Daeothar's Imperial Knights - Assembly complete and Serfs printed

[Daeothar]

Several years ago already, I picked up an unbuilt Imperial Knight from a local kid on a Dutch auction site for very cheap. I had always wanted one, because the kits were so cool, but it took until about a month ago for me to finally dig up the sprues and get started on it.

And I've been having heaps of fun cleaning up and assembling this beast.

Yes; I said I fun cleaning it up, because I've (again) found that cutting, filing, sanding and polishing parts has a strangely therapeutic effect on me. So much so, that halfway through, I bought another one for about the same amount on the same site. And then a third one, which is the big(ger) one, with turrets on top of its shoulder pauldrons.

That'll be the leader of this lance squadron of mechs Knight Titans. See; along the way, a sort of plan developed. I am now going to build an Imperial Knight army, consisting of three proper, big Knights, and a handful of Armigers (a smaller type of mech Knight), possibly supported by a squad or more of household troops.

Those, I am looking forward to kitbashing out of Fireforge Men at Arms, Cadians and Skittari. Should be heaps of fun!

But in the meanwhile, I'm still working on the first of the large Knights. And because they're rather expensive, I decided to make all the weapon options fully modular. Which meant magnets...

So I magnetized all weapons, including the smaller ones in the torso, so I could eventually switch all of them around as I pleased, to get the loadouts I'd require on a battle by battle basis.

I started out with the two torso mounted weapons. I simply glued the end caps on the brackets and glued a piece of plasticard on top. This would then really secure the magnets I push fit into the holes underneath:





From there, it was a simple action to add matching magnets into the weapon mounts, after cutting off the nubs that would originally go into the brackets.

And since I had initially bought the titan version with the powerfist, vulcan mega-cannon and carapace mounted weapon, I had to make sure the latter would be able to be switched out as well.

I solved this by enlarging the hole in the carapace, where the weapon should go, and inserting a piece of plastic tube. As you can see here, I also added supports to it on the underside, to prevent it from being bent or even broken out of position:



The carapace weapons, a rocket-pod and an AA gun, both received their own styrene tubing, matching the inside diameter of the carapace one, so they would fit on snugly. And yes; I magnetized them as well. Probably unnecessarily, but it won't hurt after all. Oh; and I also found a small bit of gubbins to close off the hole in the carapace when there would not be a weapon on top. This received the same rod underneath (but no magnet ).



Next up were the arm weapons; the main attraction I'd say. And because I have done every weapon in the same way, they'll be fully swappable.

I filed and sanded the shoulder nubs into a diameter matching that of a large length of styrene tubing. And then I added a large magnet to the center of both, nicely flush with the surface:



Finally, I enlarged the openings of the weapon side of the above connection, by cutting away the rim that would normally hold the rim of the shoulder into place. Instead, I added a short length of the abovementioned large styrene tube, and put some putty on the bottom, in which I embedded the same type of magnet that was used in the shoulder. And that times four, for each weapon I had available (should have been five, but I found out that the kit provided only one weapon casing and joint for the meltacannon and the battlecannon, so I had to choose. I went with the meltacannon, but I do plan on eventually building a casing for the cannon as well, so I can add that to the arsenal too):



So after all of the above, it was finally time for paint!

But first I needed to mask off a lot of areas that would later on be glued with styrene cement. Loads of people will paint an entire component and then superglue, but I don't think those bonds would be nearly as strong as welding the parts together with plastic cement, so I took the extra time to carefully mask those areas.

The small parts, I then fixed to some cardboard with postertack for their date with the initial spray can of primer:



After the primer was applied, I had to flip over a lot of pieces, so I could spray primer on the rear. And then flip them again to spray white on all the armour plate fronts. And then I reversed those same parts yet again and added a silver spray on all the under/back sides, as well as the larger pieces such as the torso and the legs:



The reason I did the white first is because it'll be easier to correct overspray on those parts later on. And also because I covered all the silver with a black wash next. This looked sloppy to the extreme (I'm not going to lie; it actually was):



This dried overnight, and looked pretty crappy, but just now, I heavily drybrushed all the metal parts with gunmetal, and now the components look loads better again.



After this will follow a very light drybrush of silver, to really bring out the edges and details, and then it'll be on to the house colours! I'm actually quite exited about this, because I created my own Knight household for this project, complete with heraldry

[Blackwolf]

Nice! 
I recently completed my second knight,haven’t put it up on the forum (obviously), though the first is in future wars.
I always replace the gun barrels with something more realistic,usually turned aluminium; my Baneblade looks much better for it as well( also not photographed…).
Are you going to build a cockpit? Both mine have them,mostly bits from aeroplanes,and card.
Anyway 

[Daeothar]

Cheers

 I briefly looked around for your knight, but couldn't find it under either 'Knight' or 'Imperial'; probably posted under a different guise.

