Blog Slannta's Workshop

Lots of LOTR - 2 Cave trolls an Eagle dwarfs - I have so much and I already sold a job lot of broken elves and a few characters I had - I sold 2 sauromans and I have one still xd - I have practically a full fellowship apart from my legolas and gimili I don't know where they are




These are the bottom of the boxes I had so much in here

 

Okay everyone - now that the competition is over I can post my conversion project in here - this was my first ever one so please keep the harsh comments to a minimum.

So first things first is the clear up the long name thingy I had intended on keeping it as its Lizardman name but I guess the powers that be had other ideas and I was too polite to say anything.

Name Of Model - "Tehe-Tli-Chuq" - Escorting "Kor-Kai-Har-Am-Bai" Astride "Itza-Kor-Kha"
Name Of Palanquin - The Crown Of Lustria

Name Of Model Translation - "Knowledgeable Beast Magic - Escorting Mighty Ancient Harmless Soul Astride Mighty Revered One."

My Model is a Skink Priest Engine of the Gods proxy - The gods in this case being the chaos gods that tainted the giant gorilla - He is released in battle under the strict control of his skink priest who has dedicated his studies to the lore of beast magic. The rickety cage he is being held in is temporary and barley fit for purpose - as the model shows he has broken much of the bars already.

The model Is magnetised so that eventually I can use the gorilla element as scenery and the priest can remain atop on his Custom Palanquin - The Crown Of Lustria . and be used as a priest on ancient Stegadon Proxy.

I also intended to make these dedications:

" (I'd actually like to dedicate the monkey in the cage element of this model to Harmabe. I don't want this to influence peoples decisions at all so you can either add this as a spoiler of freely mention it if you wish. Or wait till the end of competition and then I can tell people about it. I started to conceptualise this around the time of the tragedy for the poor gorilla - I had the model of a monkey looking tainted by chaos and it made me think that that's how the media portrayed him. The Name of the gorilla in my conversion represents the true nature of the animal - and although he is tainted by the chaos gods and appears to be grabbing a skink in the model his motives may well be kind natured.)

The other dedication I'd like to mention is that the snake casting element was a direct copy of @ Hojdar 's Skink priest from the Itza Gallery of Fine Arts - I'm mentioning this because I didn't want to plagiarise it more pay homage to it with my own and as its 1 element of a larger conversion I hope it doesn't affect things. Everything else on the model was done of my own ideas. "


So how did I go about this conversion? - In short attempting a lot of stuff I didn't even know what I was doing ^.^

I recorded a lot of the little bits I did along the way but I had a mish mash approach to making the model so I'll post some of the steps I took bellow -



In this step you can see I have made a circular base for the cage of the gorilla this later got changed due to it looking ridiculous on the back of the Stegadon (Who knew an elongated cage would also look ridiculous - but that's because I never got round to making the support structures either ) - I also wanted to have it carried by 2 Stegadons but I just never tried it that well. Here you can see I have ripped by Stegadon of his base which he was firmly attached too both in an emotional sense and otherwise. I guess at this point I had already magnetised the circular base and the stegadons back as he has it inside him.



In this step you can see the construction of the crown I used metallic struts that came attached to other miniatures and bent them to go in a circular shape as I thought they would look like a nice crown



In this step you can see part construction of the throne I used part of the basdillion (I cant even begin to bother to spell this atm) kit and steps from a wizard set that the names alludes me of but I found out its name for someone before - the one people use for engine of the gods a lot.



Here is some brass wire I ordered to make a cage


Here is some brass wire cut into little rows (Tougher than u'd think with the wrong equipment )



I started to make the cage from the corners at first.



Then painstaking propping up of bars as they glued individually for hours -.- ... oh oh oh here u can kinda see the blade I had sticking out the monkey - I wanted to glue some weapons in him to make it seem like he'd had a bit of a back story and seen some action - I also green stuffed in a gap in his arm.



Then I began some shaping of bent bars to make it look like the beast was strong and capable of acts of brutality and to insinuate that he was not happy being locked up.



Here we see the crown palanquin about to be smoothed over by a sweet talking Slann...haha nah It had the makers marks of the models imprinted in the metal so I had to smooth over a lot of that in afew layers and the gaps between the connecting parts - this took a few layers.



Here is some of the smoothing.

The max file limit is 10 so i'll do a second post shortly

 

Part 2....or part 1 continued or The Making Of....

More painstaking propping to come....



Here we see the beautiful nature of balance and how using what you have to hand can help you glue something in place while you go do something more important like pretend to have a life



Here is my Stegadon on his base I incorporated a base I had that had some raptor prints in it - I wanted to have the dead raptor under him seen here (kinda) but It didn't have a whole lot of body left so I abandoned the idea.



