Iron Snakes: Storm Eagle Progress 1

Hi folks,

This Storm Eagle gunship has been in my "too hard" basket for a couple of years now. In fact, if you have seen my posts showing my hobby table, you will have seen it in the top left hand corner quite a few times already! It is a real fixer-upper. Sgt Waz gave it to me, from possible dubious origins, quite a while back, when I was getting my butt handed to me by flyers every single game. It has been in the too-hard basket because many of the pieces are warped/damaged, there were a heap of really big gaps in the construction, one large piece was missing and the clear cockpit glass was badly frosted.

Filling the gaps and sanding with green stuff took a couple of weeks to do, a couple of years ago. After that I undercoated it in Leadbelchers then set it aside for a rainy day. So... it rained yesterday! I figured I had better mark the occasion with another jolt of progress, giving the front end a lick of paint and some TLC. I painted the minimum of detail in the cockpit, as you couldn't see much through the frosted glass.

I got most of the cockpit assembly bent back into a reasonable shape; as long as you don't look to closely is looks airworthy, kind of. I also improved the frosting with some coats of matt varnish (for those with a knowledge of physics/forensics, I was "trying to make the coin disappear"). It gave me some clarity back, enough for me to reconsider just painting the whole thing. I am not sure what colour and effect I would go for if I was to actually just paint the whole thing. From a tabletop perspective, it is fine and probably not worth the effort.

From the top view you can see the exposed magazine of rockets that I constructed, to replace the triangular hull piece that was missing. Having exposed rockets like that is pretty gangster, I think.

So far so good. The rear end of the ship is where things are going to get tricky. The Iron Snakes paint-scheme is a fine balance between using lots of colours and still making it look like a unified scheme. I feel that I need to add some colour splashes to the fuselage, much like I added a stormy blue to the hurricane bolters on my Centurions, and deep red accents to the armour in places. It is going to go somewhere, but where? Those are the kinds of decisions I would usually sit on and ponder for months. I am not giving myself anywhere near that amount of time though; I wan't this thing finished before Squaduary next month.

See you across the table,

Marc