An Army Of One

When I'm painting I rarely mix up the "right" amount of paint; it's typically either too much or too little, in which case I mix up some more and it becomes too much. In other words, after I'm done painting with one colour I often have some left. While painting Old Rowdy, I figured I might as well use the remaining paint to make some progress on a Sentinel I had started painting a while back. So once Old Rowdy was done, I just kept going on the Sentinel.

I wanted him to look like he was hunkering down behind his shield for cover.

I sculpted the base from Greenstuff, I'm going for a tile/cobblestone theme for my Cygnar.

Well, I guess this is official my first painted Cygnar model. There's a bit of subtle conversion work going on: I found the stock model too bulky for my tastes, so I cut some material from his waist and boiler to slim him down a bit. His leg attachment points are also a little bit offset from the official model. I turned the spike on his shield into a big screw, cos I ain't a big fan of spikes. Lastly, I didn't like the default head, so I gave him a leftover Decimator head (sans the spike), which I thought fit him a little better.

It's really hard to see his "eyes", but they're green.

I had a fair bit of trouble with this model. First I had to paint his arms separately because of his pose, which was more of a pain than it should have been, then I had to repaint his shield because I decided that I really didn't like my first colour scheme. Next I got hit by the dreaded Sugar Coated Frosting Of Doom! We'd had some rains, and I guess it was still a little too humid when I sprayed him three days later. Or something. Anyway, following some online advice I brushed him with some olive oil, which fixed the problem, though it took off a bit of the matt as well, so I ended up respraying him later. Finally I just noticed a splotch of blue paint over the gun's bronze fixings; it's in a hard position to see, but it's quite big so I would like to fix it. I only noticed this after spending two hours or more putting together the turntable animation, and there's no way I'm doing that all over again, so the fix will have to wait until I can be bothered.

Cloudy with a chance of DOOM! Hmm, I feel like I've made this joke before...

I originally started painting this model to experiment with shading. The results - which you can see on the blue areas - are quite flat; it's not all I'd hoped for, but I guess it's passable. The blue areas are Enchanted Blue, shaded with Mordian Blue I think, and highlighted with Ice Blue. The rest is all standard colours for me.

I'm not really happy with the weathering; I feel as if it would have looked better with either smaller patches of weathering, or just a lot more of it. I almost painted him without any weathering at all, but I ended up drilling some bullet holes into him to cover up some rough spots in the model, and I just went on from there.

When searching for inspiration for naming him, I tried to think of characters with both shields and guns. The only thing that came to mind were the protagonists of Army of Two (who can attach small ballistic shields on their weapons and can pick up objects in the environment to use as shields). I named him Tyson Rios, after the larger of the two main characters; hopefully someday I'll put together one of the older, smaller metal Sentinels who I'll then naturally name Elliot Salem. I'll probably give him a Marauder head or something.

In an attempt to create a smoother animation this time, I split the rotation into twice as many frames. I also used a heavy book inside the Foldio to get it to sit flat, and I set the camera on a two-second timer so I could take my hands off and let it return to the same position each time before the photo was taken. The results are an improvement, but it's even more labor-intensive to take the photos, and I still need to spend ages manually aligning them. I'm looking forwards to getting the Foldio Turntable thingy when it comes out, that should make this all much easier.