Tarsis

Here’s some more details on the final stages of base finishing. I wanted to have an infantry model on the base to give a sense of scale for when the titan isn’t being used in a game (because, let’s be honest, I’m probably going to get to use this only a very few times, so it’s mostly going to be for display). One of my friends suggested I should have someone getting stepped on, like a Tau Crisis Suit or something, but there were a couple of problems with that in my mind. Firstly, I don’t like super gory models and bases. Personal opinion, but I just don’t think they look good, and I don’t particularly want something like that in my house where my 1 year-old is going to ask questions about what all that blood spilling out of the squashed guy is. Secondly, I kind of like the Tau and am considering them as a second army (My main is Space Marines), so I don’t necessarily want to run into a situation where I’m fielding this thing alongside a potential future Tau army and there’s squashed Tau guys under the Titan. Awkward… I thought about doing a Fire Warrior standing by the ruins looking scared, but that can be hard to convey with a model sometimes (my green stuff skills are not amazing). But then I thought, maybe I could have the Fire Warrior watching somebody get stepped on– that would convey the general feeling.

Anyway, I got to thinking that if I wanted anybody to be stepped on, it’d be Chaos. I don’t think I’m ever going to field a Chaos army, and they’ve kind of been my arch-nemesis ever since I started playing 40k (both my brother and my high school friends played Chaos armies). So, I decided I could do a squashed Chaos marine and wouldn’t need to make him all gory to get the point across that “this guy just got stepped on by something enormous.”

In this first picture you can see that I had remarked the toe positions in a darker marker; this makes it possible for me to slather gluey sand all over the base without getting it all over the toes of the titan. In the below picture, the ruins behind the titan’s left foot and the tile pieces behind that have all been epoxied in place. I’ve also glued down the Chaos posessed marine that’s been smashed into the ground. I bent his arms and backpack up a bit, then smashed his shoulder pads with a clamp I had used earlier in the titan-building process.

Next up, I put down some sand. For this, I basically just dumped some sand into a plastic cup and added water until the sand looked wet and was easily stir-able without being too much like slime. Then I added a bunch of PVA glue and spread it onto the base with a plastic spoon and a knife to give me a bit more precision. After it had dried, it was pretty solid, so I spray-primed the whole thing black, then dry-brushed brown over the dirt with a large brush. After that, I did some drybrushed P3 Greatcoat Grey and Citadel Administratum Grey onto the ruins and stones. I think I followed it up with a very light drybrushing of Dheneb Stone, but I don’t quite remember. I also did a lighter brown on the dirt in some places for highlights. I didn’t bother doing a wash; I tried it a bit on a small area and it was almost completely invisible, so I didn’t bother with doing any more. I did the Chaos marine in red so he’d stand out from the blue on the titan and brown on the base. I also washed him liberally with Agrax Earthshade to give him more of a beat-up and dirty look.

Here you can see it with the titan’s legs placed over the body while I was checking what it would look like when finished.

Next up, completed titan!

It’s been a little while since I posted, but I’ve made a lot of progress; it’s been rather slow, but relatively consistent. I started final assembly of the titan today. The legs are epoxied to the base and are curing as I write, the rest of the titan will follow suit over the course of the next few days. I have to leave 16-24 hours for drying time between each stage.

Since I started off talking about the base in the last post, I’ll lead off talking about it here as well. After doing some of the painting I demonstrated at the end of the last post, I started work on how to secure the titan to the base I had cut out. I considered epoxy, but I wasn’t sure it would be sufficient on its own; after all, it would need to pull the entire weight of the base up with it when I lifted it.

Eventually, I decided to do some screws. I could sink them into the underside of the base in such a way that it would remain flat on the bottom and still provide some additional strength. I determined to use #4 x 1/2″ flat-head wood screws. These would be short enough that they wouldn’t stick up through the top of the toes, but also long enough to provide sufficient pinning strength. I started out by setting the feet onto the base in the position I wanted them, then penciled some outlines of where the toes and the ruins went. It wasn’t perfect, but it was decent.

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More stuff in the Warhound building! I worked on the base a bit a few days ago. I’ve seen a few people use large cutting boards, CD/DVDs, or other stuff for their titan bases.  I wanted something bigger than a couple of CDs but not as big as a cutting board, so I decided to get some hardboard from the hardware store and cut my own base out of it. I just placed the titan’s legs onto the base and pencil-drew a rough rounded shape around the feet at about the size I wanted. After that, I cut it out with the drywall bit on my dremel, then sanded down the edges and put a bevel on it with the drum sander.

The drywall bit gave me a fairly wobbly cut around the edge I wanted (it was my first time using it, this has been a project of firsts), but I was able to sand it down to smooth enough for my purposes.  I don’t necessarily want it to look like it’s a perfectly rounded base; a little unevenness gives it a bit of a “this was torn out of the ground where the titan was walking and frozen in time” look (besides, I don’t think I can get it perfectly rounded…).

Then I did some paint tests in trying to figure out the paint scheme I want to use.

These are just some gates that I cut off the titan pieces. The one on the left is black primer, the middle is white primer, and the right one is gray primer.  In this picture I was considering doing a blue/black or a blue/white color scheme. I eventually decided on the latter, because the blue and the white are nice contrasting colors.  I’m a sucker for blue schemes, it’s always been my favorite color.

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