Tuesday 19 November 2019

The Kitbashes: the beginning

     My third post.  Woo-hoo, I'm on a roll.

     I know that at least some of my readers will have little to no experience with kitbashing and the world of Games Workshop miniatures.  Therefore I will include some links to wiki pages that go into more detail on some of the terminology and background for those who are interested.

     I first started doing kitbashing at a young age.  I would chop up and combine HO scale model railroad building kits to create larger or different buildings.  I also kitbashed a few 1/25 scale vehicle kits, but my interest in those waned pretty quickly.

     My dreams of having a huge model railroad have never come to fruition.  By the time I was in high school, all of my model train stuff was packed away in boxes.  Every now and then, they would be unpacked and I would start a small switching layout.  However, I would inevitably end up moving, and everything would have to be packed up again.  As I have lived in at least twenty different apartments over the years, this happened fairly often.

     In the early 90's, I got interested in Warhammer 40K and converted a few Orks.  This one is a very simple conversion, I just cut the right hand off at the wrist and rotated it so that he was shooting 'gangtsa style'.

     For this one, I chopped both arms at the shoulders so that they would stick straight out from the body, and added sleeves with putty to cover the mess I had made of it.  I also cut the right hand off at the wrist and added that knobby bracelet for reasons that escape me.  I have the memory capacity of a goldfish.  Plus it was about 25 years ago.

     Another very simple conversion.  You can probably guess what it was.

     A quick Google search gave me this picture of a sprue of the above miniatures.  They were pretty simple kits with limited options, but they did have character.

     Google turned up this image for the next batch of miniatures on a sprue.  As you can see, they had no options.  You glued on the arm and stuck him on his base.

     For this fella, I cut the middle horn off his helmet and glued it along with another one to his shoulder pad.  This was apparently before I began drilling out the gun barrels.  More on that later.

     For this happy fellow, I cut into his face, bent his lower jaw down, and carved off his mangled teeth.  Then I added new teeth (or teef, as Orks call them) made from whittled down bits of plastic and a tongue made from putty, if I remember correctly.  I also cut off his axe and gave him a second gun.

     This guy was supposed to represent the leader of my army.  I cut off his side horns and turned them downward (I still like the look of those).  I gave him a power sword and a kustom shoota made from three imperial boltguns and a chainblade.  At one time he had an odd-shaped piece glued onto his belt buckle that represented a kustom force field generator, but it is now long gone.  Although it may be lying in the bottom of one of my many bitz boxes.

     The bright and cartoonish paint jobs were typical of the day.

     I much prefer the gritty, rusted look that is popular today.  I painted these guys about four years ago.  I think my painting technique has improved a little bit.  I'll go into more depth on the process to make these guys sometime down the road.

     I think that's enough for now.  My attention span is... squirrel!


Saturday 16 November 2019

The Thugs: the beginning

     In May of 2011, some friends informed me that they had some kittens that needed to be adopted.  They lived in an old farmhouse outside of Ottawa and already had seven cats when someone abandoned a pregnant cat on their driveway.  They were willing to keep her, but eight cats was their limit.

     I went out to visit and of the six kittens, two continually played around me.  I had been chosen.  I had to wait a couple more weeks for them to be old enough to leave their mother, but I soon became dad to two tiny, adorable beasties.

     This is Silk.  Look at those ears.


     This is Velvet.  Her fur is soooo soft.


     Silk started practicing his mind-control powers right from the get-go.  He's very good.

     Toe beans!

     I could barely handle the cuteness.

     I like that Silk's whiskers are white and Velvet's are black.

     You can see that Velvet actually has the same markings as Silk, but as she got older her fur darkened up and the markings aren't visible anymore.

     I had no idea the impact that these two would have on my life, but it became apparent very quickly that I was their minion.


Friday 15 November 2019

And so it begins...

     Welcome to my blog.  This will likely be a hot mess until I figure out what the heck I'm doing.

     The plan is to show off pictures of my cats (Silk and Velvet) and progress pictures of my builds where I take bits and pieces from various model kits and smush them together in an attempt to make what I see in my mind's eye.  There will be the occasional story about my cats or some random topic, and descriptions of the process and parts used in my builds.

     First, a couple of pictures of the thugs, Silk and Velvet:
Silk

Velvet

     And a couple of pictures of some builds:



     So there you have it.  I will start with pictures of the thugs when they were kittens and stuff that I built years ago and add more pictures every couple of days or so until I get caught up to the present.

     Stay tuned.