Christmas Cheer

Merry Christmas, everyone! (I know I'm a bit late but I've been busy so cut me some slack, okay?) This was my first Christmas as a father and it was just so amazing and special. Best. Christmas. Ever... seriously. My little daughter is fantastic and brilliant, she took her first steps on Christmas morning right in front of the tree! Also my wife got for me the coolest gift I've ever received. She commissioned an artist to paint and oil-on-canvas original of my kitty cat Isabel sitting on the desk of C. Montgomery Burns, having a meeting with the man himself. I've never been so surprised, overwhelmed, and touched by a gift before. My wife's the best! As magical as Christmas was as a child, I can now appreciate it all over again from an entirely new perspective. It's like the magic is back, but better than ever!

I've been making some changes today to the website, in particular my links. I decided to delete outright the Manufacturers and Retailers list that I had maintained, primarily as it no longer served much use to me. I have since gotten comfortable enough with my new computer to start making use of the bookmark folders and simply transferred my preferred sites to one of them. I did add a few of them (GW, Forge World, WarStore) to the Wargaming Resources list for my own convenience. I think the list of links now better reflects the shift in focus I've made in going from historical miniatures to primarily 40k. I will also probably be making some other changes in the coming days, like removing some artwork poached off the net. I'm thinking about deleting point values from my army lists as well, though I'm not quite sure how I feel about that on 1st Amendment grounds. Whatever I end up doing, I hope to have all of it complete in time for the new year.

I'm close to finishing all of the Dreadnought's subassemblies and should be able to get the rest put together tonight. I've got a pretty clear idea of how I want to paint it and so I'm looking forward to getting into that phase quickly, perhaps as soon as tomorrow. The four arms are all magnetized but I think I should have used the larger diameter magnets to better support their weight. They hold them sufficiently well but not as strongly as I would have liked. I made spaces for the magnets using my largest pin-vice drill bit but it was just large enough for the smaller magnets. I don't believe it would be possible to find a larger bit and still use the same drill, so when I want to magnetize something in the future I may look into getting a Dremel or something. Otherwise I am satisfied with my first attempt at working with these little things, though it can be frustrating when they become glued together. Oh my!

Magnetic Fields

I started assembling the Dreadnought after finishing the Librarian and had been making slow progress the last two days cleaning mold lines off just a few pieces, not even enough to glue anything together. But tonight I got down to it in ernest, quickly completing the legs before promptly moving on to the torso. But that is where I have since ventured into potentially uncharted waters, a move that if nothing else will add some extra time to this project but will hopefully be amusing enough to make it worthwhile. I have decided to model the inside of the Dreadnought's sarcophagus! I've only ever seen once, maybe twice, a Nurgle Dreadnought modeled so that a zombie dude could be seen reaching out of the damaged sarcophagus. I wouldn't be surprised if what I am attempting has been done before, but I myself have never seen or heard of such a project.

This choice was made on the spur of the moment and was not planned out in advance so I had to make do with the materials I had immediately at hand. Whenever I've put together a Dreadnought's body, the interior space has always impressed me with just how large of a box it really is. This time around I got the idea of sealing inside a good luck token of some kind to help protect my little plastic machine of doom. Initially I considered taking a metal skull, cramming it on top of a column of Greenstuff, and then gluing it all inside and closing it up. It wasn't until I had mixed the two-part epoxy stuff, however, before I realized that I could magnetize the front plate of the sarcophagus so that it could still be opened up for a look inside. So with my Greenstuff already curing, I grabbed the closest bitz box and found an IG vox-caster and a Chaos Marine decoration that were summarily chopped up. I've had very limited experience working with Greenstuff and so I wasn't expecting to sculpt a beautifully detailed interior. Instead I just plopped the mound of green goo into the middle of the torso and started cramming in the plastic bitz. I then built up another mound of green into which I sunk a rare earth magnet, then glued another to the inside face of the front plate, and finally put them together to make sure they still fit. The fit was fine but I soon learned that I needed to leave them alone to finish curing. Each time I removed the front plate, the inner magnet would pull forward as well with its anchoring mound of Greenstuff... these neodymium magnets are strong!

Ideally I would have liked to make the inside of the Dreadnought look even more cramped and confining. I feel like there's still too much empty space when one peeks inside, but I think this might change once it's painted and the rest of the pieces have been glued into place. The next time I put together a Dreadnought, I would like to plan out how to do a more detailed interior and perhaps even sculpt it as separate pieces that could be painted before positioning them inside the body. Since I probably won't be doing another Dreadnought until I get around to working on the Stonecutters, and who knows when that will be, I should have no shortage of time to think it out. I know for sure I would have loved to have had some guitar strings on hand to create cabling running throughout the inside so they will certainly be included on the next one of these guys. Nothing screams "Grim Dark Future" quite like power cables made from guitar strings! Next time, next time....