is a mix of airbrushing and edge highlighting. The red the metallic mix I made with varying mixes of red and Hashut Copper. The red bits are frustrating though. One of the reasons that these three took so long to do is the same reason that the hexagons are a smidge more irregular than last time. Ages ago now I really, really did my wrist in with an RSI. Now, it has recovered, I'm pain free. This is good. But... in order to stop a recurrence of the condition I have to paint with my wrist straight. For 25 years I've painted with my hand cocked back at about a 20° angle. To say that fighting two and a half decades of muscle memory kills your very finest control is an understatement. It is coming back, but I am having to relearn-ish the freehand skills I had. Irksome to say the least.

Finally though, we have one where through concentration and choice of subject, nifty freehand got painted. The Corsair Lord's Falcon needed something nifty. The sigil of the Corsairs is the stylised winged serpent. What could be cooler than a pair of dragons as your wingman? Not much thought I. So, I looked up a few tribal-ey/stylised dragons online (what did we do before Google?). Once I'd found a nifty one I traced the outline of the Falcon onto scrap paper and worked out where the lines of the dragons would fit. I can heartily recommend this. Saves a lot of pain. Then, with a nice sharp pencil I sketched the dragon outlines onto the Falcon itself and simply coloured them in. Shaded lower edges and highlighted upper finished them off. Simple but quite effective.

That's all folks! I'm off for a week of getting bludgeoning with latex weapons (I help run a LRP game) but I've got a couple of posts queued with Mulder to stop you feeling abandoned. To my strange, giggling glee I realised that this was my 365th post on the site. That's one per day for an entire year. Seemed like a milestone but I've no idea on the way to what :) See you in a week or so.

TTFN