Project Mortis: The Beginning.

Every now and again Graham has an idea, an idea that even with “He’s my brother, he’s an idiot” hat on is too good to ignore, the Mexican wrestling masks we wore to Throne of Skulls and in turn creating the tag team Bordo Del Imperio was one of these ideas..

Who are these masked dice rolling Goliath’s?

…another was the content of this Whatsapp message.

For those of you living in caves and yet somehow reading this, here’s the video he’s talking about

It came about during a conversation about Rob wanting to possibly enter the Golden Demon scene (im sure he will cover that in some way on here too) and what he could do, in the end he wanted to explore another option, but the concept was too good to be ignored and he wasn’t wrong, it would look cool, it certainly did in highly polished CGI:

So how does one go from turning this digital titan erotica into corporeal existence? Well probably not easily but the one thing I really enjoy in this hobby is making stuff, but before I even get planning and purchasing I had some questions that needed answers.

First question: What Legio is it? Was the first one, there are a few Legio’s with a mainly red and black colour scheme, Vulpa, Honorium or Mortis. Luckily on the second image above you can make out more of the colour scheme and see the shield more clearly.

Which when zoomed in looks an awful lot like this little beauty from the Mortis transfer sheet,

So that answers that question, and also means I don’t have to attempt to freehand paint it. The warlord is packing double volcano cannons and laser blaster carapace weapons, which means buying a warlord and the plasma upgrade kit as thats where the carapace weapons are, and finally the Mortis transfer sheet, so i’m painting a Mortis Warlord, with double VC’s.

Second (and certainly sizable) question : The void shield,  How on Holy Terra am I going to make a void shield around the Titan? Do I build it in some crazy ship in a bottle fashion? I could plonk a sphere down around it for decorative purposes, but how would I secure it from being knocked and taking the titan down and destroying everything else with it? So one way round this is that in reality the void shield doesn’t have to envelope the titan, in the images its only really visible at the front due to the attacks taking place.

so if I focus on doing a hemisphere or partial hemisphere perhaps with parts of it curving further around the titan that can work, so that’s the what sorted now onto the how am i going to do it; well i’m going to need both metaphysical and corporeal balls. So the void shield will be made from poured UV hard setting resin, over a hard foam ball of the correct diameter (160mm to give it some leeway around the Warlord) with the bottom cut off to create flat bottom, with the UV resin i can have more control over its drying with a UV torch and create the shape it want (fingers crossed).

Third question: how big do I want this to be? After discussing it with the chaps i decided on 12”x12” board for the diorama, i had originally wanted to go bigger but they convinced me smaller is better, it will still be big enough that the titan can stand out and have stuff around it without being swamped.

Fourth question:  what’s the warlord going to have around it? Well if we look at the trailer again, we can see little marines running through the warlords legs and having a much larger battle between Imperial Fists and Sons of Horus with spartans, drop pods and other things, so, that basically

Now I’m not doing this is 28mm (unless GW want to donate a warlord) so I i need to add those in 8mm scale to the battlefield to give it some other things for people to look at and go “oooh look a poorly painted tiny army” as opposed to just a shoddily painted titan on it’s own

(GW LEGALDEPT  LOOK AWAY NOW!)

 the internet and 3D printing can be my friend her,  as after a bit of investigation i found lots of STL’s of what i want to add or at least most of the elements of the trailer in some form or another plus a few additions.
(GW LEGAL YOU CAN OPEN YOUR EYES AGAIN)

Now I know that at this point you have question you want to ask: “But if the titan is being shot at, and there’s all this battle happening, why isn’t it returning fire?!” is what i imagine your saying right now, as opposed to “why am i still reading this garbage” well dear reader the thing is look no further than the trailer once again…

It is firing!!! Well probably a different one, but it can still work for my purposes, have the warlord burn its way through some marines or tanks, (yes it will have to do this through the void shield but i’ll worry about that later.) 

so that’s the plan, well the basic plan anyway, which when we put all the elements in the mental mixer we end up with….

…the poorly drawn plan for PROJECT MORTIS
(imagine a Crackle of lightning, accompanied by maniacal laughter here), 

So that’s it, I will be documenting every step of the journey on here so you can follow along and watch my inevitable dive into depression(“why did i think this was a good idea!”), substance abuse (shouting at foam, resin and plaster of paris) and almost certainly rage (like an orbital lance strike i end up destroying the whole thing when I finally reach my point) so stay tuned to our normal channels for more of these ramblings and insta for images and videos, it’s going to be quite the ride. – Chris

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