Sunday 8 June 2014

Land Raider Rebuild

Following on from a Rhino I "rebuilt" a few weeks ago and included in a series of photos talking about my new camera, I turned my attention to a very old purchase which has been in bits on the shelf for too many months. In a classic "craigslist" moment, I traded my small collection of Warmachine models for a Land Raider plus cash, only to drive an hour to pick it up and find it was a very spiky Chaos Land Raider, and not the flat sided soon to be Blood Angels Land Raider of my dreams!



After toying with the idea of starting a Chaos army, for which I would probably want to re-model the Land Raider anyway, I took to the spikes with some side cutters, a hobby knife and a sculpting tool,creating a nice neat pile of bits and an extremely battle scarred tank. For six months or more it sat gathering (even more) dust, during which time I found an even more wildly converted Land Raider from my Ork collection, and they both sat on the shelf taunting me. So what changed? The rules of course, with this year revealing yet another edition and the ability to field "objective secured" scoring Land Raiders!







Fast forward a good many days waiting for green stuff to harden sufficiently to be filed, scraped, and carved to rebuild the pitted surfaces, a little sanding and the addition of new barrels, weapons and accessories, and it was nearly ready for a can of spray. One small detail which nearly had me in knots and trying not to slice my fingers creating was the super thin rivets to glue back in place. In the end I drilled holes in the hull and inserted plasticard rods, trimming and filing to near the correct height. This used a lot more material than just slicing rivets, but saved a lot of effort and swearing!



So after many months procrastinating, and a few days worth of modelling while watching a movie or two, I have my first ever Land Raider ready for paint! With a delay in starting my Blood Angels due to additional skills learned at a recent painting class, I am itching to try out some "two brush blending" on a large model such as this! As you may recall, when I first started glazing models it was on a Leman Russ Battle tank, so it seems fitting to be trying out yet another new technique on the largest model I can find. This make it both easy to practice something new (as you can clean up large surfaces easily) but also not very forgiving if the transition between colours is not smooth!

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