How-to Thursday: Converting Cinerators into Bastions, Conclusion

Welcome to the Thursday edition of TtT.

Today, I’m going to go over my process for sculpting the ribbons onto the arms of the Cinerator/Bastions.  I use a size 0, tapered point color shaper for smoothing the greenstuff, a hard tool for major shaping, and a knife for cutting away excess putty.

Each model has a big hole in the arm where the peg on the shield goes.  This needs to be trimmed a bit.  The extra material represents the bindings holding the shield onto the arm.  Since the shield is gone now, that stuff needs to go, and the hole needs to be filled in.  Also, don’t forget to remove the bits of handle on the top and bottom of the fist.

I rolled up a bunch of greenstuff, and rolled it into a ball, which I then rolled into an ice cream cone.

The cone gets stuck onto the model…

I then put a bit of chapstick onto the metal tool, and cut the blob roughly in half, vertically.

Then, each of the two pieces got flattened a bit.

Once this is done, I shoved the ribbon on our left (the model’s right) towards the middle of the model, and flattened the other one out into a general shape.  Then, using the color shaper, the putty  was smoothed a shaped more.

I use the shaper to smooth the putty by drawing it along the greenstuff.  Since the silicone tip is pliable, you can be very gentle, and push the putty around subtly.

Rinse, repeat for the second ribbon.

Then, I added some motion by tweaking the tips of the squared off ends, and shifting the bottoms a bit to one side.  When considering the look for the motion in the ribbons, look for source photos, or grab a necktie and swing it around.  You’ll notice the bottom trails the top, and is often pointing the direction opposite the movement.

To show a change in movement, have the top and bottom heading in the same direction, with the middle trying to catch up. Take the entire pose into account – I often have to get up out of my chair and stage myself into the model’s pose to see what sort of motion it may be in the middle of.

In this case, I figured the arm was moving upwards, and across the body (likely as the other arm thrusts forward), so I trailed the ribbons towards the outside of the body.

The last bit for this is the knot at the top of the ribbon, where everything gets tied together.  I start with a super small ball, and squish it flat.  Then, I square up the sides, and put it ono the top of the ribbon.

And that’s it!  I used the same techniques on the last two models, and I’ll likely re-do the one that I did on the first model, since it no longer matches these new ribbons (which have much more depth).

I added a special ribbon to the unit leader’s weapon, and when painted, will really highlight his halberd.