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Tuesday, January 5, 2016

Project Log: Mortis Engine

Happy New Year, everyone! I can't believe it's been four years since I started this blog. Thanks to everyone for following along. Extra kudos to you if you've been following since the beginning. Hopefully I've kept things new and interesting for you.


The project log this week is something from the "I bought this years ago and I'm just getting to it now" file– The Mortis Engine.


I had held off on this for a number of reasons, mainly because I wasn't sure how I was going to paint the ethereal swarm, and because the whole kit seemed pretty intimidating. Once I began assembling it, however, the parts went together fairly easily. Cleaning the mold line on the spirits was probably the most time-consuming aspect. All the pieces fit together pretty simply to form two halves of the spirit horde:

 

 

I kept the halves of the horse bodies and the weapon arms separate so I could spray the undersides. Then I glued the horses together and the riders' arms in place and re-sprayed everything with grey and white.


 

The banshees that swirl around the top of the Mortis Engine were also assembled and pinned onto dowels for priming and painting. The attachment points for these are really flimsy, so I may have to get creative when it comes time to attach them.



 

The bone cage around the blasphemous tome also went together easily. The sculpted flame on the skeleton braziers was a bit two-dimensional, so I embellished it with some putty. 



 

The real work went into the base. The "chariot" frame of the Mortis Engine is a stone stairway with roses and thorns sculpted onto the steps. I wanted the Mortis Engine to be a monument to the legacy of my wraith Korak the Grim, a floating funerary barge where all the souls he's taken are bound in eternal torment. No living thing should be able to exist in its presence, so I removed all the roses and thorns where I could, and covered the rest with piles of skulls. 


 

These are a combination of Secret Weapon Miniatures resin skulls and a few plastic GW skulls.



 

The skulls were all carefully positioned to fit around the robes of the Corpsemaster figure. This model will perhaps represent Korak himself, riding his chariot of death across the field of battle.


 

'Til next time!

4 comments:

  1. Just an FYI, the Chariot Stairway rests on the spirit host swarm as you know- BUT the parts they rest on in the swarm are actually BONE parts for the chariot frame. Sadly I did not notice this until I had painted and assembled everything. It would be a super pain in the neck exercise to fix- so I have not yet. But over time as I field the darn thing, all I see is the mucked up painted area.. so make sure you don't miss this detail! I think you and I sit on the same page: the devil is in the details. Nothing saddens me more than to see an eye-watering paint job with a mold line showing or some other part lacking for an eye with detail.....

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    Replies
    1. I caught that, so I'll definitely be painting those little bone bits. Not sure if I'll putty the join or if it'll look acceptable as a seam between two different bone sections connecting. Thanks for the heads up, though!

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