Here is a compilation of my last 20 days of work.
I was lieing in bed Wednesday reading Lexicanum and the
BFGwiki and stumbled upon this blurb of text:
These [battleship] ships are superseded by the even larger pre-Age of Strife advanced superships that are reserved for larger combat or exterminatus missions. Such ships are similar to the huge space forts, planetary sized battle-hulks, and doomsday bastions yet are far more mobile and capable of fighting like standard battlefleets. They are mustered in far greater numbers and utilize battleship sized escorts as part of far more powerful Devastation Blockades and Sentinal Forces, which routinely crush Hive fleets or Chaos daemonworlds, or guard dangerous powers on quarantined worlds. The most powerful ships are kept totally in secret shipyard-crypts such as the Caelan Class Sunderer vessel (rumored to be able to fire and anhilatate any target in any time or location, far too powerful to used except by the Emperor Himself) and other powerful doomsday-class voidships.
I really liked the idea of my fleet with its OP battleships being docked at an unlisted Imperial fortress-world ready to defend some segmentae from another massed Tyranid invasion. I figured I could write some fluff for this that one or two people would read, or I could make a model depicting what my fleet has done, and how they lost one of their battleships. (I had been wanting to make a decrepit hulk anyways) This also gave me the opportunity to make a Nid ship or two as well...
So I started the June competition after an hour nap on Thursday... (this is 2AM when I woke up...)
And two hours later I had finished the main battleship hull assembly.
After talking with Raxxus and Sachiel in the Skype chat I got the second part of the competition piece 'fleshed out'. The armature is tinfoil that was dipped in resin. Initially it looked a little like a bent space-poop, so I gave it a bulbous butt to give it more of a hive ship/breeding sack kind of feel.
The idea is to have the Nid ship smashing into the Retribution and snapping it in half like the first picture above, from the Battlefleet_Bakka.pdf with clusters of tendrils breaching the hull and ripping panels off the ship. I definitely want some tendrils breaking the figurehead off.
I've also been taking the time to make as many tentacles as I could. I figured that it'd be well fitting to my heritage.
I've also started making fangs to replicate the Kraken mouth from Pirates of the Carribbean. This picture also shows the direction I want to go with the sculpting on the resin body. I took a lot of ideas from the
Forgeworld Meiotic spore sacks. I really liked the brain look to the models so I plan on going with a lot of the veins and exhaust things. I also like the idea of the matter sacks and feeder tendrils so those will go in there. I'm going to add 5 chitin plates on top and 3 brain-holes on the side to replicate the 40k models. I'm also contemplating adding 6 legs, wings, or appendages to also follow the theme though they may not fit quite well, in space. The 3 large tentacles will have chitin plates as well replicating those on the lictor. I'll also be using
Digit's tutorial on explosions for where the hull breaches are.
While digging for any Tyranid bits I had, any at all, I found a single untouched metal lictor and a built warrior... whoopee. But while digging in my bitz box, I did manage to find four full Imperial cruisers and two full Chaos cruisers!! Sweet! I also started work on the Armageddon cruiser (the one without the prow) and I made a Tie Interceptor and Tie Defender. The wings were ridiculously difficult to work with and I'm not 100% pleased. It'll do for now though.
On the yellow sheet of paper, you can see a six classes of Imperial cruisers listed. I'll be using the four cruisers I found to make those (already have a Armageddon and a Gothic) and I'll only need another pack of Sword frigates and I'll have a 1450 fleet. I am pretty certain that this fleet is legal since I found it on Warseer and made by Vaaish, an avid BFGer.
So I've been doing a lot of work for the competition, but I figured I should quickly paint up the two cruisers that I had presented last time. So I just spent some time finishing them up. I learned that the bases don't accept hand paint too well, so when I spray the comp I'll do the bases too.