Although I like the idea of using better barrels, I've simply used the kit as-is for this one, just to familiarize myself with it before doing some more extensive converting on the second one.

I like the posability of the kit, but a Gundam it is certainly not. The legs are monopose, but when building them, I already figured out out how to reverse the stance (i.e. left foot front), and I will be doing some more stuff to the second one.

These will mostly be cosmetic changes; different trims for instance. I'll probably use one of my Epic scale Knights as a reference. So the banner will be swapped out for a metal tabard(?), the cockpit window will be altered, etc.

All in all, I'm going for the impression that it and its older sibling are built on the same template, but centuries (or millennia even) of battle and repairing have made them all subtly different. Perhaps they were even built many, many years apart.

The goal is to make all Knights in the force unique, both in pose, trim and heraldry, while still tying them all together as a coherent force.

I've of course thought about doing a cockpit, and while it would be cool, I don't think it would add much to the battlefield presence, as cockpits are most likely closed during combat. I do regret not being able to cheaply source the variant that does have a cockpit and pilot, as it certainly would have been a fun addition.

Come to think of it; I once started building a mecha for use with 28mm miniatures for an RPG campaign we were playing through at the time. I used a Robotech Queadluun-Rau kit for that, and used parts of a 1/48 F-16 cockpit for the, well, cockpit, which could open up. Of course the campaign ended before I was able to finish it, but the project still lurks somewhere below the surface of lead mountain

As a small update; I finished the metal parts with two more, progressively lighter, rounds of drybrushing, and they look pretty good now. I also applied two thin coats of white on al the heraldry bearing parts, but I think at least one more coat will be required.

Then, I guess I'll do all the small details on the metal parts, so I can at least assemble the skeleton, but I'll leave off the livery parts, for ease of painting for now.

[Blackwolf]

All sounding very good
I think my knight might be searched for as ‘Games Workshop Goes Mecha  though it’s probably been swallowed up by photo bucket . I’ll post my new one up nevertheless.*


* Whoops,check my blog.

[The Voivod]

That's gonna feel good when it's a finished project. Intimidating model, I still can't quite find the mojo to paint my warmachine Collosol, which would be a similar project.
Gonna look ace once you finished them all, and not at all scary to face on the batllefield at all.

[Daeothar]

Thanks guys

@ Blackwolf: I found it on your blog, yes. You've taken it into a very interesting, more realistic direction. I like it. It sort of reminds me of Machine Krieger for some reason. The red searchlight is awesome by the way; did you paint that, or is it an actual glass one?

@ Voivod; get it painted up, and we can stat them both and pile them into eachother using our own system!

I've not been able to do as much as I would have liked since the opening post, but I'm plodding on.

Also, I was kind of taken aback by the sheer volume of details that need to be taken care of on this model. And I might not be doing everything perfectly, I am giving each detail at least some attention, which slows the process down quite a bit.

Still, I'm now at the point where I can consider calling the metalic parts ready. This means I can also start assembling the skeleton of the machine.

Here it is, mocked up, with its carapace and shoulderpads dry-fitted on:



The liveried parts have received their umpteenth coat of very thin white and are now also ready for colour. I can let slip now that the scheme will be predominantly green and white, but I'm still looking for the perfect green colour.

I bought a new green paint yesterday, which looked good in the bad lighting of the store, but under the daylight lamp on my desk, I found it a bit too blue again, and maybe not light enough. Yeah; I'm nitpicking at this poit, but I want to avoid having to mix the colour, because I will (hopefully) be painting two more of these big boys and half a dozen Armigers too, so assured consistency would be nice...

Anyway that's where we're at at the moment.

As a parting shot, here's a close up of the Knight's head (which will eventually be covered up completely with a face plate   ):

[Blackwolf]

Looking good.
Yes clear glass,and painted! I developed a trick for realistic reflections that don’t look too jewel like.
I’ll post up my other one tomorrow 

[Daeothar]

Well, again, real life took me right by the nads and I had very little done, between my last post and this one.

However, what did get done is quite striking, so I decided to post up a small WIP update, to show this project isn't dead.

I have created my own Imperial Knight Household, its colour scheme, heraldry and crest, and am still working on a bit of a background story for them as well.

Basically, I simply combined several themes into one entitiy. First off, I wanted the colours to be, if not unique, then to at least be as distinctive as possible for a Knight household. So I went with my favourite colour (green), and combined it with white.

