kill vehicle not exoatmospheric, but slightly more plausible

In which I face my fear of putty

Stormblades!

There are a few things I'd hope to do better next time, but overall I'm pretty happy with how they came out. I suspect most of th imperfections won't be noticeable after they're primed.

Here's a close up of the unit leader:

His positioning is pretty good, and I love the detail of his special electro-glaive. It's a cool weapon, and it makes telling him apart from the grunts very easy.

The toughest model was this one, with the raised sword:

The problem here wasn't sculpting, but rather simple positioning — his head is a separate (and tiny) piece, which made fitting it into the tight space behind the sword-and-hands piece quite difficult. I ended up having to whittle off a good bit of the metal from the front edge of the helmet before it even came close to fitting, which was a bit frustrating. I also coated my fingers in superglue trying to get everything to set, but at least I didn't glue them to anything.

Here's a detail of the putty work:

It'll need some trimming and filing before I can prime these pieces, but overall it's a good bit better than I thought I'd manage. It took me a while to get the hang of working with the stuff, which meant that by the time I sort of knew what I was doing, the putty had started hardening and becoming more difficult to work with. Oops.

Anyway, next time I'll know to control the proportions of the putty mix a little better, mix less at once, and roll out thinner cylinders before trying to fill cracks with it. It also took me far too long to realize that I'd be better off cutting off excess putty with the knife than trying to do so with sculpting tools. They're handy for shaping, but they're not nearly as sharp as a razor blade, so I ended up pushing too much putty around when all I really wanted was a quick clean cut.

So, overall, pretty much a success.

Sentinel, assembled

Well, that's that. Time to try and get the Stormblades together, 'cause I'm running out of excuses.

Tonight’s project

Should be doing: sucking it up and finishing up assembling the Stormblade Infantry, even though that means a lot of pinning and learning how to sculpt with the modeling epoxy putty to smooth out the awkward torso-to-leg joins.

Actually doing instead:

Oh well. What can I say? I have a weakness for chainguns.