Blog Tins 5ed sculpting and painting blog

Welcome to what should hopefully be a long running blog!

Background

One of my favourite releases was the 5th edition box; those plastic lizards were just so full of character and for the time were great plastics. The accompanying Alan Perry metal sculpts oozed character too, and I loved the way they leaned into Aztec/Mayan culture. Back in the day, with the move to 6ed and a change in art direction I fell out of love with the Lizardmen and started with other things...

Move forward far too many years, and a yearning for those old Lizardmen. Picked up a few, but unfortunately the scale hasn't been kind to them over the years. They're now less imposing, more cute little pets when stood next to some of the later releases!

Then I saw someone scan an oldhammer mini and that triggered an idea... if there aren't going to be any Lizardmen in the old style I'll use scans and learn to sculpt myself! This is a blog of that journey.

Initial tests

Using a scan, I printed a couple of test models. One at original scale, and one at the same scale as the new AoS release:



Please ignore the flipped pose (printer had a bug that was fixed and I didn't realise...). Initial test was good, the old mini's looked great at the bigger scale. Pic below to show the problem in size, and how imposing the new size looks in comparison:



Process

So with the initial test a success, I got to work. The first thing I wanted to do was sharpen up some of the detail and remove some of the limitations of the old style flat plastic monopause process. Below is a picture of one of the heads as an example, adding proper teeth back in instead of what they had to do back in the day:



I then carried on and started with the body, separating out some of the parts and removing the big chunks like behind the pteruges/loin cloth (resculpting in some temp pteruges). Base body for infantry done!



Next step was to create a basic body that could be used for other things... I removed the club from his belt, removed his left arm, separated the tail and added a skeleton so that I can start creating new poses:



As an example of the kind of thing I'm looking to do in future, I've reposed to the GW trademark tactical rock pose and added in the champions head (as yet not retouched) to see how it would look:



Looks like a bit of a success to start with. I haven't seen anything like this done with older models yet, so really excited to jump in to it!

Next steps are:

• Finalise the basic infantry
• Create a command group in a pose that more matches the plastic infantry (utilising bits of the original command group)

 

This is some proper 3D work here. Looking forward to see your progress.

 

Wow this is actually stunning. Loving the old saurus look, i managed to have 1 of those saurus when i was like 7 years old, so this bring me some memories

 

Thanks for the replies!

Just a small update, as I'm finishing up some of the initial touch-up and posing work I wanted to throw some together to see what they look like in a block (arms 1 and 2 not yet retouched, and none of the weapon arms reposed).

Hopefully they still hold that same aesthetic, but have subtle variation that wasn't there before. My goal is for someone to look at them and either not realise they aren't the old sculpts, or think they're some version they've not seen before. Just gone for little differences, like how they hold their shields, their stance, tails swinging in different directions. As if it was an old multipose version of that first plastic Saurus.




Next steps:

• Re-touch the remaining weapon arms
• Integrate the metal weapon arms and add options (like the spear)
• Repose the different weapon arms to have a different variation for every model in the unit
• Start work on the command group

 

Jumped ahead a bit and started putting together a rough draft for the unit champion. Any feedback?

 

Yeah it totally rocks. Did you test any print? I cant wait to see that champion finished

 

Apologies, they took a bit of a back seat whilst I was waiting for my new printer and then I got distracted by some Horus Heresy stuff

Will be resuming work on these soon!

 

Well... don't be shy and post some heresy as well.