Symrivven's Dark Elves and Vampire Counts

[Izzy Logan]

Some really nice, and imaginative conversions. I personally find most of the logs on warseer quite "samey" and dull, with a few exceptions. This is one of those exception. Kepp up the great stuff man.

[Elfboy]

really nice painting on the hydra, and I love the direction you're taking the VC army, sounds like a really cool idea, ghoul conversions look great, can't wait to see work on some bigger VC monsters

[Althwen]

Love the Hydra model....But I hate seeing it on the battlefield as you know!
Nice to finally see what you've been spending all that time on! Great job

[Lord Azoth]

really like your conversions, a more than skilled GStuffing and original ideas and concepts!!...
looking forward to se more

[Joeli]

well ive added the link of your blod to my favourites, so hurry up and sho us some more:P:P cant wait:P

[Symrivven]

Thanks for the great comments. Just saying hi to let you know that I didn't disappeared from this world. Maybe a bit, for after I finished mass effect 1 they released part 2. ^^

Anyway I'll be having a vacation soon, and hope to have some new work finished after a few weeks.

Take care

[Symrivven]

Finally I managed to finish my hydra project, there were some bumps on the road but I'm happy with the end result.

Here are some pictures, I'm not entirely pleased with those but I'm afraid its the best I can do with this camera, lighting etc.

[Symrivven]

The beast masters are done as well (but didn't fit in the previous post):





And the whole happy family:

[juicytomatoes]

Oo very nice hydra! It looks so... cold!

[Symrivven]

Thanks, having it look cold was indeed one of my goals as it has to fit into my ice themed dark elves force.

For those interested, currently I'm working on harpies for DE, and "ghouls" for VC.

[Lord Azoth]

maybe you can apply some coats of gloss varnish to the crystals.. really a beautiful hydra

[Ultimate Life Form]

!?!

Those crystals! Where did you get them? Those are exactly what I need, but I don't seem to be able to find them! Where are they from?

[juicytomatoes]

Thanks, having it look cold was indeed one of my goals as it has to fit into my ice themed dark elves force.

Yes, it ties in very nicely with the rest of your army, which I must say, looks splendid!

Great job!

[Symrivven]

@Lord Azoth, at one point I considered doing that, but it must have slipped my mind when I reached the end stage of this project. I already gloss varnish the obsidian crystals of my 40k army, those turn out great. Anyway thanks for reminding me, I'm going to give it a try on a less important model first, if it turns out ok I'll do it on the hydra to.

@Ultimate Life Form, I'm afraid you can't buy them, everything on the base I made from grey/green putty. Except for the small crystals I cut those from left over plastic sprue's .
If I have time this weekend I could post a small tutorial if you want.

[Lew_b81]

Great Hydra. It looks sort of precarious though, how is the balance on it? And how about when it's on a hill?
Considering it's not a particularly massive conversion, it really changes the look of the (otherwise slightly boring) model.

[Armond]

Well done! Thumbs up to you for a very good job! I like your VC especially! The skellies are very nice, they have this super dirty/gritty feel to them! With the red it makes them pop out and say pay attention to me!!!

[Ultimate Life Form]

@Ultimate Life Form, I'm afraid you can't buy them, everything on the base I made from grey/green putty. Except for the small crystals I cut those from left over plastic sprue's .
If I have time this weekend I could post a small tutorial if you want.

Oh... too bad.

I've been searching for something like that for months, but I just can't find what I want. Similar stuff, yes... but not exactly what I want. Which would be your crystals. My plan was to wait for Christmas so some peculiar stuff may pop up all over the place, but actually I'm not very confident.

So... if you don't mind, a small tutorial would be highly appreciated, yes. I'm still a bit inexperienced with green stuff, but I've done a few things that turned out pretty good, so I think I can get the job done. Then finally my Hellpit Abomination will have the Warpstone Spines that it truly deserves!

[Symrivven]

Typical crystal tutorial part one


Crystals come in many different shapes this tutorial is for a stereotypical crystal that is easily made and recognized as a crystal.

Most crystals I made I cut from sprues, though the large ones I made for the base of the hydra are made from green/grey putty. For those large ones, first make a green putty cylinder of approximately the size of the crystal you want. Then let it harden and cut it out just like the sprue ones in this tutorial.

Start with a straight piece of sprue, the longer it is the less likely you will be to cut your own fingers. If there is some code on the sprue cut it away first so it wont be a problem later.



Cut away the corners like shown in the image below until you end up with a polygon of your liking.
You want to end up with 5 sides or more, else it will just be a square or triangle.
The size of each different side can be variable, this is even preferred as few natural crystals are perfectly symmetrical.
Just make sure the sides are straight, typical crystals do not have wobbly or curved sides.



You should end up with something like the next picture. The part under the line is not used for the crystal, the part above the line is and those sides are straight.



Now unless you want some kind of basalt rock formation your crystal is going to need a tip. You can achieve this by putting your knife perpendicular to the side of on of the sides of the crystal and cut towards a central point on the end of the crystal (as indicated by the arrow in the following picture). Do this for every side of the crystal and your sprue should have a crystal shape at the end.



We will continue in the next post as I have hit the 4 image limit.

[Symrivven]

Typical crystal tutorial part two


If everything is all right you should by now have something looking like this:



Cut it off at whatever angle you want it protruding from the base of your model.



And there is your crystal:



In the next post I will deal with painting the crystal.

[Symrivven]

Typical crystal tutorial part three


First base-coat your model. Then proceed with painting the predominant colour of the crystal.
In this case I added some watered down black to the crystal to make it a bit darker, but this is not necessary if you want t keep the colours clear.



Proceed with painting the top and the corners of the crystal in a lighter tone. I prefer to do this with watered down paint to make the blending easier.
The reason why corners and the tip should be lighter is that light would travel less far trough the crystal at these parts as opposed to the central parts. And thus this light is less filtered and more white.



*optional* Natural crystals often have many tiny fractures and imperfections running trough them, they break the light and can be seen as stripes trough the crystal.
One way to simulate this is by drawing straight very tiny lines over the sides of the crystal, preferably letting these cross.
An easy way to make the lines that should be perpendicular perpendicular is by messing up your brush a bit. Push it slightly on some surface (that you aren't painting) and turn the brush a bit, it should look like in the next picture. Using the brush this way should leave many tin perpendicular lines. If you have a decent brush the hairs should spring back the way they are supposed to be after rinsing it in your cup.



Continue the previous step(s) with lighter and lighter tones, possibly till you reach white. The lighter the tone the more it should be restricted to the tip and the actual corners. In the end you will have something like this.



Hopefully this was useful to at least some people, if you have any comments or questions let me know.