Unicron, Herald of the Sentinels Eternal

Ages back I was in my then-local hobby shop when I saw a very well sculpted unicorn miniature from Reaper. It was part of their new Bones line, and thus was extremely well priced. So I picked it up, with one simple plan: to use it to make the stupidest Space Marine ever. The project snowballed and eventually I ended up with this guy.

I tried to make him as over-the-top as possible, giving him massive shoulder-pads, a customised helmet, oversized light-up "crystal" sword, light-up scenic base, little belt gubbins, a banner... and a stupid name. Hey, first thing that comes to my head, that's the rule.

I had been working on light-up bases at the time and this model's larger base gave me an opportunity to experiment. As I have mentioned in the past, he was in fact my first true success, predating my light-up Cortana, I just put off painting him because I didn't have confidence in my ability to paint a horse. Plus, you know, I've been busy.

There was a lot of work involved in this model. I started by creating a flat surface inside the base using milliput, to make it easier to try to build a battery holder into. I fabricated a battery holding system from plasticard and metals bits from various button battery holders that I cut and bent into the desired shape. Before I could solder everything together I had to figure out where everything was going to go.

The biggest limitation would be the wires going to up the Space Marine. The unicorn is made of a rather soft and rubbery plastic, so I decided to reinforce it's legs with pins that would serve double duty by carrying the current. So I carefully drilled a couple of very small holes up through it's legs. I had to drill a second pair of holes that intersected the first in order to create a channel for wires to get to the "saddle" area where they could pass up to the Marine's torso.

I then soldered a pair of wires to some 0.8mm tailoring pins (which are the strongest pins I have, especially relative to their diameter) and smoothed the join with sandpaper so I could push them up the legs, and carefully worked them into place.

I then drilled holes in the clear resin base and plastic base for the pins. Finally I filled the extra holes in the body and smoothed over them, taking the opportunity to do some clean up of mold lines and the like (which I found were hard to fully get rid of without some liquid greenstuff and sandpaper).

The resin base was not as quite as blue as I had expected.

The top of the base was painted and holes were drilled for the LEDs, then everything was soldered up, glued down, and covered with milliput. I used white LEDs for the base and blue for the sword, although I don't think it made much difference in the end.

Probably the hardest part of the build was the sword. I used a blue LED that's roughly 1mm by 1.5mm, and let me tell you, those can be tricky to solder. I generally destroy two LEDs for every one that I get wired up and glued in place. To give you an idea of what I'm talking about, here's a picture of the wired LED (bottom right), and unwired LED (center), a 1mm drill bit (top left), the wires I was using (middle left), the soldering iron (top right), and the solder (bottom left). So yeah, tricky work. I eventually hit on the idea of holding the LED with a pin vice while working, which helped a lot.

I used a Black Templar sword arm with the iconography sanded off the hilt. I cut out the sword and drilled into the hand, then joined that hole with one drilled in from the shoulder. Despite how tiny the LED was, I still had trouble fitting it in the sword hilt, and ended up doing enough damage to need greenstuff repair work later. Part of the problem is that the wires I was using were kinda stiff, and hard to position the way I wanted. The sword blade was made from a tooth from a clear plastic comb. Unfortunately as I couldn't sit the LED as deeply as I wanted there wasn't going to be enough material to support the blade, so I had to attach it with two .6mm pins drilled through the sides, which ruin the look a little. Still, when glued up and plugged in it looked very impressive.

Connecting the arm to the body was trickier than I'd expected, and I made things worse for myself by being stupid and cutting out plastic that I should have used for support, but it came together in the end.

In addition to the electrical bits, there was some other work needed. The icon on top of the banner was made from two Black Templars vehicle decoration bits that I glued and blended together. I think the banner was another Black Templars bit. The shoulder pads and torso were Sanguinary Guard bits. The left arm was actually from a Warrior of Chaos that was in the right pose and had the kind of baroque styling that I was after. A lot of iconography had to be sanded off and/or covered up with the hourglass and shield icons of my custom chapter. I added some decoration in the form of symbols on his knees and random bits chained to his belt. I also had to fix the unicorn's feet where I had screwed up when cutting it off it's base, and also the mane where I'd cut it to make room for the rider. Of course I had to repose the legs to make them look halfway decent.

