u/Erilaz_Of_Heruli

Nothing fancy here, just a plain old Guardian ! I'm actually really happy with how this one turned out, I especially feel like I've improved painting skin tones even though getting the eyes right is still pretty damn tricky. C&C are welcome !

Oh boy, this model gave me a lot of grief. First of all, I'm in absolute love with the whole corsair lineup (even though I have a personal theory that someone saw how fucking hard the person who came up with the Visarch cooked, and seeing how the ynnari plotline isn't going anywhere, they just decided to make a faction out of him).

But these skyreaver sculpt are FLIMSY, this one broke at the ankle and was a pain to put back together (some of you might have seen my recent post on the process). As I also mentioned, they're exquisitely detailed so just a regular paintjob (especially considering that I was testing out the color scheme !) would have been plenty, but for some reason I decided that I wanted to try out some new techniques I'd never pulled off before namely OSL.

In the end I'm happy with the result but I had to push through a LONG phase of "this looks terrible, I should just start over" before it kind of clicked into place. I've definitely got a lot to learn when it comes to OSL, it's okay but to me the result looks messy yet somehow so subtle you kind of don't even notice it lol. Tbh I think part of it is my god awful lighting set up (these were taken with a desk lamp and a smartphone flashlight btw).

Anyway, I think I'm going to paint me up some good old guardians next to chill out a bit. I'd love to hear what you guys think !

So it finally happened : one of these beautifully posed, and somewhat flimsy, skyreaver models snapped at the leg after being dropped while moving stuff around my desk.

This one accident doesn't fully account for the poor state of the model in the first picture. First, I tried simply filing the surface at the break point and glueing them together. This appeared to work at first but the joint was way too weak and it broke pretty soon afterwards while being lightly handled.

Then I decided to use super glue. However for some reason the brand I have doesn't work with gw plastic and just caused the plastic to melt and lose a ton of material in the leg.

So I decided to lock in. I bought a small power tool for modelling and some brass rods and decided to perform the first pinning of my modelling career.

Somehow, this lead to more mishaps. When drilling the hole in the foot, I messed up the angle and drilled through my poor skyreaver's ankle. Furthermore, I also found out that even at the lowest rpm setting, drilling too aggressively would cause the plastic to melt from friction. This lead to 1) the bit drifting inside the model and creating a wider hole than intended and 2) gumming up the drill with plastic slag which I had no choice but to burn off with a lighter.

After many trials and tribulations, I was finally able to pin the leg back together with a generous helping of super glue (another brand this time). Which left me with a solid, if somewhat lumpy and awful, joint.

I then proceeded to file away the excess glue and melted plastic and tried my best to fill-in the significant gap with vallejo plastic cement, which I let dry and then refined with more filing.

The last two pictures show the restored leg with a basecoat then fully painted. Overall I can't deny that I lost a lot of detail on that part of the mini, but I'm pretty happy with the results considering how damaged the area was to start with. I hope you all find this process interesting, and that it might help you avoid all the mistakes I did if you ever need to go through something similar !

Progressing on the guardian squad... I'd love some feedback if you see anything you think could be improved!

Heya, just got done with two guardian defenders and can't really decide which one I like more for my eldar army. In terms of lore I like both Iyanden and Biel-Tan. From a visual standpoint I like the thorny vine designs of Biel-Tan (Iyanden doesn't really have anything like that unfortunately), but I feel like the blue and yellow theme of Iyanden is more interesting.

So choose whichever one you prefer and I might select that one for my subsequent minis ! Any feedback on the models is also more than welcome. For the Iyanden Guardian I tried painting the metallic details to look like a dark silver, but I'm not sure I pulled it off so I'll probably rework the recipe a bit.