Monday 12 January 2015

'nids part 158 - The Beast of Phodia

That's the thing when you try to kickstart your mojo by doing dull and tedious jobs - at the point your mojo kicks in you begin to feel you're wasting your time on these necessary yet creatively unfulfilling tasks. Thus over the Christmas period I magnetise 'the Beast'. The Deathstorm formation has him armed with Stranglethorn Cannon and Scything Talons so I made sure these were all magged up. Interestingly I noticed that the actually casting on the Carnifex sprue isn't great. Much of the detail is softened, presumably because the master mold is decades old now.


However, I had a set of talons and Stranglethorn from the Hive Tyrant kit and clearly that's been converted to a CAD mold and the detail is now super sharp. I think that level of 'sharpness' is also informing a lot of GW output - with a much more angular look, Ogryns spring to mind with the new Orks also becoming sharp edged.

 
I was hoping to create a more upright pose for the Beast, I'll mainly run him as a second Dakkafex so wanted him to be posed differently to War. I managed this by removing the locator pin in the abdominal ball joint. I also snipped off a few of the small crest ridges leading to the tail section. This allowed the base of the carapace to lean further back, helped by rotating the upper body.  Also, note the addition of the Carnifex spikes to the base to make a more organic mini digestion pit instead of the lava spewing volcanic 'cone'.


The end result is he's now rearing up further and the twisting motion makes him more dynamic, as if he's raising his Brainleach Devourers to the sky to ward off enemy aircraft. The problem with magnetising for me is quite often the random poses that result once the magnets are positioned. You will never get as good a pose as gluing a pose in place but I feel it's a small price to pay for versatility. So the ammo feed for the Stranglethorn Cannon still needs to be adjust to fit the gun, I'm sure the wife's craft heat gun will come in handy here to help bend the feeder tube, once I get some tiny magnets to help locate the end in the Cannon.


Other than that the magnetising was quite straight forward. The Carnifex body was easy to do, I saw a tutorial recently that advised doing each half of the body before gluing together so if you push the magnet all the way through it's not lost inside it's torso. Of course the last time I did this the model was an ebay purchase and the body was already built but this makes sense and the drilling is much more stable. I did however make a mess of a couple of arm joints - drilling completely through one and splitting another but some liquid green stuff solved those problems.


Lastly the head magnet, this is the large Magnetix magnet with a smaller one in the head. I built the 'enhanced senses' head first. I'm not actually a fan of it but felt compelled to make one. The 'firing into the skies' image suggested a creature with more awareness of it's environment would make more sense. So, six eyes and antenna, but I can always swap them out and it prompted me to finally magnetise War instead of relying on the locator pin in the back of it's head.


I've also got the Old One Eye head ready too, in fact all of the heads have been glued up and attached to sprue so I can paint them individually, then I'll remove the sprue and magnetise. All worth it in the end as when the third Carnifex gets made I'll already have the heads done.

7 comments:

  1. Looking good man.. I need to get on my Blood Angles from Deathstorm.. Beware Old Brown Eye 8)

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  2. " saw a tutorial recently that advised doing each half of the body before gluing together so if you push the magnet all the way through it's not lost inside it's torso. "

    This is why my stompa has 40+ magnets.

    "Push push push...clink, SNAP...oh well that's another magnet...lets try again"

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    1. Bwah ha ha! Sorry Greg, that cracks me up :-) I don't magnetise things very often, so I have never even considered this problem; thanks for the warning guys.

      I use have used the same head for my carnifex, but I sawed off the antenna and replaced them with an extra armour piece from the monstrous creature biomorph sprue ("Ol' Six Eyes"). Great pose on this guy, by the way, far more dynamic than the standard build.

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    2. And it's all the super glue you end up with on your fingers. You can't even dry fit sometimes for fear the hole is too tight and you push it in and then can't get it out. So I end up using coffee stirrers to push it in so I don't get glue on my hands but that lack of touch doesn't give you the clue of how hard it's being pushed and then 'POP' it's gone all the way through!

      I'm not so sure on all the exyta armour bits for the carnifex, they always felt just 'stuck on' but I did find them useful for extra armour on my Genestealers and having been trimmed down to a more manageable size I got a load of extra spikes too!

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    3. I agree, it is hard to place the armour in a position where it doesn't look tacked on, like the shoulder pads of some 80's glam metal band. I had to actually cut away part of the head so that it would sit flush (more naturally). I really appreciate that Citadel gives us the extra parts to play with, but they require quite a bit of effort to make them worthwhile.

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    4. In fairness I think that's less of a problem nowadays. I think most of the extra bits have a place or use. I think it was more back in the day - 'if we throw in a load of spikes they'll love us' ;)

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