After all that I decided that I couldn't stand how bent the Unicorn's horn was after all. It had resisted all efforts to straighten using hot water, so in the end I cut it off, drilled a hole through the center (while carefully holding it in alignment) and inserted a 0.6mm tailoring pin to keep it straight, then glued it back on. I also took the opportunity to fix a problem area on the horn while merging the two back together.

Finished and primed, it looked pretty good. I covered the sword and base with PVA before priming, but in this picture I'd removed it from the sword:

And there it sat for something close to a year before I finally got it painted. Eventually I picked up an identical unicorn model to test painting techniques with, and finally decided upon a dry-brushed colour scheme that I decided looked good enough. I was originally hoping to use Quickshade, but I had my heart set on a white unicorn and I didn't want to introduce brown tones, and I couldn't get it to look good using the black quickshade, and I quickly gave up on the idea of proper blending (that requires actual skill), so drybrushing it was.

There was no question that the Marine's armour had to be gold. Anything less would just be silly. I picked silver for the decoration because, well, I couldn't think of anything better. I decided to use a purple wash to shade them both to try to tie them together and match the cooler tones I was trying to use (turns out using purple to shade gold can give it a really rich colour, it just didn't quite work out for me here). I'm not really happy with how the armour turned out; it just doesn't look as bright as I'd expected it to. Oh well.

I decided early on that the unicorn's hair had to be MADE OF FIRE. And of course a unicorn with FIRE FOR HAIR would obviously have a golden horn and hooves. Obviously. This was the trickiest part of the paint job, and while I think it looks pleasing overall, it's not as dramatic as I would have liked since the "hottest" parts of the fire are not noticeably brighter than the rest of the unicorn. Still I think it looks nice enough.

Purity seals were done with my standard recipe of bleached bone with white edge-highlights and brown lettering washed with Gryphone Sepia. I didn't give the red seals the usual final orange highlight as I didn't want them to be too bright. I went for a marble effect for the "parchment"on the standard. I settled on purple as the last colour, which I used for the banner and the barely-visible gems on the chest. The base was washed with watered-down Asurmen Blue then drybrushed white to try to give it more of an ice look, and also to try to better disperse the light from the LEDs and make it look slightly less like two spotlights.

I wanted to try to work rainbows into the model somehow, just to make it more ridiculous, but couldn't think of a good way to do it. I considered trying to do something on the flag, but couldn't figure out how to make it look good (and I was getting sick of the project), so I just went for a golden Sentinels Eternal logo instead, which I drew on using a metallic gold ballpoint pen. Saves a lot of effort for this kinda thing. I found it much easier to get a bright gold with it, so I used it for some highlights too. Next time I work with gold I think I'll do more edge highlighting with it.

The teeth were based with bleached bone, and the tongue with a mix of Fulgrim Pink and Elf Flesh, then both were washed with... either Ogryn Flesh or Gryphon Sepia, I forget. The sword was glazed blue over the varnish (to serve as a primer) then varnished again. A little more gloss varnish was used for the gems and mouth. I originally planned to give him an overly-long windswept cloak. Because, you know, MORE RIDICULOUS! But I couldn't seem to make it look good, so in the end I left it out. I suppose I could always add one later, but that's highly unlikely as I'm just glad to be done with him.

Overall I think he looks pretty good, though there's elements that didn't work out as I had hoped. There's a few things I might do differently if I were to do it over; I would try to use smaller wires to seat the LED lower in the hand, make the sword blade smaller and give it a longer handle, try to get a brighter gold on the armour, and perhaps use darker greys for the shadows on the unicorn. Also, I was thinking of painting the hair as fire, but in ALL THE COLOURS OF THE RAINBOW! I'm not sure I could pull it off with my current level of skill (and selection of paints), but I think it could look pretty cool with a fiery transition through the spectrum along the mane (as in, red near the head transitioning through the colours to purple at the shoulders).

The thing that's confusing me a little right now is that the LEDs seem much brighter in the earlier photos than in the finished article. This is probably because of the washes and glazes, though I'm hoping that it will look better with a fresh battery. Next up: a handful of smaller and less complex models.

The long overdue light-up Marine

I actually finished assembling this guy almost a year ago (according to the dates on the photos), in fact I primed him at the same time as my first light-up model. I guess I was a little burned out on Space Marines as I haven't painted any since these scouts, and they don't really count as they aren't even wearing power armour. I was pretty burned out on trying to put lights in my models too, as I'd been working on it for ages by that point.

