Commission work: Thousand sons #1, and the grief involved...

Fear not, for the custodia watch over you!  

Throne, I'm tired.

At my FLGS a month or so ago, a local gamer asked if I could paint him a squad of rubric marines; he had some old CSM that he'd never got around to painting, some 3rd party resin chaps along with a metal sorcerer and Lucius the Eternal (who you would've seen finished last post).  I picked them up as I went past into town, thinking how fun and exciting it would be to paint blue and gold for once!  Ho ho... I'm such an optomist... actually, I was wound up with getting the canoness figure and didn't think much about how HORRIBLE resin-- particularly old, 3rd party stuff-- could be.

Well, got them home and realised they were already undercoated.  In a LOT of black.  Worse thing was the fact that the client hadn't pinned anything, and had used either an improper glue, or had put them together longer ago than I thought; hardly anything was holding and guns were balanced above hands, stuck down with drips of primer...

Dorn help me!

 Sorry for the rotten picture quality-- again.  The sorcerer was the only candidate up for the dettol bath, so in he went.

 

And after a  while of hesitant pulling on arms and heads, this was about all that actually held:  Out came the drill press and the wire cutters...  Bit of a side thing here; I'm harvesting boysenberries tomorrow, and I have to practise getting up at FIVE in the morning; a tricky thing for an insomniac.  I've been working on these chaps to stop myself falling back to sleep.

What you're seeing here is easily 15" of wire and three night's worth of hobby time.  What made it more challenging was the fact of the 3rd party bodies not fitting the GW legs, so they needed to be scraped out and greenstuffed.  This left them looking a bit tall in the body so I added pouches to try and cover this up.  In the words of brother-captain Erecond Gaius, "Brothers, we are being tested..."
Matching arms to bodies again was a bit of a task, and with the way the guns had been attached left for some... awkward... poses.  Can't say I tried though.

Pfft...

After adding a few strips of parchment  and basing them all, I got down to painting, at last.  I started with a Very Very Careful spray of corax white-- Throne, they had enough chaos black on them for three times their number, but we'll have to see what happens.

Sotek green to Africa; quite an intriguing colour, I might add.

So after another hour after the green/blue and an entire Equilibrium album later, this is where I'm up to.  I think the guns are going to be red or silver, and there's going to be a lot of yellow and bone to go.

Ten past eight, and I'd better go and have breakfast.  Bye bye for now.