Justaerin - Part I

 

Clad me in spiked studs!

The recent Siege Assault Battle Group was good value for money when bought from a third party store, so I ended grabbing myself a copy. I didn't really fancy buying more models just yet, but I did want those new Cataphractii, and I could always sell the rest (probably won't, but I could). Naturally having the box sitting there I needed to assemble something and get a true feel for the new sculpts.

The end result is pretty great. The torsos aren't as bad as photos initially suggested, and if really necessary they could be padded out with green-stuff. The poses I was a little unsure about, but they do make everything seem more ponderous, which is absolutely spot-on for these suits of armour. Assembly, though, could use a few improvements.

The initial problem I was faced with (pun intended) was how to position the head correctly. I wanted it to face the same direction as the gun, and a wild guess likely would have it in the wrong position. So I needed to assemble the legs, some of the torso, and glue the arm into position, but not attaching the front and rear of the torso. Then I lined up the head, took some reference positions, and glued the head into what I thought was the right position. I did have a little time to make minor adjustments with tweezers afterwards and it ended up alright. I generally prefer to paint and glue heads into position much later, but the assembly here wouldn't permit that. Maybe I could trim some of the bottom of the head, but then that won't sit proper, and so in the end I've just fully assembled the model. Maybe in future I could PVA glue the chest in place, but that's just a lot of effort to paint areas that I doubt will be seen anyway.

The shoulder pads were a pain. They're in multiple pieces, I took the wrong parts from a different sprue (because the numbering is the same), and on the left shoulder pad the top tilted down where it wasn't supposed to. This gave everything the wrong angle and actually forced apart the under "plate" (I needed some severe gap filling with green-stuff to correct that). To compensate for the wrong angle I forced the arm up slightly and used pieces of plastic to add a kind of wedge (melted with copious plastic glue) to keep it in place. I fell like a few adjustments with little plastic nubs could've made all of that a lot easier to handle.

The hip plates do fit alright, but need care and should be done before putting the arms in place. Too bad I needed to put the arms in place first on account of the torso, but maybe that can be avoided: the attachment for the hip plates on this model are actually not on the torso piece and might not interfere if trying to add it later.

When attaching to the base, the angle wasn't quite right either. That's on me of course, and I only needed to tilt the model by one or two degrees, but it did mean mixing up the base and putting some extra debris underfoot to stabilise everything. Luckily the foot happened to be over an area that I thought would look cool if it was kind of crushed as the heavy armour stepped on it, so it all worked out in the end.

I'm making this model a Justaerin for practice. The triangular spiked studs let me try my hand and smaller sculpting, working the putty, and getting to be more familiar with how fast it cures, how the tools work, etc. I've actually made a small stamp for the spikes in future and can scuplt them sparately to later glue into place, but the experience with clay shapers was worth it for now. The little stamp was made by drilling a hole into a spare piece of sprue, adding putty inside, and then pushing the end of a thunder hammer from the kit through. Water or Vaseline makes sure that nothing sticks to the stamp when using it - but it works best with a "spiky" tip to stamp into. Pretty sure I'm getting the hang of bases too, but I have a few other ideas to make that easier (I don't have unlimited Sector Imperialis bases, and I'd like all the Horus Heresy models I do to have similar bases). Much sculpting ahead!

I'm not yet done with this model, and I have no real intention to start painting it quite yet. I just wanted to play around with it. There will be more painted model progress coming very soon.

-- silly painter.