This then reminded me of a certain bravely brave knight from one of my favourite films, so this particular Knight ended up with a halved checkered livery. I did briefly play with the notion of adding a black rooster as its heraldic symbol, but decided against it, as I wanted the Knight to be feared on the battlefield, and not the laughing stock of its accompanying minstrels

So I spliced in another theme running strong in my own household; unicorns. Yes, unicorns, because those are still a thing with my eight year old daughter, and they're sort of cool, I reckon (well, at least cooler than the unikitties she's actually preferring nowadays )

And I combined all of that with the layout of existing Knight crests to get the following house crest:

Enter house Monoceros!

Following that, I printed an entire sheet of waterslide decals with this heraldry; enough to do up an entire Knight army.

And coming from that, we will have the following personal heraldry for this particular Knight (I hope I got all the terminology right ): 'a party per pale, chequy vert and argent, and argent, a unicorn rampant, sinister, sable, collared and chained sable, the chain pendent'

All of that with the intent of paying homage to Bravely Brave Sir Robin's heraldry, but obviously replacing the chicken with a unicorn.

And that means I had to paint half of the Titan checkered in green and white, which turned out to be an interesting, but fun challenge. Especially since I never really painted on this scale before (and with that I mean the size of the model, not 28mm heroic of course ):



You might notice that all the parts belonging to the (magnetized) weapons with livery on them do not sport the checkered pattern, but are just plain white and green.

This is because I want to be able to switch out weapons between the different Knights, and since each Knight will get its green half patterned differently, I could not include the weapons in those patterns, because then they might not match the titan they're attached to.

So my explanation is that while each individual Knight might have its own heraldic pattern applied, all the weapons are in the household's main colours, as those are being kept in the armory of the central keep, and distributed as required, tailored to the mission at hand.

In that vein, I might even create some sort of a weapons rack for in the display cabinet to store the weapons that are not in use (and there'll be quite a bit of redundancy there).

I have several dreadnoughts with alternative loadouts, and those extra weapons always end up at their feet when in the cabinet, which I don't find ideal.

But that's for later.

Now I only need to shade and highlight the plain green parts (and the toes on the right foot, which I apparently forgot ), and then it's on to the (copious amount of) trim in bronze/brass...

[Blackwolf]

Looking good! I wouldn’t have thought to paint checks on the feet,interesting to see how that turns out.
Really must post up my second one,just as a juxtaposition to yours,painted after watching too many Grimdark Compendium YouTube videos 

[OSHIROmodels]

Liking where this is going 

Can I ask, for the heraldry image in your post, did you use a generic program to ‘fill in the blanks’ or was it all done from scratch?

[Daeothar]

Cheers guys 

@ Blackwolf: you really should! The first one already was pretty spiffy, so I'm really curious for the second one. Does it match the first one in style?

@ James: I used a picture of an original Knight crest as a template, and then added my own elements on top one by one in individual layers. Those elements were sourced on the web and adjusted or cut where required.

And I used Photoshop, since I find it easier to work with than Illustrator, and the end result was printed at just 1.5cm high anyway, so I could afford to be a little bit less professional there 

As an update, I finished all the green bits. So now it's on to the gloss varnish and then the decals!

[OSHIROmodels]

Looks great, thanks 

[Daeothar]

It doesn't look like much, but a lot was done this week!

I gloss varnished the to be decaled sections and applied the decals. Especially on the shoulderpads, loads of MicroSol was required. But in the end, everything sttled down nicely, and I immediately varnished over everything to seal them in.

But then I found that my printer has quite different ideas of what constitutes black than I have, and all the 'black' decals I had printed looked rather indigo next to the true black decals from GW.

So I had to go in with black paint and trace all of them the best I could. And they were intricate to say the least) There was some loss in detail, especially on the chain attached to the unicorns' crown, but from more than a foot away, this is hardly to not noticeable anymore.

I then shaded all the white areas with VGC Wolf Grey and eventually VMC Blue Grey Pale, wetblending them in with the white on the larger surfaces.

And tonight, I had a major slog, undercoating all the soon to be gold/brass areas with a dark brown. Man, there is a lot of trim on this big boy!

Next step will be to colour in the gold/brass areas with metallics. Which will undoubtedly be yet another long sitting...

[The Voivod]

Kuddo's for keeping on keeping on.
Re-doing all the metalwork on my Collosol was the part where I threw in the towl and I wasn't nearly as far as you are now.
Looking groovy

[Daeothar]

Thanks mate

Surprisingly enough; the basecoat of brass over the brown went on really fast (relatively spaeaking; there was still quite a lot of real estate to cover) and in most cases even only required just the one layer. Only the larger surfaces, such as on the carapace required a second one, but then the result was good too.

Next will be washing and highlighting the gold. I'm still contemplating the right colours though, both for the wash and the highlight colour.

For the highlight, I might go with Vallejo's Liquid Gold, which I have had in the arsenal for quite some time already, but have yet to use.

Does anyone know if it can be used directly over waterbased acrylics, or would I need a varnish layer first?