it sounds cool.
This is an amazing thread, and inspiration for the space marine army I'll be doing (this summer or next summer, depending on when I have the money) that no one is allowed to know what it is yet. I haven't officially started yet, which is why I'm not sharing, but it will require a lot of converting (though not as much as this)

I picked up a set of empire wizards to experiment with and see if it'd work for sandpeople/tuskens. I was looking over the parts this morning and I realized that they'd be a perfect fit for the Emperor, not sure why I didn't make that connection before, doh! I like the power armor version but it's not all that accurate of a portrayal of the presence he projects in the movies, so I figured I'd give him another shot and do a more fitting miniature. I did some scraping and refitting of pieces so that the ams were opened outwards a bit more and scraped off the wizardy details on the cloak.

He's still going to need a bunch of greenstuff work as there's some pretty large gaps, but the rough-in works quite well IMO. I think I need to add a bolt pistol to his waist or maybe a lightsaber hilt. Alternately I could replace the right hand with a hand holding a lightsaber/powersword, I'm going to think it over a bit. I'd really like to give him some force lightning but no idea how to go about modeling it, I may just try doing directional lighting with a glowing hand.

I like the second version, it's spot on!

I seem to recall seeing somewhere (don't recall) a SM Librarian conversion where they used wire drilled into the hand and shaped, then put green stuff around the wire to add bulk. It would be a fairly fragile thing in terms of storage, but could give the look you're seeking.

I personally liked the first one better, even if the second is more story accurate.

The Jawas are truly wonderful, the speeder bikes are inspired, and your new Emperor is a huge improvement in my opinion - well done! The other emperor model looked good, but this one captures his character much better, and you could use him as an astropath or psyker now instead of a marine, which fits his fragility better.
As for lightning, check out Armorcast's cinematic effects for some ideas:
http://armorcast.com/store/index.php?cPath=100&osCsid=79256a3b88e0a60fe2e1f5046ff9706f
While they don't have true lightning, their energy blasts or venom would convey the idea well enough, and really, you are talented enough with the GS that I don't think that these would be too hard to make using a wire armature.

I love coming back to this thread-keep up the excellent work!

I sat down to resume work on the sandcrawler but a part in the box grabbed my attention and I ended up with a new model. He's still in the rough and needs more work but I liking R-2 so far.

He's on a 40mm terminator base so he's definitely much larger than he is in the movie, but oh well not everything scales perfectly. The overall image is more important.



Two models in one day, I'm on creative overload!

you will create a covering for him right? his torso is rather ugly without one.

Rather than a covering, it could simply have a skirting added to the bottom of the abdomen to stop it being so narrow.

R2 is getting some extra styrene applied to the torso in the areas between the raised ridges, it'll make him more tubular in the body than he is in the current pic.

I didn't manage to get all that much done over the weekend, spent most of my time on R2 and gap filling in the emperor, unfortunately I left the box they were in at work so I don't have updated pics at the moment. I'll have to make sure I remember to bring them home next weekend. I also started on the legs for the bike scouts and have them reposed, but they are in the same box

Here's the pics of the stuff I do have onhand and made some minor progress on

Bikes


I would have the 4th bike together but apparently I'm out off the correct bits, I'll need to get ahold of another ammo boxes from a predator for the upper veins. The lower veins attach to the upper ones so I can't put them on til I locate a ammo box.

Here's a shot of the jawa group awaiting greenstuff for their torsos:




I also took a basic step by step line up of how I do the torse for those that are interested.


First step is to cut the plague monk at the waist. I use a jewelry saw for this as it makes a much finer cut than a razor saw and is easier to control. Once he's in half I remove a small amount of plastic from the upper edge of the belt area and remove some of the plastic on the underside of the torso's rear that way they have flat edges where they meet up. The pic on the left shows a differant reference angle on how the torso is reposistioned.