But as I mentioned in a previous post, I've made great strides in making powered bases recently, so I thought I'd finish off the last of my old prototypes. Plus I really liked the model as I put a fair bit of work into the conversion, so I thought I might as well paint it. Fair warning, this is going to be a REALLY long post as a LOT of work and experimentation went into this guy - if you count this then I've been looking at lighting up my minis for well over three years now - and I wanted to write about it for my own benefit.

I was building an assault squad back in 5th when vehicles were everywhere and it was traditional to put a "hidden fist" in every squad to give it punch. As I'm not a huge fan of the aesthetics of power fists, I opted for a hammer instead. And just to give him that truly heroic resilience, I added a shield as well. The way wound allocation went back in fifth, I could have allocated any low AP attacks to him instead of regular attacks, meaning I could allocate wounds in such a way that his survive-ability wouldn't be affected but that of his squad would be greatly enhanced. I reckon it's still how I'd run an assault sergeant in sixth to give him some punch in challenges.

I call him Daedalus. When you say "Icarus" people think "Flew too close to the sun: wings melted, died". Well, Daedalus was his father, he built the wings, and he didn't fly too close to the sun and didn't die. In other words, he was the one who knew what he was doing.

I tried to put an LED in his hammer, but I just couldn't fit two cables down the shaft without taking out too much material and compromising the strength. In the end I decided to leave that for another model and just put an LED in his jump pack.

However, just to make things harder on myself, I decided to make the jump pack removable. Well, OK, it was to increase his versatility and it also didn't sound much harder at the time, but it turned out to be quite frustrating to get it to work. Still, the result is a more versatile model.

To do this I used two magnets which served to attach the jump pack and carry the current. Now, you can't really solder a wire to a magnet without destroying, or at least weakening, it's magnetism. So what I did was solder wires to magnets, then let that stick itself to the back of the actual magnet that formed the connection. Even without magnetism of it's own, it would still be ferromagnetic allowing the second magnet to attach to it. The second magnet would then be glued in place in the model, and the same arrangement would be repeated on the other piece.

I wanted the pose to be very dynamic, with his whole body twisted back and his arm drawn back to deliver a crushing blow with the hammer, his other arm holding up the shield to block incoming fire until the last moment. It took a little work to pose the arms (Space Marine arms aren't usually posed held too far out from the body as it can interfere with the pauldrons on the shoulders (let's face it, those things aren't designed for letting the wearer do anything as unnecessary as raising his arms), but it came out OK in the end.

I don't like the two-piece GW thunder hammers, I just wanted a single massive block of hammer (like the Coteaz or the Master of the Fleet), so I made one out of greenstuff. The arm/shaft was a Sanguinary Guard axe arm (I may have had to file some gems off, not really sure). The shield was a Celtic Shield from Scibor Miniatures.

What with the big old hammer and decorative shield, I wanted him to look "knightly" and gothic. However I also wanted to keep his armour as utilitarian as possible - on planes and race cars every ounce counts, I figured a guy who goes flying through the air for the Emperor would value every bit of speed and range over ostentatious un-aerodynamic decoration. And purity seals? Flappy bits of paper that would get torn off in the rushing air or sucked into an air intake or something? Forget about it! So I used the simplest, plainest parts I could - the weapons being the exception.

I was using Black Templar heads on the rest of the squad, so I wanted his head to look a little different. I took a Grey Knight head and filed the front down to make it less pronounced, then filed some new "air" holes in the front left side. The result looks about halfway between a Grey Knight and a Black Templar helmet. This model was from the first batch using my new shoulder pads; I take plain shoulder pads, file off the rims to make them a little smaller, and fill any details. I did give him a slightly more "archaic" torso than the standard assault marine, and greenstuffed a shield across the front to replace the existing symbol (I think it may have been a Black Templar symbol). Of course I sculpted the Sentinels Eternal symbol on his left pauldron. A standard jump pack would not have left room for his hammer and would have blocked his view, plus I would have had to use 2 LEDs instead of one, so I used a Sanguinary Guard jump pack (sans wings) instead.

I wasn't sure what I was going to do with the model except that I wanted to paint him in metallics. I've already got a Grey Knight and I'm hoping to paint a bunch more eventually, and I already have a bronze marine, so I decided to go darker on the body with bright details for contrast. I basecoated him in Calthan Brown then Tin Bitz. Some details were painted up to Dwarf Bronze, and most of the decorations were brought up to gold. I washed him with Devlan Mud, but that just dulled the Tin Bitz without adding any shading or contrast, so next time I won't bother. I then edge highlighted with one shade higher so Tin Bitz was highlighted with Dwarf Bronze, Dwarf Bronze with gold, and gold with a mix of gold and Mithril Silver.

