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Yep, really looking good. Badass is the word for these guys.

Fantastic post Ailaros! As one who also has a tendency to disarticulate my models before assembly, the way you laid your system out is very helpful.

So Ailaros, what do you use to cut the legs on said minis, and get a clean cut/ hold them still?

Since I've begun miniature work, 100% of what I've done has been done with an exacto knife with a #11 blade.



So far, I have yet to come across something in either plastic, styrene, or greenstuff that can't be done with a regular old pen knife blade. Sometimes, for certain things, I've used old blades that have already had the tip of the blade chipped off (it's good for certain things where you purposely don't want a sharp edge, like on fur or hair, for example).

Like most projects, I cut things with my hands and xacto knife blade. With thicker cutting things, like with these legs, I just have to be more careful. Also, when there isn't any detail that I have to worry about smushing on the other side of the model, I'll sometimes smush the model against my workbench and cut from the other side (like chopping carrots), using blade angle leverage as necessary.

This usually makes nice clean cuts. When they're less than clean, they can be cleaned up with, you got it, the knife. If things get cut wrong or too deeply, that's what greenstuff is for.

These things are absolutely bloody brilliant. I should really do some of the stuff you have here for my Chaos army, especially the leg cutting. If I could make a suggestion load-out wise, give your lord a combi-flamer. Its only 5 points and great against GEQs, especially if you take him with wings, LCs and MoK.

I should practice using green stuff. And as always I am jealous.

Thanks for the "how to" on taking the "squat" out of your Berzerkers. I really enjoyed it. I've taken a break from doing any CSM for a while (especially Plague Marines) because a few months straight out of just CMS has made me just plain sick of them. I can't even play CSM right now. Ha. But all my roads lead to Chaos. When I start up my CSM projects again I'm going to try this.

So, It's been awhile. After being done playing 40k this march, and falling out of community this may, it wasn't long before my 40k run was complete, and I stopped modeling. After a roughly 5 month break, though, the siren song of modelling called out to me again. Once sprues start getting broken out and greenstuff kneaded, the process of re-40k-ing (which is the same as de-40k-ing, but in reverse) began to commence.

Where I last left off, I had a nearly completed first squad of my new army. The final straw was a failed attempt at crafting a power fist. Once I finally get that model finished, I'll regail you with the story.

Rather than getting back into things by pounding my head into the wall where I'd left off, I decided to start working fresh with some brand new berzerkers. It was time to start my second squad.

Starting back in, there were a few things that I wanted to make sure were true for this new round. For one, this time it was time to start doing my models assembly-line style. This time wasn't going to be another 1 or 2 weeks per model single shot. This time, I was going to make models 2 at a time, and, after I'd get a pair converted, I'd already be working on another pair while I painted the first. After all, I learned all of these mass-model skills with my guardsmen, it's time to put them to work with some chaos models.

The first two models I decided were going to be nothing particularly fancy. All berzerker bitz off the sprue, a regular amount of converting. While my skills hadn't really faded at all, I still don't want to hit the ground with something too hard.

The models were assembled as per usual, and the fur went on the same as before. For the skull masks, I decided to keep things a little fresh, going with one with a rhino horn, and another with more stereotypical small-demon-horns.





Then it was back to the painting. I'd forgotten just how long these guys take to paint. While the color scheme is MUCH more simple than my guardsmen, the models themselves are just so huge and so much more detailed per model, that it takes much longer to paint per painting step.

In the end, things went pretty well with only limited after-primer-sculpting. The main problem I had, however, is that one of my skull masks looked much better at the GS stage than once painted white. There was just too much detail and too many creases, making the end result look insufficiently like a face. However, I remembered my lessons from earlier, and applying a liberal dose of bloody gore fixed up the problem quite nicely.





Unfortunately, I'd forgotten how very little justice my camera does to these models. For some reason, the glowing red of the armor just gets washed out to a really flat color. At some point I'll have battle reports of some sort with these guys, and game store lighting, for some reason, is always more flattering to my models.

In the end, though, I'm very satisfied with how these came out. I think I've also rediscovered why I like these models. On the one hand, they're skull and firs makes them look evil and barbaric, but the red and gold in crisp lines makes them look SO classy. It's sort of like how darth vader looks evil, but the kind of evil that projects so much seductive power and style that makes you want to BE that kind of evil. These guys don't just talk about what they want. They conquer and take and DESERVE what they want.

The one other strange thing I found, though, is that I got a new pot of codex grey in the new, soft-plastic containers. For some reason, the color grey is lighter than it used to be. Am I the only one who has noticed this or did I just happen to get a strange pot?

Anyways, once these guys were done, the next two were all but painted, followed by the next two who are nearly done with being converted, and the final two which are nearing completion of the assembly phase. Look for more updates soon.


Automatically Appended Next Post:
Once the first two guys were done, it was time to take stock of what I had for the final push. Unfortunately, in the process of moving things about, I'd lost a shoulderpad and a helmet. Even moreso, there was no way I'd have enough berzerker parts to finish a second squad of 8.

This meant it was time to dip into my old, regular CSM models. By ripping apart a few regular CSM and mixing them with khorne parts, as I'd done before, I'd have enough bitz to go around with a little creativity.

The next two berzerkers saw a 50-50 blend of these two parts. A head, torso, and backpack (the superglue just refused to let go) went to one, while the legs and shoulderpads went to the other.

I wanted to mix things up with the fur a bit, making one of the guys less hairy than usual, and the other moreso.

With the first guy, I'd wanted to do make my token shooter. After all, these guys all get a bolt pistol, it should look like at least a couple of them are actually using them.



I wasn't going to give this guy a sword originally, but miscalculations in the fur-under-GS-layer wound up with a comically poofy fur bottom, leaving me little choice but to cover up shoddy work with more bitz (yay for 40k).

