For his honour ......

So my second project is up on Putty and Paint, so please if you want to see the pictures or are members yourselves, maybe you could vote and comment.

Here's the link straight to Fulgrim (Primarch of the Emperors Children)

Cheers guys and Happy Painting!!!

Building and painting my first ever Salute entry - Volgor The Skull Hunter.

About 4 years ago i purchased Volgor The Skull Hunter (54mm Warlord Saga) from Andrea miniatures and upon receiving it I have to admit to some trepidation to actually start the project. A house move later and I had lost the loin cloth piece, so he sat in a drawer for about two years. Then about a year or so ago, I bought the mini again from my friend Volomir and today I decided it was time to build it and maybe enter it at Salute 2014. So here's a little write up about the build process and a little review of the miniature itself. Hopefully, time, commitments, commissions an family willing, will finish the article in the future with a piece on the actual painting too.

So as you can see from the picture, you only need pretty basic tools to get the build done. So before we start to clean the various pieces down lets take a look at the contents.

So the miniature consists of a dozen pieces of finely detailed white metal. There is a lot of various textures to the mini that should make the painting very enjoyable. The volumes to the anatomy are very attractive and thus offers painting the skin a host of curves and muscle groups to really go to town on the skintones.

So using my needle file and scalpel, mold lines and flash were removed initially and then the whole of each part was polished up and smoothed with wire wool. This step really does help to provide a great surface to apply the primer and hopefully means that all imperfections have been removed before i start applying paint.

The legs and hands were each pinned. I drilled a hole with a 0.5mm drill bit in my pin vice, into the main body part (roughly central), glued in a length of brass rod and then carefully brought the leg or hand into place. The metal is so soft that by carefully pushing the limb up to the rod, you are able to make an impression to act as a guide to where you need to drill the hole for the limb thus ensuring that the parts meet snuggly and accurately. I repeated the process for each limb.

I decided early on that i would assemble the whole miniature prior to painting and would only leave the shield off and then attach at the end when the painting was finished.

The picture of the shield shows the thin flash that is easily removed with a scalpel. The detail again is excellent.

There were two slight issues during the build but were not too problematic. The feet have pins that sit in the sockets on the rocks of the scenic base. So it was necessary to check during the attachment of the legs that they not only fit nicely into the waist of the mini but that they are also positioned at the necessary angle to allow the foot pegs to sit in the rock sockets and thus get the correct stance. Secondly, Volgor's topknot comes pretty straight and this would look rather strange as the mini is in a dynamic pose ,but if you glue the topknot on it would just stick up in the air. So it needed to be carefully bent back and positioned to look like it is in motion as Volgor swings his immense axe. During this little operation it snapped at the base of the horns that it is attached to. This meant another exercise in pinning but now looks far more natural.

The kit goes together very nicely and now I just hope the paintjob can do this great miniature justice. I will be referring to the article by David Rodriguez in "How to paint fantasy miniatures" by Andrea Press.