Bloodpact Baneblade Completed Pics

Hey all,
Sorry it took longer than expected, but they are now here, the pictures of my completed Baneblade!

As mentioned in my first post about the Bloodpact Baneblade here, this beast is the first unit I ever did for my Bloodpact. Originally I was just doing it up for something that looked cool, but then as time went on, and my local GW store had a tank camo scheme comp for the release of the current (new at the time) IG codex, the project went from a concept piece right through to the start of a growing Bloodpact force.

Now, the Baneblade kit has a lot to offer for both imperial and traitors alike, but not so much so in the case of the imperial symbols everywhere and the machine spirit shrine at the rear. So first thing I did during the assembly of this beast was to defile all those pieces of Imperial belief adorning it. To further add to the traitorous feel, the vehicles lascannaon, autocannon and heavy bolter barrels have all been modified with pieces from multiple Chaos Vehicle Accessoriess sprue. Spikes made out of paperclips twisted together were added to the hull at random intervals at odd angels to serve as mounting points for the barbed wire I would add later on.

The smoke launchers were replaced with havok launchers, and a tank trap from the Battle Field Accessories Set was attached across the front, not as a dozer blade, but more as a trophy collection point for when the this tank goes on 'crowd control' duties. Extra communication arrays have been added to the side of the turret, with the normally short aerials being replaced with longer lengths of wire.

To make it stand out from other traitor Baneblades, I cut off the battle cannons end, and attached it to the demolisher cannon, more that doubling its length. As my battle cannon now no longer had a barrel end, I attached the Hellhammer cannon barrel end in place of the old 1. To me it makes the tank look that much more deadly, and to emphasis the point that when this cannon fires there is going to be carnage, using a scene from Dan Abnetts book 'Honour Guard', a corpse has been attached to the end of the barrel so that it looks like this guy was attached over the cannon mouth when it fired, leaving his remains dangling, serving as both a message and a trophy.

When it came to trophies and defiling, I kept everything in theme to chaos and more specifically the Bloodpact. So copious amounts of blood, gore, and corpses had to be used. Across the front as seen before I had piled up a mound of guard helmets, and over the machine shrine, I have attached a mutilated guardsmen. I chose to paint him in the same colours as the helmets on the front. Using a knife from the Cadian Heavy Weapons team sprue, and a piece of parchment made out of green stuff, I attached it to his chest, with some line work to make it look like a message is written on it.

To keep with the theme of the Bloodpact recruiting from defeated units of Imperial guard, and to tie it in with the rest of the ground vehicles ive got on the go, the tank was first painted in a 3 colour urban camo scheme. Then once that was completed, I painted on my own blood effect recipe to look like blood has been brushed on by the Bloodpact, as well as spray ups from the corpses crushed under its tracks. Liberal coats were added to the front to emphasis the carnage dealt by this behemoth when it goes on a rampage.

To add to the look that its wet blood splattered over the sides of the tank, I added bloody hand and foot prints leading up and away from each ladder, in the case of the ladder on the tanks side, they lead right up the side of the turret and into the first hatch.

After all the painting was done the barbed wire was added and coated with brown ink to give the rusted look, and the tank commander with hatch were attached into place. I painted this guy seperately as its hard to airbrush his colour on when attached to the tank. Its alot easier to mask up just his hatch rather than the whole turrent piece.

And there you have it, the completed Bloodpact Baneblade in all its traitorous glory.

Until next time all.

Tervigon WIP (still)

Hello fellow hobbyists!

Yet more WIP pics only, the edited pictures of the completed Baneblade I was to post have been 'misplaced' somewhere on my girlfriends laptop so currently am waiting for the raw pictures to be re-done.

So in the mean time I figured, since there's a lot of hype atm about the Tervigon thanks to the release of the Arachnarok Spider from GW, and over at Dark Future Games Old School Terminator has a Tervigon Scratch Build for $25 going on (currently in parts 1 and 2) as well as having built 1 from combining the Arachnarok Spider with a Carnifex (can be found in parts 1 and 2), I figured it was about time my beast graced the realm of bloggers.

