Tom's Wild Card -- The Super Stall-- er... Khorne Lord...

Going to be making a Super Stalker out of the one and a half Necron Canoptek Tomb Stalker kits I have from Forge World.  Photos to follow later.

Ok, haven't had much of a chance to do anything beyond gathering supplies, but I guess I can list out what I have so far.

1.5x Necron Canoptek Stalker kits
1x Chaos Raptor + misc bits
1x Magewrath Throne
2x Electric Tea Lights

I still need to get some clear red acrylic panes for this project.

Bits inventory!



Probably going to have to work a little bit of plasticard into the tower, as the kit was not made with an under-view of the top in mind. Concept art will be sketched up and posted after I process some carrots.

Quick and dirty concept art. I also fully intent to make the eyes on the tower glow, but I'll need the acrylic for that.

He's gettin' all muad'dib up on it.

have you tried Hobbyworld for the acrylic, or maybe the chainmail store on broadway? they do a lot of different crafts there. i seem to recall some wall art stuff, and the owner is a 40k'er.

Dune, I'm guessing, Mark?

Rhaevyn, do you know the name of the chainmail store off hand? I can try giving them a call tomorrow over lunch. The goal with the acrylic is to cut out the backs of the skull tower's 16 eye sockets and place the acrylic panes there, where the internal electric tea lights will cause them to flicker with ominous chaos power! Having dry fit the tower together, I have found that there is ample room inside the tower for said tea lights, to the point where I will have to construct a stand to hold them up. The plus side to this is when it comes time to replace them, I can simply swap them out wholesale.

I managed to get some drilling done before I got kicked out of the basement tonight. By running the heavy gauge florist wire through the body segments I will not only get full pose control over the Super Stalker, I will also be able to milk our a few extra millimeters per body segment, netting me over an extra inch of length which I can use to wrap the tower.

Joe is the owner, he's on the forums, forum name is littlehurc

I looked through the online catalogue for Metal Designz, and I didn't see anything to the tune of clear acrylic sheets. I'll try calling Hobby World over lunch.

never seen them carry it, and their inventory's gotten smaller, despite a larger store.....

you could buy a clear R/C truck body shell and cut that up if the sections you need are small enough that you can find enough flat surfaces on one of the shells.  that's anywhere from $20-45 for a shell

Wouldn't a clear tube do the same thing, with less work? Fluorescent bulb covers, home depot, 1 1/2" dia.

Tinted transparency paper might work?

So much Stalker!

Well, tonight I finally got around to drilling out the backs of the eyes. After completing the pilot holes, I realized that the "pin hole glow" would actually serve me better for overall effect. With drastically less exposed surface area, I feel safer about putting in something that isn't 1/8" thick, so I'll be looking at using overhead transparency sheet instead. Thank's for the call on that one, gluvzer.



I also got to try out the pinning kit I picked up with my league winnings, and I'm pretty happy with it so far. No way I'd ever be able to do this precise of pinning with my dremmel. Combining a random but awesome fantasy chaos sword I got in the bag-o-bits with a 40k icon bearer arm and pole to make a really rad Power Lance. I'm also starting to entertain the idea of drilling out the middle of the top of the tower with a 28mm hole and counter setting a magnet rig in there so I can pull the Raptor Lord out and field him as his own thing from time to time. Plasma Pistol, Power Lance, MoK, and Raptor Pack a good load out? Probably not. Will it look awesome? Hells yes.

I cut out the space for the base and backed it with plasticard. While this is too shallow for the top of the base to be flush with the "floor", a bit of knife and dremmel work turns the whole affair into a ritual circle.



The tower can now stand on it's own. I am going to refrain from gluing the very top piece on until after painting and the addition of magnets, as well as installing the tint film. I gave it a test run with Typhus' candle, and I can tell already that the bottom candle will need to be elevated so it flickers at the same level as the eyes for maximum effect. To further increase it's eye power, I'm going to spray the inside of the tower with a silver paint, and then hit that with a coat of 'Ard Coat after, effectively mirror coating the inside of the tower.

Chaos Raptor Lord assembled! Also, I just got how meta it is that I need to do basing on the base of a basing element that sits well above the base of the monster I am basing. Baseception.

Apparently this is what happens when you have a very casual work place and the local server goes down.

Due to general business and work and such, I think I will have to scale down my project for the month. So, rather than an ever increasingly complex, self lit, diorama style monsterous creature that can have components popped off via magnets to be individually fielded, I'm going to focus on the Raptor Lord and build up from there. As it stands, the Pile-o-skulls has shown up at the Den, so I picked up those, along with some Clear Red by Tamiya from Hobby World, so I'll get to start painting him before much longer. In the mean time, I'm waiting for some glue to set so I can put a CSM top-knot I shaved off a helmet onto the butt of the power lance as a tassel. It will be nifty to see how value painting and the air brush works out.

I decided to try out some value painting with this guy before I try doing anything fancy like fire effects using the technique.

So, I primed and did a bit of a basic black-to-white gradient with the air brush.


I fine tuned it a bit with a wash of Nuln Oil and some selective dry brushing.


And then I hit him with a coat of Tamiya Clear Red with some acrylic thinner of the same brand mixed in.


Looks a touch glossy, but aside from that I'm liking how it's turning out. I gave him a quick seal after the coat of colour out of a bit of paranoia. Up next I think will be the gradient on the blade, and then going in with a brush to start work on at the detail nubbins.

I got the basic power blade gradient down now.

With the bronze trim on now, the dark red pops out so much more, as it now has something to contrast against. I opted to get some kirby dots going on the power blade to get some old school comic book effects going.

Damn. This is not the work of Tom from 1.5 years ago at all. How the heck did you get good so quick??

How much longer do we have to finish this particular round anyways? I'm SO close but was out of commission for a few days due to sickness/schoolwork.

Not using toothpicks helps.   The whole learning about value painting and finding the right paints to pull it off with certainly helps, too. Constant learning, like the whole "back flush your air brush" stuff.

I think we have somewhere around a week left to work with, as I noticed a bunch of the competition threads this time around booted up on the 18th.

Still plenty of room to tweak this guy, I would call him finished for now. I'm really happy with how the value painting turned out, and I'm going to give it a shot with my Night Lords and some Plague Marines I'm going to build, putzing around with some variants of the technique to see what kind of effects I can milk out of it.