[BFG] Chios' Dockyard - Scratchbuilds

[Chios]

Hi Guys!

I started my scratchbuild-thread with my Chaos fleet in the BFG Discussion section before noticing the modeling & painting section, so I'll continue my builds in here from now on.
For continuity, here is the link to the discontinued Chaos fleet blog:
http://www.forum.specialist-arms.com/index.php?topic=8070.0

On to new builds!

So I noticed our tables were a little small for BFG and made a starfield out of 3 interlocking plates of XPS, securing the edges with wooden L-shaped brackets (for the life of me I have no idea how you would call such things, they are used for the edges of furniture).
I then painted the first nebula with a cotton pad (see picture 1), the second with a brush and lots of paint (picture 2) and for the third one, which came out the best I think, I took almost no colour onto the brush and painted the spiral nebula with a very light drybrushing-like technique. Differently coloured stars were sprinkled on with a toothbrush.

[Chios]

Since we might start a campaign in the near future, I started building orbitals, one Lance battery made out of a bottlecap and a pen is already done as sort of a template.

[Rowlybot]

Nice scratch-builds!

[Malika]

Ooooooh, cool!

[Geep]

Nice board.

Will you be doing much with planets and asteroids?

[Chios]

Thanks for the kind words guys!

I have started collecting materials for planets and such, while my girlfriend has announced that she will contribute by building asteroids when me and the guys do a modeling afternoon for the fleets.

For the time being I still use laminated 2D-templates, GW made a document with asteroids and planets and such, and I did some gas cloud templates of the same size because I like that you can take those little markers and form the fields in a rather organic fashion.

[Geep]

One of the problems I've always had with BFG is that I always like well modelled terrain- but you can't balance a spaceship on a planet very easily! I've always used templates for that reason, even though the game then loses something from it.

[Chios]

I made a new ship prototype: A Scythe Class Harvester for the Necrons. I really like this one, although I have a feeling that carving pyramids out of a rectangular rod will become tiresome pretty fast.

[Geep]

Veryimpressive!
Fortunate for you thatNecron fleets are so small- you'll have these done pretty quickly.

[Blindhorizon]

I think you did a pretty good job making that miniature. How long have you been scratch building? Instead of carving them all you could do stepped pyramids take some styrene sheets a mm thick and cut three squares each a little smaller then the last. The chaos cruisers shape is good but I think the next step for you is to do more detail passes, very nice so far!

[Chios]

Thanks for the encouragement!

I did a lot of scratchbuilding back when I played Warhammer and 40k and money was pretty tight.
Now, after a 6-year-hiatus (give or take) I started playing BFG with my friends, so I started modelling the ships out of plastic sheets, rods and the like (GW bits from back then are all somewhere at my parents house in the attic).

I hope to get my gaming group into collectively building fleets for our campaign, that's why I don't do any Green Stuff modelling etc.; I want the fleets to be buildable by everyone in the group and still fit together, thus I keep it simple.

Nevertheless, Blindhorizon, you are right that there are some "bald spots" on my Chaos cruisers, I will have to deal with them at some point in the future.

At the moment I have a whole lot of escorts in the works (one of the guys wants to play the human pirates list), so stay tuned! (Not too tuned mind you, will still take a while  )

[Chios]

New ship, straight outta the dockyard: an Iconoclast destroyer
My camera cannot handle the white models so well (especially since this one is only 4cm short), I will upload again when I have painted the bugger.
Take my word for it though, this one is much more higly detailed than the other ships 

The rods I had for making weapons batteries are too big for this little fella (2mm diameter looks huge). I guess I will use it as a system defence monitor instead, since they are described as having far more guns than the small ships could reasonably hope to handle.

[lord_blackfang]

That is some amazingly fiddly detail. You must have the patience of a zen monk!

[Malika]

Holy crap that ship is amazing!!!!

[Chios]

Thank you guys for the kind words!