Using a pin vise I sink a pin in the legs and upper torso about where the models spine would be that way it has extra support before I glue them together. Once the torso pieces are together I scrape down the shoulder area so that the hood will fit. You have to remove the entire back collar of the robe and part of the surrounding sholders. Once that's done and you have a nice flat surface you can attach the hood.

Then fill the torso gap with greenstuff. Once it hardened up I go in and trim down the collar on the robe to acomidate the various ammo pouches and belts.

The Dark Angels hood has the face removed with a dremmel tool, I use the bit that looks like a little ball with vertical ridges on it. This new batch of jawas has a couple of the heads made from the helmeted and yelling robed heads for variety as the neckline differs a bit on each version. It's pretty much impossible to remove the face with a hobby knife so it needs a dremmeled out, or a lot of repeat drilling with a pin vise. It takes maybe 2 minutes with the dremmel tops, just be super careful not to slip and stab it into your finger.


I also ordered a die punch, styrene scibing tools and casting materials today that I'm going to experiment with, should be a huge time saving factor if I'm able to cast the various heads and modified bodies. Plus I'd esasily be able to produce enough stormtroopers head to let me convert a full company rather than just a couple squads.

Your Jawas are an awesome idea and look pretty darn good to boot. What army do 'plague monks' come from though? I'm guessing it is something in fantasy but have not stumbled across them in the few army books I have taken the time to flip through, nor specifically spotted them on the shelf at GW.

I am considering borrowing the basic idea for yet another auxiliary race for my Tau if you don't mind?

Overall too I have to say, very nice work on all your conversions. This is great, solid work and I am looking forward to seeing all your units together on the tabletop some day.

Dal'yth Mont'sha - Plague monks are from the WHFB Skaven (Rat) army.
I think the come in Skaven Plague Monk Regiment boxes of 20 plastic figures.

paulson games - greatwork

As the post above noted they are from the warhammer fantasy skaven line.

Feel free to borrow whatever ideas you'd like from my posts I like seeing custom models and armies, I borrow other ideas all the time and I feel like I did a really good job if people are impressed enough to make copies of conversions I came up with.

I think I may be making a jawa gang for =I=munda (necromunda variant) They are really growing on me and they are a lot of fun to work on.

This weekend I quit at my work, my boss wants to play political games with the employees backstabbing each other and being that it's only a part time job I decided it wasn't worth it and walked out. It definitely opens up more time for working on the army, but as my weekend job was the source of my gaming budget it may slow things down a bit, fortunately I have most everything I need already. The downside is that my modeling will now have to compete with the PS3 and Xbox for free time now that I'm home on the wekeends.

My casting supplies arrived earlier in the week so I puit them to use and cast some stormtrooper heads. I bought a good number of darktroopers but the paint is virtually impossible to remove and the molding on the minis is pretty lax so the majority of them have terrible mold lines or details filled in with gobs of paint. Given how much effort and money I've already sunk into the army I decided I'd cast several of the good heads because I really don't want a bunch of crappy looking stormtrooper heads floating about in the units.

I went through about 40 differant darktroopers and picked out the 5 cleanest looking heads with minimal lines and the smoothest paint. Then I anchored them to a couple pieces of scrap sprue pieces and went to work on making the mold. The housing for the mold I made out of lego blocks with a piece of tin foil taped in place across the bottom. The rubber takes 6-8 hours to cure all the way and requires two seperate pours, one for each half the mold.

I made a couple errors with the mold but fortunately nothing that would affect the casting. First error was I used sticky-tac to hold the heads the sprue, which worked great except when it came time to remove them from the mold, I had to spend the betterpart of an hour scraping the sticky-tac out of the rubber.

The second mistake is that I didn't let the rubber-to-rubber mold release dry long enough before I did the second pour, which resulted in one end of the mold sticking to the first layer, fortunately I was able to get them seperated with a hobby knife, and managed not to ruin the entire mold. Part of the mold is very jagged due to tearing and being cut, but it's not in a detail area.

