Big Mek Booma

[jamsessionein]

So dudes, I need to share this because it is totally awesome.

A while back I wrote up a somewhat wordy backstory to my ork army, and slapped it up on The Warforge.

A dude named Zsoulless has been posting at The Waaagh for a while now and started posting some completely, ridiculously awesome Ork art that hes been doing in his free time.


Kaptin Badrukk, the meanest Flash Git in da \'ooniverse.\'
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The artist\'s personal Big Mek art for his army.
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I sent him a PM asking if he did commissions, and he asked what I had in mind. I pitched my ideas at him. In my backstory, I laid out a number of orky characters that are in my army: Wurrzag da Weird, the feral-esque Warphead, Booma da Big Mek, the chief architect of all things explosive and stompy, and Warboss Gargrim \"\'Uge\'\" Mungus, a massive ork warlord who has an unusual fondness for grots.

He said he had been looking for a couple neat ideas to draw out, and after a bit of discussion where I explained a couple facets of the characters that I hadn\'t yet written out, he started drawing. He did a general rough sketch of Gargrim, but that\'s not what I want to show you guys. See, he\'s started drawing out Big Mek Booma, and oh man is it awesome.

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I just think it\'s amazing to see a character I imagined up rendered like this.

That\'s Booma with his signature weapon, da Boomhamma, a bionic arm, and a Kustom Force Field generator. It\'s still a work in progress, but holy crap guys, tell me this isn\'t the coolest thing. When he\'s done, he\'s given me permission to ink the thing and color it in. While I have no artistic talents as far as illustration goes, I can certainly wield photoshop well enough to manage that.

I get inspired by good artwork, and this is one hell of a kick in the ass to actually build a proper Big Mek model to represent Booma. That little project has rocketed it\'s way up to the top of my to-do list! I\'m going to try and model as closely to his art as I can within reasonably boundaries.

That bionic arm is going to be one heck of a fun job. I\'m mirroring the image for the purposes of modelling because the big mek arm I have holding the handle is on the right side, so Booma\'s model is going to have the bionic arm on his left side. I\'ll just flip the image when he\'s done drawing.

I expect this to take me a while, as I do intend on sculpting a decent amount on this model so I can do the art justice.

 

[Dragonsreach]

@ jamsessionein: Man do you ever finish anything you start? lol

Love this guys artwork, really has talent...(Don\'t let GW see they\'ll be jealous.)
Like the Booma idea. Drop me a line when (or if) he gets finished and I\'ll paint him for you FOC.

 

[Recoil889]

i can ink and color commission that bad boy my way!
looks cool i like it, tell him that hand on the boom hammer needs to be larger! you scored with some class-a work there dude, you mind if i ask what your paying for it?

 

[freakinacage]

Originally posted by Dragonsreach
@ jamsessionein: Man do you ever finish anything you start? lol

what he said!

 

[mud duck]

maybe a arm from a warjack as a base for the fist? And from the sounds of things you have NO reason not to finish is project up, especially if DR is going to paint it!

 

[Zsoulless]

I feel Obligated to point out.. my Big mek was a rushed job I did to make a few people stop hounding me to draw something...And Badrukk is still in sketch form..

 

[COG]

Dude you rock.
ignore everyone else cause if you aint doing it for fun then its work and work sucks.lol:evil:
for freehand that is some great stuff.

 

[jamsessionein]

Originally posted by Dragonsreach
@ jamsessionein: Man do you ever finish anything you start? lol

If you check the warforge\'s updates, you\'ll see I\'ve also been painting some of my older projects.

This was a sketch I got today, and I think I like it. I popped the leman russ wheel hubs off and I had to putty the surface back over again so that it\'ll be smooth, but what I\'m going to end up doing is adding a riveted outer ring with glyphs on the faces inside the ring - one will be of Gork, the other side will have Mork.

Have to wait till the putty dries tomorrow to pull that off, unfortunately, but I\'ve been killing time with a couple other projects while I wait.

 

[jamsessionein]

Man oh man. Working on the head of this hammer has been some of the fiddliest scratchbuilding I\'ve ever had to do, particularly that glyph, but I think I really like this more than the other designs. This is the \'gork\' side - the \'mork\' glyph will go on the opposite end when I get a proper chance to do it.

Also, I sculpted booma a larger tooth to match the art.

 

[jamsessionein]

I vowed to finish the other side and the glyph before I had to head back to school, so here is the \'mork\' side of the hammer.

I understand that aesthetically it might look a bit better if the glyph were farther out from the face of the hammer, but I need to also reiterate how infinitely small they are to begin with - the only reason I was able to really cut something that size is because I used thin card. Sanding the outer ring hubs down isn\'t really something I care to do right now, either, because they\'ve been riveted already. The ring is the thickness it is because when I tried making rings that were any thinner, they would fall apart when I used a pin vice to drill the rivet holes. I made about 6-7 rings before I managed to get a pair that didn\'t fall apart under the stress!