Here we see a puddle of glue.... these can dry beautifully into all sorts of little patterns but I kept filling it with more - the idea was to make the cage a flat base and hide the lines the material had - in future I will use better equipment other than a elongated base. (My bad).



here we can see I used a ton of green stuff to make a muddy battlefield effect for the base it was due to the angel the velociraptor base glued on that I needed to make a raised base. I also did dots in it with a toothbrush to emulate the dotted effect already on the velociraptor base - although then I used a pokey tool to do it as the toothbrush didn't seem to work in the light I was making it in. Then in the morning the toothbrush dots were perfect and I was gutted.



Here are the rocks I made out of green stuff to again emulate the rocks on the velociraptor base and make it into one coherent piece.







here is the un-recommended way to unpaint a model ^.^ - you can scratch chip paint of a metal model it takes a long time and is annoying and not 100% effective. The competition was for unpainted so I yeah fucked this guys paint job up...not proud....or am I.....Mwhaha... (This is the victim skink grabbed in by the gorilla - the under tone of this was after the aftermath of harambe so I thought it was an interesting thing to do to evoke whether the gorilla was grabbing it to play with or to harm etc)



here are the bones of some snakes fed to the beast they are some long spines indeed.





I did dem horn tings and dem scale tings to quote batman (lego) "First try..."

10 again? Okay so we continue soon...

 

Part 3 if you're still with me...




Here is the skink who braved the cage to save his friend (I wanted more skinks on the model but without support structures the space was already dominated) My next conversion will be better from the learning from this one - The top three circles are all magnatised for the crown to float on at different locations they were going to be etched with symbols indication the moon city sun city and star city but I failed at this so gave up.



here are the stones I made on the base and another temple bit to add to the scenic effect. I dunno if you can see it here too clearly but I also dry brushed green liquid greenstuff on the base to make it less smooth and more like a grubby dirty effect.


Here is another temple wall section from a model unkown but I had to splice of a gryphon claw from it.



Here is the greenstuff upside down floating to help support the magnet structure for holding the crown up - it had previously pulled the other magnet off the superglue so I had to strengthen it.



Here is the flame spell casted by the skink priest they came from a world of Warcraft model of my brothers I wanted the guy to be casting a cool spell the flame balls are circulating around the crown as he casts them down into battle. Here you can see his cloak blowing in the wind as he is high above floating and I converted his arm to position downwards to be casting at enemies.

There are lots of other little bits I did but I won't bore you with them I can't find the pictures to hand at the moment. - I made some plauques which he is standing on they are imprinted by the tehehuains staff to make them have Lizardmen glyphs on them. I made some scrolls for his spell casting and for realistic gameplay - urhm what else did I do? not a lot else worth mentioning Hope you enjoyed next year victory will be mine!

 

Wow you put so much time into this! I´d say that using some better equipment you would have finished far faster (for example don´t flood your base in super glue but get a piece of plasticard; or pin the wire rods instead of gluing them, that´ll add structural support and will make the build easier) .
Also where are those spines from? They look awesomely realistic!


(Ps: I don´t even know if awesomely is an actual word )

 

Urhm I can't recall they're defiantly some kind of Warhammer plastic - so probably from one of the Warhammer range somewhere xd

 

Thanks! Now I just have to search around about a thousand kits

 

It narrows it down - but i'm not even 90% sure it is I just feel the plastic is very similar - they are connecting spine parts from something but I can't remember - my next entry will be more refined from all the learning

 

Yeah that skink in the cage is doomed...

Also like that skink priest at the end! Interesting throne-piece besides him. The spell-snakes are also a nice touch!

 

This is such a cool conversion! The skink habdler trying to keep the monster at bay, the priest riding in top. Brilliant work here.

 

That is looking like a beautiful piece I can't wait to see it painted I love your ideas keep it up dude

 

I could only think of nagash and his tentacles, or some of those new kits

 

I don't think it's new as I haven't bought any Warhammer stuff for ages - perhaps its not even Warhammer ^.^ not to throw spanners in the works

 

Good! Now I don´t need to search around a thousand kits, I´ll just forget it

 

Christmas conversion clue no.1 (Picture is upside down )

 

Slannta and his reindeer!

 

I guess clue no.2 isn't gonna be needed

 

Hahaha

Can't wait to see this project progress. Should be a fun one!

 

Which one will be the red nosed one?

 

Rory the rednose reindeer ^.^ - It's official guys I had to give my clue maker the SACK now he has to find another job or become ELF employed.

The initial idea was to have a more Lizardmen themed sleigh pulling taskforce - but I found exactly 9 old LOTR horses of mine which look like prancing ponies (LOTR joke ) so they might make a cool conversion something for me to practice with . What do you all think of reindeer pulling Slanntaclause? They wouldn't exactly be native to Lustria? but then again Santa isn't exactly native to where he drops all his presents.