It’s funny how we (yes, I know others of you are the same) go through phases of hobby activity. Personally the latter half of 2012 did not get a whole lot of hobby attention but since Christmas I’ve had my mojo back and have been tearing into my projects. Interestingly, there seems to be a pattern to this as the same thing seems to happen each year: Summer inspires a lot of hobby work and in Winter I tend to retract a bit. It should be the other way around so that in Summer one doesn’t have to be continually choosing between the beach and hobby time (fortunately I live close enough to the beach that I don’t have to commit large blocks of time to one or the other)!
But I digress!
As is obvious by the post title I have myself a Warhound Titan. I bought it in the first half of 2012 and while I did a bit of cleanup work on it over the rest of the year, over Christmas I felt inspired to get the project going full swing. The very positive response I got to the painting of my SAW also gave me the confidence I need to feel that I can do a decent job of painting the Warhound, which is also an epic task.
Cleanup and assembly has been a big job. There are a LOT of parts and they pretty much all have some mould lines to be removed. All have gates that need removal too. There were a few badly cast and damaged parts but I elected to repair them myself with putty rather than screw around sorting out replacements. All of the joints have been pinned and I’m using Zap A Gap 5 minute epoxy for any important joins. I decided early on that I wouldn’t bother with the interior for 3 reasons:
- It’s intended to be a static display model in a case so nobody will be looking inside
- Getting the body to assemble properly so that the internal parts all line up nicely is a pain
- Painting the interiors would add a lot of time to painting
One thing I did want to do was something interesting for the grille that covers the cooling systems on the top of the carapace armour (rather than the boring brass etch grille supplied). I played around in Inkscape and came up with what I felt was a cool, suitably 40k style design. 10 minutes with my CNC router and some really thin styrene sheet produced this:
To be really honest I’m not completely sold on the skull (yes, that’s what the centre cutout is supposed to be) design. The problem is that I couldn’t come up with anything else that I felt more appropriate routed out in that style. Imperial eagles are too detailed. And I wanted to have a fair amount of open area to show plenty of the details underneath. I’ll think about it some more as I continue assembly.
The other thing I’ve been giving some consideration to is the diorama base for this one. I did a test last night and while I’m pretty sure it will be stand freely without a base (despite the “walking” pose, which you’ll see soon), it won’t be super stable. Plus a nice base really completes a model! Inspired by this Warhound (I’m planning to do a blue and yellow Warp Runners Legion colour scheme too) I am considering a snowy setting (primarily because I haven’t done snow before, and to not do something new wouldn’t be keeping with my hobby masochistic tendencies). But I also don’t want to do such a featureless expanse as featured on the SAW diorama. So I’m now starting to think “snowy ruined city street”, inspired by the building modelling work featured on a recent Eye of Terror blog post (seriously that is one of the best Imperial building ruins I’ve seen anywhere).
The one thing I need to do is make sure I don’t go overboard with the base size: the SAW diorama only just fits into my display cabinet (the base has to be oriented in a specific, non-ideal way). The Warhound is also a very large model (similar footprint as the SAW and a lot taller). Suddenly I wish I didn’t get rid of all of my Cities of Death bits on a previous clean out (although I do have an unopened Manufactorum box sitting around)!
I’ll post some pics of the Warhound itself as assembly nears completion. But really, we’ve all seen assembled Warhound pics a million times before. They’re pretty commonplace nowadays. I wonder if Forge World ever anticipated the sheer number of them they would sell?