Here's the cast heads, they came out a bit too soon and were a bit sticky, but the detail level is really solid and there's no bubbling or noticable defects. The resin has about a 2-3 minute working life and around an hour for full cure. It was hard to see the details as the resin is a pure shiny white so I gave it a very quick ink wash to bring out the detial.




I also got some more work in on the jawa pack, greenstuffed the torsos and cut the feet down. The greenstuff work I left a bit rough as it'll all be covered by belts and pouches so it won't be visable, any areas that show I can smooth down later.

very cool. I want some Storm Trooper Marines now...

I cast 8 sets of heads today, for a total of 40. I still need to cast another 70-80 heads so I can cover the rest of the stormtroopers and dark troopers.

I have 30 regular tactical marines, and 3 boxes of devastators. I also have 50 black reach marines that I can use to help bulk out to a full company.

Using the newly cast heads here's the first squad of the black reach marines ready for priming. They take a bit of trimming to fit inside the armored collar. The black reach guys are pretty static in pose but it makes for a very cheap option for getting lots of troops together quickly. These guys I'll give a fairly quick paint job as the detail level isn't as good as the regular tactcial squads who I can focus more attention on.



Overall the casting has gone well, I've had two bad batches occur one the mold slipped a bit so the heads came out lopsided. I also ruined a batch by placing the mould under a lamp while it was curing, this caused the resin to bubble like crazy and flow out of the mould, and leaving the cast parts to look like swiss cheese.

I should have another 2 squads of black reach marines ready for priming tomorrow, and I'll finally be priming heads for the 10 man squad of regular marines I have already together & painted.

I also need to get the devistator squads going, and start work on the terminator squads that I'll be using for darkrtoopers.

Ugh so much to do, but I'm quite happy with the progress I'm making.

I was setting up to photgraph R2 and the Emperor and I managed to drop the box, the hard wood fllor in the kitchen didn't make it a soft landing and they exploded in a shower of parts, the emperor's head and part of his green stuff are MIA as in one of R2's legs, I suspect they managed to launch themself under the stove which I'll have to move later when I can get some help. If they landed in the air vent somehow I'm kinda screwed, but I can replace the parts as I have extras, thankfully I didn't lose the right hand on the emperor as I only had one copy of that particular hand,

Because of the change in my job situation (not having one now) I've decided I'm going to sell a limited amount of the cast heads to help defray some of the costs of the molds and materials, I'm not looking to sell these to make a profit I only plan on selling enough to make the project be a break even cost. I'll also cast the jawa heads, the mandalorian and scout heads once I get sets of those finished and cast. If anyone is interested feel free to PM me.

Hi! How is it going? Did You find time to make more stuff? Those heads look really neat. Where did You get Your casting materials? And how much did You pay? And did You get a new job?
I hope for the best :-)

Currently the army is on pause as I've been focusing on the 3-d space hulk board but resuming work on it is at the top of my to do list as soon as I get done with the space hulk pieces.

The casting materials I got from http://www.micromark.com their basic start up kit costs $70 you can also get a simular kit from http://www.alumilite.com both companies work very well, I think the set from micromark has slightly more material but they are both very close in price and quantity of materials.

As for the job I decided to go back to college full time and at the moment I'm not working as I'd only be able to work on the weekend, and given the amount of homework I think I'm going to skip working until the semester is over and I can get a better schedual at school. It'll definitely cut into my modelling budget but that's ok as I already have way too much stuff to work on and I shouldn't be buying anything new because of that.

I'm hoping to get back on track to the star wars army soon and I'll definitely update as soon as I get some more progress done.

It may be too late to throw this idea out, how well does the Lego Star Wars Storm troopers Heads Work to scale? I know there is a cheap Lego Set out there that gets you like 4-5 Troopers for 10$ USD. Aslo It looks like you are already casting heads, in response to your blaster question, can you not just buy a Star Wars Action Figure and cast the blasters from those?

I'd checked into those, the lego guys are actually pretty huge compaired to GW stuff almost twice as tall. I swear I remembered them being much smaller, however they are big enough that the lego stormtrooper hemets make them look like bobble heads on a GW body.