Printing a warlord Titan!

Yea you read that title right.... 

So what started off as a crazy suggestion from one of the Phosphex party chaps made me think "I wonder" and so it began! 

Yep thanks to the wonders of tech I found a massive amount of STL files on thingieverse and after much pondering and playing about in the slicer software that I use, I decided to pull the trigger and the start of something that will go down in legend within the Leicester Phat Cats.....

Anton printed a Warlord.

I decided to start from the feet up that way I could see progress and do the legs then move onto the torso chassis then add the armour plates as the the final part.

Posing of the legs was a bit of a mission, I didn't want static and boring however I didn't want some bonkers pose where the titan was off balance or nearly falling over.

When I was messing about with the legs AT had been released so I'd seen a number of special poses all over facebook so lots of inspiration on how not to pose warlords was given!

As I was doing some paint repair work on Marc's reaver I decided to do a quick side by side and was shocked by the size at this point.

Ironicly I'd also started to print the warlord after mediation with the ex so it signified her "walking" away however she took that long to move out (another story that's not for the net) I started on the torso!

I was on my third reel of filament at this point, it wasn't all purely printing the titan I was doing bits and bobs in between so decided to experiment with colours and the like and the orange was slightly translucent which looked really good.

However as it was slightly brittle it had breaks in the reel and when it was being pulled into the hot end it was snapping and if it wasn't for the filament detector then the amount of failed prints would have been mental! So thank you Mr Prusa that bit of kit was a life saver!

looking back on the legs they were pretty easy to print as I split the upper and lower legs so that I just needed to stick them together.

with the upper torso I decided to see how they came out in single pieces and these were some serious print times! up to 3 days for some parts.

so part way through I though I'll paint the legs and then I had a thought of doing it all in one shot that way I'll get consistency to the paint scheme and it'll save time in the long run.

It also got nicknamed as the nerf titan due to the colourful scheme with all the various colours!

Hip pistons that I printed off when I realised that I'd missed them off, the smaller parts came out way better than I expected.

Moving on the the exciting part, the plates!

I laid down the basic metal base colour with my standard halfords black and a gun metal car spray, exactly how I did for my ZM table so I knew that the base colours would give me a good starting point

the armour panels continued to build up and I soon realised that I needed more than I thought!

Batch printing took place for some of the smaller parts,

So I could track the progress from a visual perspective the blue tac was deployed.

this in turn lead to some very exciting gentlemen on the phosphex chat!

As I switched to pink for the final bits, emperors children and slannesh was mentioned a number of times, mainly Kris banging on about the size of his tool and he's a big boy.

so previously I though the big boy drop pods took alot of work and space, however this thing too the living piss!

cleaning up the armour plates was simple enough but time consuming, If I would do it differently I would clean up as they printed out rather than going for them all in one fell swoop!

I then started thinking about the armour plates, colour and legio, Initially I was going to mimic my AT stuff however I wanted to have it instantly recognisable at a traitor titan as its going to stand next to the mighty world eaters!

The difference some light management can make!

The final piece printed, managed to kill the printer on the last part, Anton's top tip don't sand wall filler in the same room as a running printer.....

Getting the test red nailed down, unlike two pump Nick this only took 3 passes ;)

Lots of late night airbrushing sessions were about to take place!

The brass work was done by brush, and that was the only bit of brush work the rest was all airbrush/rattle can.

With the legs coming along nicely and settling on mortis legio I felt that I had too much red to start with,

So again feedback and suggestions from the phosphex party I added some strips and all was good in the world again.

More dry fitting, mainly for the upper Armour plates and the colour splits that I was planning,

All the metals done and dusted! 

I wanted something a little different for the carapace weapons, so decided to experiment with checkers however as I wanted to continue the airbrush route I went to youtube to suss out how it was done, most was hand painting though.

after some pondering I worked it out and went for it, the finished result was way better than I expected and really happy with the outcome.

For the armour plates I did them in chunks mainly due to the bronze edging and keeping them clean so as I painted them I stuck them onto the titan.

Bit of a gap that would need filling, nice simple fix really.

onto the boon sticks and the shoulder armour

The 105 was getting a bit temperamental at this point so I thought it deserved a clean out, at the same time Sean was over and was gobsmacked with the ultra sonic cleaner. I'm still waiting for that back ;)

When I was doing the stripes on the legs Ross was very excited and if I did the same on the armour panels then it would look "baller" well who am I to deny him of a power wank!

One of the many many brews that I threw down my neck!

Now you may ask how can I get one of those amazing mugs from? Well look no further....

its a tenner, and Mel's a top lad!

So as the final parts were coming together I started thinking about decals and the like.

and if your wondering how I did the metals, the 3 paints above was it, bang a black wash over made from floor cleaner and artists ink looks good smells nice and gives it a slight shine which works really well.

the final armour plates done for the titan!

at this point I was a very happy chappy until I sussed out that I'd managed to miss the head! Time to start up the airbrush again!!

One of the guys works reasonable close to warhammer world so nipped over for a decal sheet and after some final work with the decals the titan was good to go!

Ladies, Gentlemen and fans of the Anarchy of Anton may I present the newest family member..... 

Winston the Warlord.....

Angry Ron for scale......

now for the Stats!

Amount of filament used would be "around" 6ish kilos.

Time taken to print would be "about" 9 months.

Time to paint was about 6 weeks on and off.

However for the "pledge" its still one model!

This entire project really helped me focus on something apart from the bullshit that was going down in real life and the reactions from fellow gamers who have had a sneak peak or "normal" people who have seen it really has been worth all the effort.

However the real thanks go out in no particular order:

Dan
Kris
Spencer
Ross

this motley crew provided honest feedback and gave me wicked ideas throughout, well apart from Kris as he collects space wolves more thank likely loves the cock like Ross actually.....