Modeling: Iron Fang Pikeman WIP (1)

First, I'd like to apologize for the pictures.  Not that I'm a master photographer or anything but usually I at least have HD turned on so that more detail can be seen if necessary.  Anyways, onto the update...

As I mentioned here I acquired some Khador models.  This was during a bi-annual auction at one of my local game stores.  No, I'm not going to stop doing Legion but I did want to have a Warmachine faction as well so this is my first update on their progress as well.  Plus, there's a legion model right now slowing me waaaayyyyy down on updates.  I'll cover that sometime this week and it may be a project that I put on pause so that I don't slow down my progress so much.

Any-who, as with anything beggars can't be choosers and here's me working on a unit of Pikemen who came sort of "primed" in white.  I say sort off because it was a light coat, although it was kind of rough kind of like sand paper, however it was easily removable by brass brush and Dremel (technique also demonstrated at Spacejunky's Gaming and Hobby Blog a friend of mine on a prime job gone wrong).   This guy below actually still has the light coat on but it's probably hard to see from this crappy pic.

There! The picture below probably shows the "spraying" previously done to the fig a little better specially on the base.  Not a big deal, so now I set on to just make the dudes whole.  Their arms and such were all mixed up so it took me a tiny bit between pictures and such to organize who's stuff went where.

I then went onto clean up some of the paint that I thought would maybe cause me trouble when I went to prime it.  On the image below you can see the brass brush actually works quite well!

While doing some of the cleaning I ran into some mould lines.  This arm in particular was quite nasty.  I believe this is the "unit leader"... holy crud that's a big line of moulding.

Ah!  This picture shows off better the huge line of moulding that needed to be cleaned up.  Again, I actually used a Dremel for this with a diamond bit.  Not sure exactly what they are called since I threw away the packaging (I'll do a more in depth post on the technique later, which I actually learned from a buddy of mine who likes modeling as well) but it's basically a file.  They have two types one of them is just rounder than the other.  After "filing" with the Dremel I usually go over it with the brash brush attachment to smooth out the surface.

I did forget to take an "after" picture of the clean up before I glued it onto the mini but here's a closeup that hopefully shows the mould line virtually gone.

Another thing that I've decided is to keep their shields off.  I was going to glue them on there when I realized that painting them would be a lot more difficult with the shield covering quite a bit of the figure.  What I have done to keep them straight is simply put a number under the base of the figure and putting the same number on a blister pack containing the remaining portions of the model.  This way I don't have to figure out who's stuff who's more than once.

I have a little bit more work, some cleaning left here and there.  After that some basing probably which will be mainly simple flock since these guys take up a bit of room on their own base. 

Not too shabby for about 6 bucks at an auction eh?  So, there be a minimum Iron Fang Pikeman unit w/UA (Yes I know the standard is missing the star on the top... it's around here somewhere! Ah!  The numbered blister...  I hope... More to come...