At this point there wasn't any contrast on the brighter metals, so I carefully painted Army Painter Quickshade strong tone onto the bronze and gold areas. I ended up giving the shield a couple of layers to really create contrast, then carefully touched up the gold on the raised areas.

I hadn't sculpted anything onto his right pauldron as I didn't have any ideas, so I decided to leave it smooth and paint something on. While painting I came up with the idea of putting lines of "text" across it to make it look like he had scripture engraved into his armour. The thing is, once I had done that (in Mithril Silver for maximum brightness), the rest of his armour looked really boring. I think it might have been fine if he was in brighter colours, like gold or silver, but as it was my original plan to keep it plain was backfiring. So I went ahead and just painted "scripture"across every bit of armour large enough for me to scribble a line across.

I think that turned out quite well actually; it makes him look very devoted as the only decoration on his armour is his chapter symbol and his holy texts, plus it's a rather unique effect (I don't remember seeing it used to this extent before anyway). The size and quality of the "text" is highly inconsistent, but it's the best I could do over so many different hard-to-reach areas, so I'm happy with it.

I originally considered painting the hammer head in gold to match the shield, but I wanted it to stand out, and the idea of white marble really appealed to me. I found a tutorial written by Abaroth on how to paint various shades of marble, and while there's still room for improvement in my technique, I think it came out reasonably well in the end.

I used this piece of wall to practice painting marble; each section is slightly different.

I varnished him in 'Ardcoat as it brightens the colours a bit and I figured he would look good shiny. I used a Vallejo brush on matt varnish for the base and hammer shaft. It's the only brush-on matt varnish I've found that actually works, and it works really well and dries quickly.


Of course, it was always the lights that took the most work. After trying a number of different approaches, I settled on making a completely new base from breadboard and plasticard. This allowed me to make it a bit more spacious by not sloping the sides, create cut-outs in the sides for the battery and switch, and to save room by not needing wires. Soldering was a whole lot easier, and it made it much easier to fashion a terminal / battery retaining "spring" from a paperclip soldered into the existing holes. On the down side, I was still figuring out liquid greenstuff at the time and I didn't to a very good job of filling the holes in the top to a smooth finish, but luckily a thick layer of paint and good matt varnish seem to have done a good job of hiding the problem.

I tried using a disc cutting saw on a pillar drill to cut the breadboard disc, but it created a large hole in the middle, which was a problem. I found I could get a smaller hole when I just snapped a roughly circular disc out of breadboard, attached a small screw through the middle, and used the drill to file away the outside against a large file until it was the right size. You can see it on top of a standard base in the third photo:

I used a circle cutter to cut plasticard discs. When I tried to cut into the plasticard using the blade in the typical fashion it took half an hour of finger-blistering effort to cut out a disc. I mean that literally; it took half an hour and I had blisters afterwards. And the edge was a bit of a mess too. The problem is that the blade got wedged into the the thick plastic and it was very difficult to continue to exert downwards force. However, when I tried spinning it the other way, I found that the back of the blade carved neat little strips of plastic off the top, and within five minutes I had a clean disc of plasticard in my hand.

After assembling the inner components of the base, I put a ring of plasticard around the outside (with channels cut right through for the battery and switch), filled it with milliput for strength and weight, and capped it with another thin disc (with cutouts around the magnet and "spring" in order to keep the thickness down). The result is a functional powered base of the same diameter as a standard GW 25mm base, and only a millimetre or two thicker.

I forgot to take a WIP picture of the components, but here's the finished base.

This base took a lot of effort to make, with careful positioning of component on the breadboard, scratching off sections of copper, and shaping of breadboard and plasticard necessary. The result is not the same shape as a standard base, it looks a little rough, and the switch and battery slot are visible from the outside. It's also very vulnerable to scratches around the switch and battery slot. My new bases are much better and I'm finding them easier to make, but more on that in my next post.

As a parting shot, here's a picture of my first successful lit model, but with a new battery (unfortunately it seems the battery I used when taking pictures for the old post was a little run down and the pictures didn't end up as impressive as a result):