Another day of building with these guardians. Today I finished all the torsos for this squad of 8.
Or I should say “unit” of 8 since in the game rule book groups of models are called “units.” Very confusing at first for me after getting into the video game Starcraft where individuals are referred to as “units.” In Warhammer a unit can be composed of an individual OR a group. The more you know.
Something uncanny about armless headless eldar…. I think it’s the long long legs relative to the torsos.
To be honest I wish that join by the crotch didn’t have such a big gap. I am on the fence about whether to fill those gaps in with putty. On the one hand aesthetics, on the other hand my wallet and or my sanity. It seems my putty application options are to use a sewing pin and or toothpick – both of which can be a pain – or invest in some decent sculpting tools which would put me back at least 20 bucks. Why sculpting tools don’t get sold individually, I do not understand. But I digress.
Let’s look at how we got here:
Same as with the legs, I clipped the torso bits off the sprue, cleaned them with my knife, and then super glued them together.
I naturally went torso by torso and only glued together the pairs of torso parts across from one another on the sprue. I did this out of fear that I might accidentally glue incompatible torso parts together. I think they could be mixed and matched though just going off their shapes. But the arms in this set are specifically designed to have certain right and left arm pairs.
While you might think the back parts are all the same, they actually have some subtle differences! These eldar apparently manufacture a variety of power armor styles… that are for the most part indistinguishable.
The most notable difference between eldar armor suits are whther they are designed to have big round boobs! One in four guardian torsos come with boobs where the rest have relatively flat chests. This sets Eldar apart from the more popular Space Marines (TM) that have no women in their ranks.
I read an interesting quote online from someone who worked at Games Workshop at the beginning of the company’s history on the company’s relationship with overtly feminine models. I wish I could find that quote to show here. It was a screenshot of a Facebook post. Anyways, it read that GW originally made closer to 50/50 masculine to feminine looking models, but that store owners complained that they could not sell the feminine models. So GW in response made their boxed sets either all of male figures, or of mostly male figures, like the guardians set.
Given GW’s recent support for the mostly women “Sisters of Battle” faction, it seems perhaps they have found their market for selling models of women here they had not before. I think they should officially support the introduction of Space Marine (TM) women too, however, with the simple inclusion of some female-coded heads in Space marine (TM) boxes. What is there to lose in exchange for a gesture of inclusivity towards the girls and women who like sci-fi and some more diversity among Space Marine (TM) points of view? I know a whole debate over this issue can be found all over Warhammer internet forums though and this pot cannot do all that discourse justice. Back to the guardians!
Pictured here are the push-fit pins built into the backs of the torsos.
At first I cut the pins off but then when I tried gluing without cutting them off I found I got a result pretty much just as good as I got without cutting the pins. So then I stopped cutting them off.
My least favorite part of these torsos is the two joins with the sprue at the bottoms of the back pieces. I find the sprue nub night impossible to scrape off entirely without damaging the model in some way. At this point I have resigned myself to accept defeat on this one. If anyone knows a secret to getting these back pieces clean of mold nubs & lines, please leave a comment.
To an outsider this piece might look flawless. But bits like that nub at the bottom right of the plastic there rustle my jimmies. I hear GW has gotten better about making their mold lines and sprue nubs more subtle so I hope when I build some more recently designed kits I will encounter less of these plastic equivalents of a canker sore.
Yes I know about GW’s “mold line remover” product and no I am not interested unless someone shows me how that thing can do anything the back of a hobby knife can’t.
This time I want to prime my guardians before I glue the arms on, unlike my last unit/squad/group/thing. That way I wont have to fit my paint brush behind the guns to get the fronts of the torsos covered.
For those totally out of the loop. To “prime” something in mini painting means to coat it with a special paint called a “primer.” A coat of primer helps the rest of the paint stick to the model better than it would otherwise. Primers come in a variety of colors. Since paint is often semi-transparent, or “translucent,” until you put on a bunch of layers, the primer will often show through whatever you put over it. So the same layer of red paint could look brighter over white primer than it would over black primer. You can take this concept and run with it to get some cool effects. Go check out Youtuber Dana Howl’s channel to find a wealth of information of how she used special undercoating techniques to make some awesome paint jobs.
Wile E. out.
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Wile E Painter's Hobby Blog 