Geist-Servitor

Sometimes you just need a good light.

Geist-servitors are little more than upgraded servo-skulls. They float around being basically flying tools, and they have the added benefit of serving as eyes and ears of the magi. This one carries lamps on its back to illuminate excavation sites and better explore hard to reach places. 

Despite the lack of weapons the geist-servitor can be also used in combat, revealing enemies in cover with its spotlight and tracking them so the servants of the Omnissiah can triangulate shots with extreme precision. They haunt single targets like ominous spirits, stripping them of any cover.

This is an older model, made before the heavy duty servitor. I like the weirdness of it, and the pose that makes it look like it's drifting in the breeze! 

Heavy Duty Servitor

Time to try this blog thing again I guess...

Here's one of the elements of my Mechanicus Explorator warband: a heavy duty servitor converted from a Necromunda Ambot.

An adaptation of the Luther-pattern excavation automata commonly found throughout the Imperium, the Graia-pattern heavy duty servitor is employed when operations require a much sturdier frame than the normal humanoid servitors. Keeping the chassis almost unaltered, the ambull cortex is replaced by a servitor brain, making it far easier to control and reprogram. They're usually fitted with much more powerful tools than common servitors and, as befits a warlike world like Graia, they can be turned from assistant to warrior with a single thought, their heavy duty tools and sturdy frame making them powerful battering rams.

This servitor is fitted with a heavy rock saw and a multi-melta, allowing it to tear through rockcrete and steel with ease, cracking open the old vaults forgotten under the hive city so that the techpriests can prey upon the treasures that lay within. 

I like how this guy came out. Especially the saw arm, that emphasises the already hulking pose even more and had been so much fun to realise. I wanted to give the idea of an industrial tool that could be fitted or detached as needed - and there's still the option to manually operate it in case of problems. 

And the tiny skull head too!

The Steel Skulls

The Steel Skulls are models I began working on two years ago, I think. And in some cases the quality of painting is showing. But I still like them, so I'll leave them as they are until I'll work on the rest of the squad - then I'll update the others.

The Steel Skulls are an underhive gang of tech-scrappers. They are adept at salvaging and repurposing. They all show some form of technological augmentation, more or less extensive depending on rank and role. Implants vary from a simple bionic eye to rebreathers and cybernetic limbs. Most notably, all Steel Skulls have implants on their heads, trait from which derives their name: head augmentations are the symbol of gang membership, and the first ones to be grafted upon induction in their ranks. 

The Steel Skulls dwell under the more populated layers of the hive. From there, they launch raiding parties to pillage more technology, hoarding tech to become more and more powerful. They are extremely talented technicians, and their most expert members serve both as field medics and engineers, repairing both their comrades' flesh and tech. For all these reasons, Techpriests despise them, seeing them as heretics, and actively hunt them down at every opportunity. At the same time, though, a Techpriest is a prized prey, for in the eyes of a Steel Skull it's like a bag full of shiny toys.

They favor fighting in environments that put others to severe disadvantage. Their favored tactic is striking in pitch black darkness: their enemies usually don't realize they're being stalked, until they see a pair of glowing green eyes in the dark - but then it's already too late.

This is one of their medic-engineers. As you can see, he's equipped with a multipurpose tool, that can work either as a medical or technical tool, and a case which is surely full of shiny gadgets to keep everyone (or everything) alive. Plus the ubiquitus head implants.
You can also see that skull dangling from a chain: it's a literal steel skull, that serves as the gang's badge.

The colour scheme is simple, favoring black and dark grey together with steel and grey-ish skin, so that the only focus was on the many green lights.

More mutants!

More than one month since the last post, wow. University sure does know how to drain your desire to work.

Anyway, here we have more mutants! Not much background for them, at least not now, but we can all make some assumptions from their appearance. They're just like animals, hiding most of the time and just coming out to hunt - or to scavenge food.

It looks like someone experimented on them. Are they discarded models of servitors? Some grotesque creations of a mad  scientist? Did they escape from a Mechanicum lab? Something even more sinister entirely? Time will tell...


The paint job is the same as Uncle Istvan and the other mutant, but I tried to give a feeling of illness and dead meat even stronger using more purple. I'm also quite proud of the poses!

Uncle Istvan

Welcome to another day of mutations!

Uncle Istvan is a deranged, cannibal hermit. He lives alone in a hidden shack among the ruins, down in the underhive, surrounded by the skulls of those he ate. Despite his fragile, ill appearance, he wields his massive axe with impressive strength, stalking his prey from the shadows until he leaps out of the darkness screaming and laughing, trying to chop heads off. Uncle Istvan lost his sanity long ago, age mixed to loneliness and starvation, and now he's loyal only to his stomach: anybody is just meat, be it human, animal or mutant.

