Hey, look! He's standing on a base! (Forge World Renegade Psyker WIP)

 It's taken a while to get to this point, only being able to work in fits and starts. This is one of the Forge World Renegade Psykers I picked up at the Games Workshop Chicago Games Day in 2007. It's taken me a while to get around to work my way over to these guys, partly because there's been a certain "apprehension" in approaching this and the other Psyker - mostly the "it's made of resin!" thing. He is completely cleaned up so far as mold lines, excess material in a few spots, and tidying up things like the leveling of the soles of his boots, so he would properly fit on the pre-cast base from Secret Weapon Miniatures. He's soaking in a jar full of Simple Green along with extra broken chunks of hard resin from another source.


 This is actually the first Forge World piece I've worked on, although I've got a few others still in their packaging squirreled away at my painting desk. I've heard stories, both good and bad (and some really bad) about the quality of Forge World's figure casting and the ease to work with of their figures. I must say that although I was initially tentative in handling it, the resin isn't nearly as brittle as I thought it would be - nor as malleable. It was a pretty even mixture of the two in that I could deform some areas to shape by gentle pressure (trying to shape crevices, like the line around both shins where the boots meet his pants, for example) as well as by outright filing/sanding/Dremeling - the latter being important because it would've otherwise taken me forever to get rid of all traces of his now-unneeded slottabase tab. The expected mold lines were very light and none of the casting was mismatched. The only real complaints I have about the figure (and again, I don't really have a standard to compare it to) is that there appear to be multiple mold lines around the figure instead of just the one on a typical GW white metal or plastic figure. There was also some slight excess material in a few areas (front of his right shin, around the sides of the multiple tanks on his back), but nothing on a scale where it was unmanageable or covered details.

 Overall, I'd have to say I was quite pleased (and impressed) in prepping this Renegade Psyker figure. The level of detail on the guy is just amazing - I'm wishing I could sculpt even half as well - with things like 1/8" inset areas actually having crisp details at the bottom. He also cleaned up much easier than a comparable GW plastic piece, although a fair amount of this might be due to some tools I just started using in working on this guy - I'll be posting about these at a later time, but sufficent to say I was surprised at how apparently something unassuming such as a few new scraping tools can make such a big change (for the better) in my prepping of figures.