[BFG] A first foray into scratchbuilding

[Casus belli]

Hi Everyone,

Here are a few tries at modifying some IN cruisers. I am still learning, and working up to a couple of bigger projects (finally a complete scratchbuild of a Chaos/IN grand cruiser), so these are only the tentative beginnings, and I hope this thread can serve as a record of my progress from now on. I'll update it with new stuff as I go.

Here you can see a few WIPs that are close to being finished. I'd like to modify all my cruisers, even just a little bit, to keep them unique.


The prow on this dictator is my first ever attempt at sculpting or scratch-building anything, so be nice! The prow was inspired a bit by some rocket pods found on Soviet era helicopter gunships like the Hind. Basically its supposed to be a central cone with torpedo tubes protruding from the sides. The prow emblem is the double-headed eagle.




The rocket pods that inspired my to do the Dictator's torpedo tubes in that way:


This Tyrant has a winged skull on the prow, instead of the eagle, an extended keel fin (I want to do this on more of my ships as I love the look of it), and the gun batteries are merged into one row of eight instead of two rows of four. At the bottom is a WIP of a Voss-style prow for an Armageddon class.


All the stuff above is made with Tamiya's 0.3 and 0.5 mm 'Plaplate' plasticard, Tamiya's own version of Green Stuff, and also some Liquid Green Stuff for smoothing. If some of it looks a bit messy, it's because I gave all the models a wash of green ink so the edges would show up even with my crappy photography abilities.

More to come!

CB

[afterimagedan]

Very skillful work! You will be making full ships to resin cast for every (for a price) in no time! 

[muz111]

Dat prow. Nice work so far! Can't wait to see the fleet =P

[Jimmy Zimms]

Great googly moglie!!!

Love the little extra attention to details like that. I personally feel its even more important for IN as they naturally have a more regimented look than say traitor fleets. It really helps to make them stand out.

oh and to repeat what others have said, that prow!!! W00t

[little]

Lovely cruisers .... Bigs guns nevers Tires .... You're play like torpedoes or nova canon ?

[Comrade-K-Rad]

Very nice work.  Mixing up prows is a great way to add some customization.  I also really like the lower tail extension, cool idea.

[Casus belli]

Thanks guys, for all the nice comments!
There have been a bunch of really nice BFG modelling threads recently, especially for Orks. Really great to see that.

I'm away from the models this week, but hope to make some progress at the weekend and post something up.

@ little - I lean towards torpedoes. Back in the UK I have a roughly 3000pts collection of IN (hope to post a few pics at the weekend). It has ~44 torpedoes (iirc), but only 2 nova cannons.

CB

[Casus belli]

A little progress I made this weekend. This is my interpretation of a Voss cruiser prow, since there's no official model. Its still WIP though.






I wanted a look extrapolated from the Apocalypse battleship model, rather than the BFG: Armada artwork, which I don't really like much.

I left some space on the top for a little defensive turret (yet to come - but you can see similar ones on the Dictator in the OP), and it needs the shield icon on one or both sides, like the other cruisers have. It's still a bit rough around the edges, but after a bit of a clean up, I hope it will compare well against the GW metals like the Apocalypse battleship.

Also, just in case you thought there would be no love for Chaos in this thread, here is an Acheron I did recently:



And a carnage. I'm not sure about the colour scheme yet. I might be starting to regret that a little bit. The red underside is too pink, and not bloody enough.


More is yet to come, including painting everything!

ps. By the way, if anyone has some quick and easy tips about the lighting, camera settings, or whatever, for taking photos like this, I would highly appreciate it!

CB

[Stormwind]

The red underlight there is nicely ominious for a chaos ship. =D