The crazy hermit is a feared figure. Stories are told of a skinny old man, hunched around a massive axe, cackling like a maniac. Even the most boastful gangers fear to travel through what are considered Uncle Istvan's hunting grounds, and patrols tend to travel squeezed together, hands clutched frantically to their weapons, everyone trying to stay in the middle of the group. And then a laugh echoes...

To be honest, I like this model a lot. I'm not a good sculptor, hence the fact that I managed to make this, even with all his flaws, makes me happy. It's also one of those models that suddenly come out together in a single go: the name and background came while I was building him (points if you get the name reference).

There's lots of greenstuff: I glued the arms to the body in a precarious position, and then filled the spaces with g.s.; same for the neck. The upper and lower half of the body are kept together with g.s. too, and in fact the rope that holds his rags and the skull are all there to cover the ugly mess of the joint.

So, what do you think? Critics, suggestions, opinions?

See you next time!

Mutants

“I tell you one of those foul things ate Bob! They only found his gun and some drips of blood.”

“Stop trying to scare me, Gus. I’m not a kid anymore.”

“Sssssh! Quiet! Then stop acting like one and listen. These places are dangerous.”

“Yeah, yeah. As you say, old man. I’m sure we’ll OH GOD SHOOT IT! SHOOT IT!”

Down in the underhive, in the darker domes, amid the ruins, mutants find shelter. Some form packs, some lurk alone; some still retain traces of humanity, others devolve into mindless beasts. But whatever crosses those territories is doomed to attract many a hungry mouth. Thus they’ll look like a group, while the truth is every mutant is racing to secure the juiciest bits.

Tales of horror and gruesome death are told by the other gangers around campfires, like one would a ghost story. Tunnels are sealed and guarded. But some still try to venture in those places, and not everyone return.

Mutants are not actually a “gang”. They are a ragtag collection of mutated, deformed, deranged individuals that all happen to be hungry. So I’m trying to shape each of them individually, make every one of them easily recognizable as a character. Many of them won’t even have names. 

This one, for example, wears what remains of a hazmat suit. Once a worker, mutations wracked both his body and his mind. Now  his only instincts are killing and eating.

I built this guy from an Acolyte Hybrid body. The forearms and the head come from the Crypt Ghouls, and the bludgeon is made of two pieces of a banner of the Empire Flagellants. I swear Warhammer Fantasy AoS is a goldmine when you want to make Inq28 conversions!

The hazmat suit is painted with abundance of washes and paint splatters here and there. The skin is something I like doing with all my mutants (yes, there will be more, hopefully soon!): I start with Rakarth Flesh, and then I begin adding thin patches of colours: Kislev Flesh, Slaaneshi Grey, Cadian Fleshtone, and some crevices darkened with Reikland Fleshshade. Everything extremely thin, to simply provide different tones to the skin, trying to make it look ill.

Now, I need to choose how to make the base. Since the mutants live in abandoned areas, amid the ruins, maybe I could make them like the Techpriest’s one. Let’s see.

Mechanicum Explorator Squad

Under the city... below, below, in the depth of darkness of forgotten vaults...


The Imperium of Man, in its ignorance, built upon itself, burying its past, forgetting, one might even say purposefully, its power and its danger.

Words have been whispered in blurred static, echoed through the noosphere. Of something buried deep under the city. Something powerful but, most important, something old.

And the Mechanicum covetes old things above everything else.


One of the many warbands I'm slowly building is an explorator squad of the Adeptus Mechanicus. Their mission will be investigating if the rumors are true, and that will necessarily make them clash with the other gangs.

What I want to strive for with these models is to recreate what I have always felt the Mechanicum was: cloaked figures, cables, creepy retro-futuristic technology, shining eyes in the dark. Something along with these lines, which is one of my absolute favorites:

https://i.pinimg.com/564x/32/ed/f0/32edf09934de8f7619401bbdac74abb5.jpg


Let's see the first model of the squad!

I wanted the colour scheme to reflect the Mechanicum of old: red robes, black-yellow danger stripes, brownished steel. I didn't like the idea of using blue or green  for the lenses, so I went back to John Blanche's works and noticed he used white, which I tried to replicate here (though I should retouch it to make it brighter). Black for the gun seemed an appropriate colour; no energy effect on the coils for the same reason of the eyes, and didn't fit the model anyway. 

Since the theme was a squad exploring old vaults and crypts, I made the base to look like an old stone pavement. Had so much fun creating it!

The only complaint I have is that my camera sucks, and does horrible things to red. The robes have been painted with Mephiston Red, and it doesn't look like that.

So, what do you think?