Aunds Blog

I’m not good at meeting painting deadlines. I’ve set my own painting targets in the past and never seem to meet them, either because I become distracted by something else or I inevitably spend too much time on one project. That being said 6 weeks seemed like ample time to complete my latest venture.

Roll on Kingdom of Adventures Pirate Painting Competition. The criteria was to come up with something ‘Piratey’ and so I spent a few days podering on what I could come up with.
Given my interest is primary 40K, Orks naturally seemed the way to go with there pirate like qualities, I had many of the Ork figures unassembled from the Black Reach box set so this reinforced the initial thought. The warboss was the most imposing figure so it made sense to work with him.
Now how to piratize the figure? A hat? Good start but we need more. A plank! A Space Marine being made to walk the plank by the warboss! Hmmm could be tricky. I know a ship! Well maybe if I can make one. So after tossing around loads of ideas in my head project VOM was borne.

I wanted to build a pirate ship but had very little scratch building experience. I also wanted to do this as cheaply as possible. I scoured the internet looking for ideas on how to go about building a ship but found nothing so in the end I scribbled some ideas down on paper of how I might go about this.

Next I checked my material stock. I’ve been hoarding lollipop sticks for months thinking they might come in handy for some future terrain project. I had foam board and plastic tubing left over from a previously failed scratch built drop pod. I also had some fantasy terrain sprues picked up at last years game day that could lend some touches to the ship.

After a few hours messing about this was the initial result:

Eeeek. I thought of abandoning here. The thing was clearly looking questionable. Over the next few weeks I decided to keep at it, until eventually I could see it taking shape. I won’t bore you with every detail but here’s a few pics to show how it progressed. I managed to spent about an hour or so every night on it

Ok it’s getting there but we need a sail me hearties. Paper, a printer and some PVA glue be the answer.

Slap on some paint

Wouldn’t it be nice if there was a sea for it to sail on?

Alright this is starting to look the part but I now found myself with 2 weeks left to go and no crew onboard. Whilst I had been building the ship I’d ordered a few minis and bits to crew it. I wanted a suitable ‘idiot’ character to walk the plank and found him on coolmini’s shop.

I painted my idiot first and wanted to base him on a certain comic book owner who owns the following t-shirt. Given it said crewman it also fit in well.

Ok dokey got the idiot done now just to finish the ork warboss. Given this was a painting competition I wanted to do him do a very good standard. I’d done quite simple drybrushing on the ship and the ‘idiot’ had only taken a a couple of days so now to concentrate on old Orky.

To finally cut a very long post short I ran out of time. I had to abandon a lot of ideas I had and didn’t actually manage to finish the ship in the way I intended. I spent this morning hastily finishing the paint job on my ork warboss which was a shame as I’d spent considerable time keeping quite a precise job only to finish up slapping the paint on him and abandoning some highlighting. That being said the end result was still decent.

I probably could have spent another 6 weeks on this and still not have finished it to my satisfaction. I thoroughly enjoyed working on it though. Despite the shortcomings of the end job the fact I had a deadline to work to kept me focused and interested. Whereas I would normally have several distractions on the go at once, this competition has been my sole painting outlet for the last 6 weeks and actually resulted in a ‘finished’ project. If only self imposed deadlines could have the same effect!