Now, originally this bug was going to be made into something else, something much MUCH bigger (though the leg-span width of this bug is almost equal to the length of a Baneblade, and its as long as a Baneblade is wide), which I still aim to build as soon as I find a polystyrene ball that matches the size of a 1kg Easter egg, but using that design, along with reference pictures of queen ants and spiders, I was able to turn the design away from utter destruction to baby production.

What I needed to do this conversion was the following:
2 x Carnifex kits
Left over Termagaunt
Polystyrene Ball
Florist Wire
Green Stuff
Automotive body filler
Water based Sealer
Hubba Bubba bubble gum wrapper (intact, not ripped apart)

Essentially, the front half is a normally assembled Carnifex, with the exception being that I ground off the nob poking out about its head on the back carapace, and attached a 2nd carapace on the top (after grinding out the insides) with the gap left over being filled with greenstuff and shaped to look like a fleshy sponge of sorts.

At the hip joint, it uses the Carnifex hip, but I have ground off the guide pin and flipped it upside down. This required a bit more thinking than I first thought it would. Once that was done, the tail had to be trimmed off and shaped into a point that I used to stick into the styrene ball. This was then glued on with super glue (prior to this i had coated the ball in many coats of sealer), and then modified 2 Carnifex spine backs to fit around. I put the spine backs on the abdomen rather than the thorax after looking at some footage of tarantulas flicking hairs off there abdomens to dissuade predators, so followed in suit with a similar idea.

Once the body was put together I worked on the legs. For the positioning of the legs, I used the lower of the sets of arm sockets on the Carnifex torso for the front 2 legs, and for the back I created 2 new sockets. So that the legs would support the weight, I had to work out the right stance to put the legs in. For this, I turned to reference pictures of queen ants. Generally they will have 2 longer legs following the length of the body towards the read, with the next set up being more centralized, followed by the front 2 legs being close to the centre also.

I made the legs using a length of florist wire for each as the core, then coated the outside with greenstuff for strength and body, then to make the carapace portion I used and shaped some Body fill from an Automotive Body Repairs shop.

The birthing tube was made using the old wrapper of a bubble gum packet i had lying around. Originally I had emptied the packet from both ends, and sprayed it silver to use in a piece of building terrain hanging down out of the ceiling, but this seemed more a fitting use. I glued 1 end in place, then bent it down over itself, gluing as I went, to form the final shape. Once done and dried in place i coated it with a layer of greenstuff to mold the fleshy look. Once done I then glued in the majority of a Termagaunt body. At this stage I also covered the abdomen of the Tervigon with bulging veins.

This step isn't all that important, but it will explain how I got the shape of the abdomen, considering it started as a ball seeing as I had no polystyrene eggs of the size i needed at the time.

Simply I started to carve an oval shape, using a lemon off the tree for reference, as I didn't want a perfect oval or ending up with an egg. Once I had the general shape I wanted, I took my sisters lighter (she shouldn't be smoking as shes my sister, other people can do what they want) and then using a back and forth motion, moved the ball towards and away from the flame. I did this as the intention wasn't to burn or melt, but to shrink the polystyrene, and doing it in this fashion creates all the random lumps and dints.

Once this was done, I did a positioning on the hip joint, cut a portion off the newly created abdomen so it sat flush once stuck on over the spike I created when making the hip joint. The whole abdomen was then coated in 3-4 good coats of a water based sealer so i could then spray it ready for painting at a later date without damaging the polystyrene.

And there it is, a free standing gaunt producing Tervigon.

The main downside for this thing is that unless the cover is enough to hide a Baneblade, everyone is going to see this thing. It wasn't made for gaming purposes as much as for a conversion comp GW had running for the release of the current Tyranid codex, of which I ended up winning and scoring another Carnifex for my efforts! As it stands, it is still to be painted, as many other projects have gotten in the way, but ill get there eventually.

Til next time all, hope you enjoyed this post.