And heres how the competition piece is sitting so far. Waiting for the current batch of greenstuff to harden so I can move on. The brain-veins will have smaller veins branching off once I figure out how to sculpt them, they'll also extend into the carapace to add a look of continuity. The remaining three carapace pieces require greenstuff, and the main head piece will post likely be fully sculpted so that I can make it overhang the mouth part. I'm really not too pleased with the PotC Kraken mouth as of yet, and I may rip it off and resculpt it like the
Leviathan from the Avengers. Currently though, I'm not too worried since it'll be mostly covered in explosions anyways. The 3 main tentacles will be added after the 4th plate is done. Where I had planned to have one of the main tentacles to go has ended up being in the place where the 4th/5th carapace plates meet, so I may either have them split or have some sort of joining piece there. The 3 face-vents will be sculpted after the main tentacles are added.
Finally finished the first Lunar class cruiser. Took a while to sort out the prow since I some time ago snipped it off...I guess... I also assembled the four discovered cruisers as well. Two Armageddons and two Dictators. I'm one Lunar and three Sword frigates away from a playable 1500 fleet list.
This was a post from Warseer that I couldn't get enough laughs out of. I'm sure Lewis will get the same enjoyment.
I also worked on the tentacle plates. I'm not entirely too pleased with them but they were really difficult to do near the tips so I just left them as is.
And I'm almost done with the most difficult part of the sculpt: The head chitin plate. I had no idea of how I wanted to work it and I think the way it finally turned out is suitable enough for what I wanted. Once this third layer of greenstuff (for that single plate) hardens, I'll sculpt some stuff around the third tentacle similar to that of the
Barbed Hierodule. I will also add 1-2 longer plates on the tentacles near the body as well. The 3 exhaust points near the head will probably be sculpted last. I'm dryfitting the rest of the tentacles as well, thats an interesting situation, I may need to make another 30+ tendrils for what I want to execute.
What I'm also really pleased with is the fact that the body of this thing is about the length of an IN cruiser, so not oversized (in my opinion) at all! It does seem to have more mass (fat butt) but I don't think its overly large.
My sister and I also bought my father an air compressor and nailgun, so I'm tempted to purchase an airbrush to give these black bases a bit of a theme, maybe some nebulae or something.
The SDTM (Space Dick Tentacle Monster as coined by Sachiel) is at a point where I am almost ready to paint. With my six week summer course starting tomorrow, my time with the June comp has definitely been shortened. At least I was able to get the bulk of the work done in the past 10 days. I have some minor sculpts to fix (there was some massive snapping when I tried the double pinning...) and I need to fix one of the chitin plates on the center tentacle because of the extreme curve that I put on it which was expected. After the fix ups, I have 64 smaller tentacles to attach in clusters of 20 or so. Some will be smashing through bulkheads and some will be wrapping around the hull just like the Bakka image. I glued the bottom most main tentacle a bit too close to the center one (wasn't planned, just wound up like that) so I'll need to rethink how I plan on doing that. I am really pleased how it looked on a flying stand. I think it was almost passable to be a cruiser or hive ship. Someone (Sachiel) suggested adding some crater marks along the chitin which I attempted, but just couldn't pull off. Instead I will just paint on some blast marks and scoring later on.
I had no idea of what I was doing with the head chitin plate, so I just made a protective shroud (which doesn't actually protect it from a frontal assault) and called it good. I've about burned myself out on sculpting anyways. :p I realize that the area around the maw looks really dumb so I'll probably add some lip-like features sometime. The base has also warped, so I glued more popsicle sticks underneath perpendicular to those already there. It helped a little but not a lot. I'm contemplating just scrapping this base and using the other spare that I have. We'll see!
Enough gab, the pictures!
Let me know what you think, many thanks!
And so, on with the work. My six week summer course is now one week in and so I've found little time to work on this. I've just been playing with small batches of tentacles.
The hardest part was figuring out how to get them to look on the outer end of the ship. I think I've done a decent job. :p
I really like how this single tentacle is taking down the angel at the bridge. I'll probably find more ways to incorporate singular pieces like that somewhere.
I also want to find a way to make the forward most dorsal lance turret look as if it were hit by bio-acid, which is why it didn't manage to fully rotate around. Not sure how I'll go about doing that without making it look Nurgle-ified, so I'll brainstorm on that for a bit. I still have a while, right?
The hive fleet that I'm thinking I'll go with are either Leviathan or Kraken (or something different all together) to help contrast the blue/black colors of the fleet.
Let me know of what you think of the Nid ship! Thanks all.