Still, I think it looks good all the same.

 

[jamsessionein]

Oh! Nearly forgot: Zsoulless updated the sketch a little bit.

 

[Cleezy]

Wow, those sketches are really good. And the Big Mek is gona look hella cool.

Cant wait to see it finished and painted.

 

[jamsessionein]

Enough people on other forums complained to me enough times about the fact that the glyphs were a bit too recessed into the hammer that I popped them off and used a hole puncher to fill the middle of the ring in and push the glyphs out a little bit. There\'s some tiny gaps around the outside edges, but I\'m working on melting those shut with a syringe and some Plastruct plastic weld.

I think this is where I leave it for now.

 

[Jericho]

If you want him to be truly Orky, then you have to get confused when trying to remember which is Gork and which is Mork. Looks great though, I\'m gonna check on that Warforge thingy to see painted pics of your other models. They were coming along nicely and I thought you\'d just gotten sidetracked again

 

[Ziggi]

Nice!

 

[rextalon]

I normally don\'t like filthy stinking aliens, but this is so awesome!
So what are you using for the gear shaped hammer head?

 

[jamsessionein]

Originally posted by rextalon
I normally don\'t like filthy stinking aliens, but this is so awesome!
So what are you using for the gear shaped hammer head?

I wish I had some idea what the gears came from, but I don\'t. The local hobby store I went to just happened to have it - I went to the counter and asked if they knew where I could get some big, chunky gears and they handed me a chopped up sprue that just happened to have those two gears on it. I think it must be a cannon or something, I can\'t imagine what they\'re actually meant for.

So, I had grand designs of coming home on Thursday and jumping right into modelling Booma but of course the teensy, weensy fact that it is Valentines day threw a wrench into that. Add onto that the fact that I have been enlisted to fix my father\'s ailing computer and I didn\'t find myself with much free time today.

Despite this, I have something I thought I might post. See, I found a rather nifty bit a while back. It comes from a miniature model line called Demonblade, which produced some rather unusual models until Games Workshop shut it down for copyright infringement. The Demonblade models had an \'orky\' line that had a fair bit of crossover with GW\'s old second edition ork designs.

I managed to pick up a couple Demonblade minis off ebay with the intent of maybe mixing their parts discreetly in with the rest of my boyz, and this bit caught my attention right away. It\'s a completely bionic left arm!

I have been saving this for some time now with the mentality that perhaps it would look good on a Nob or what have you, but it seems to fit Booma fairly nicely.

Now! [COLOR=\"Red\"]With that said, I want to make one thing clear[/COLOR]: I do still intend on trying to scratchbuild Booma a proper styrene arm to match the phenomenal art that Zsoulless has been creating. The only reason I am showing photos of this other arm is because it will serve as a plan B of sorts. If I find that I simply can\'t scratchbuild such a small, fiddly little detail, this bit will serve as a backup way to actually finish Booma\'s model and get it on the table.

Having said that, I think I\'m going to head off to bed so that I can wake up bright and early tomorrow morning and contemplate how I\'m possibly going to build such tiny fingers.

 

[Dragonsreach]

[Originally by Jamessession
Having said that, I think I\'m going to head off to bed so that I can wake up bright and early tomorrow morning and contemplate how I\'m possibly going to build such tiny fingers.

Can I suggest Dressmakers pins.
Made of steel and if you are careful can be bent to quite extreme angles.
But when you go to cut them be very Careful and make sure that the pointed end is embeded in a wine cork otherwise it can decide to take flying lessons, and trying to find a very fine piece of Sharp steel in a Carpet can turn out to be rather painful.

 

[Thunderhawker]

Personal experience DR?

 

[jamsessionein]

So I spent some time this morning struggling with manufacturing a bionic arm and man, this is not easy. It\'s all to do with the scale of the thing - if I could be like Games Workshop and make all of the original models at 3x the size, I would be set, but unfortunately I have to suffer through these attempts.

The little bit you\'re about to see is actually my third attempt, as arm number one was far too long and was hitting the ground even without a hand attached to it, and arm number two got glued to my desk in a moment of carelessness.

Anyway, here\'s the gist of it. I put a terminator hand on the stump for the time being both to get an idea of how long the finished arm should be, and because for the life of me I don\'t think I can build fingers that small. I tried - pins, paperclips, styrene, everything is too fiddly and flimsy!

The coily spring things in his wrist are some little fiddly roller part I found inside an old laser printer that I took apart a while back. I like the way they look, but they\'re such a pain in the ass to work with and I have a feeling that after priming they\'ll look like rubbish because the \'ribbing\' is so small.

Personally? That other metal arm is looking better and better as I try this. Still, I figure it doesn\'t hurt to post the work up.