With less fur, this guy made the classy red-and-gold come out in all its brutal glory.



And the terrifying old-tymie helmet didn't hurt either. Of the first three that I've done, I think I like this one the most. It's dynamic in pose, with a clear intention of malice. I hope more of them come similarly cool.

I did fall behind a little bit with painting the second of this set, so look for a posting for the next berzerker soon.

Glad to see you are back! Hope to see more.

Yes, you're back! Fantastic work so far, looking forward to more.

Hey, welcome back! Good to see you working on these again. I'm really really liking those first two. The poses are really dynamic, and the helmets especially are really well done. The added cheekbones on the second one really make the eye sockets look very recessed and menacing. Very nice take on an otherwise pretty standard helmet.

Dang it, how did I miss this blog? Good to see you again and awesome work on the sculpting! Made me wish there were purchasable copies of some of those

Great stuff as usual! looks like some part of your subconscious didn't let go of the 40k mania! you've bounced back from the dreaded fugue of 40k burn out with a vengeance! and i must say i'm glad, that last bezerker is fantastic, i love the old school helmet on him, in fact that helmet is one of my favorite helmets across the entire range! and with your reds and golds so crisp and the poses so dynamic, i'd love to see a shot of the ones you've completed all charging at the camera! :-)

keep it up, we all enjoy your work!

Nerdfest09

Welcome back! I took a 4 month break form all of this as well, just got back into it about a month or so ago again. Glad to see you back, I've shown people this thread as inspiration and all around your work is well received.

The GS fur still sells itself very well, and the dynamic pose on every model is a huge visual draw for me, and your painting is very clean and crisp. Sorry the pics aren't coming out the way you would like. They are at least awesome enough to impress upon me how amazing this project is.

nerdfest09 wrote:Great stuff as usual! looks like some part of your subconscious didn't let go of the 40k mania! you've bounced back from the dreaded fugue of 40k burn out with a vengeance!

So, this is actually chapter 4 (or, depending on how you want to cut things, chapter 5) of my 40k experience. I've been modeling and playing off and on for some years now.

For whatever reason, it's always the modelling that gets me back in. Then, once I spend several dozen hours working, well, why not actually do something with them?

Skalk Bloodaxe wrote:Welcome back! I took a 4 month break form all of this as well, just got back into it about a month or so ago again. Glad to see you back, I've shown people this thread as inspiration and all around your work is well received.

Wow, thanks. I'm touched.

Skalk Bloodaxe wrote:The GS fur still sells itself very well, and the dynamic pose on every model is a huge visual draw for me, and your painting is very clean and crisp. Sorry the pics aren't coming out the way you would like. They are at least awesome enough to impress upon me how amazing this project is.

I suppose what I think my greatest strength as a modeller is is the overall effect. Getting poses to look simultaneously natural and dynamic, without looking over the top, while at the same time being able to start from the beginning of each model to get the overall statement down (in this case, I want to brutalize you, and I'm going to, and with style) is probably my biggest strength. I've also gotten rather good at GS over the years, although I'd hesistate to call myself great at it. As you say, "sells itself well" is as good as I'm going for right now.

Unfortunately, I'm crappy at painting, which is funny, because that used to be my relative strength, before picking up the blade and the greenstuff. Crisp is about as good as I can go for nowadays, enough to at least get out of the way of the rest of the model.

Anyways, I've got the next one done and ready.

As mentioned in the last post, this was another kitbash, and was designed to be a bit furrier. On top of this, I wanted to give myself a little bit of a challenge, picking out the bitz that I'd most struggled with so far. In part this was to force myself to do a really different pose. In part, it was to give myself some choicer bitz as things got scarcer.

for some reason, I forgot to take pictures after the GS step, so I'll just throw down the final picture.



So, the pose took a lot of agonizing over. On the one hand, I wanted it to look like the sword arm was actually in the process of swinging, unlike the usual pose of the model just sort of holding onto their weapon. Getting the arm in such a way where it looked like the sword arm was just starting to come forward from the wind-up was more than just posing the arm nicely. WIthout the rest of the pose looking like it was just in the process of uncoiling, the model just sort of looked like a guy running forward with a broken arm, or a guy who was trying to hi-five someone with a chainsword.

In the end, I think this part of the pose was worth the great deal of futzing. Unfortunately, the slight alterations to the mask really came off poorly once the model was under paint, and I might well have been better off just chopping off the bunny ears and leaving the skull plain like the second guy of this series. In the end, I was forced to do the gore splatter to cover up the crappiness. I guess it's not too late to put some horns on it or something, but I don't know. I guess I'll just have to relegate it to one of my somewhat less good ones and let it be that.

Anyway we can get a family portrait and a cool family poster. Something with a caption like the family that slays for khorne together stays together.

Your poses are really dynamic, and unlike anything else I've really seen. You're doing some great work with those old berserker kits. My favorite is the third one in your first new post, with the "old tyme" helmet. I've always liked your conversions, and these are no exception. The painting isn't quite as exciting as the poses, but it's not as bad as you say it is.

Also, as an added note - I missed your battle reports an awful lot, Ailaros. I hope you don't mind that I totally ripped off your reporting style for my own reports!

Nice and chaosy khorney! I'd like to see more done to the feet however, they dont look right, maybe make them into a more natural running pose and either greenstuff or paint a sole on their boots?

cool stuff.

Tortured-Robot wrote:either greenstuff or paint a sole on their boots?

I agree the sole on your current Berzerker looks too smooth, but putting things in perspective (literally) these are tiny little army men and the chances of someone other than the people reading this thread looking at HUGE high-res photographs on a monitor noticing that detail is slim.

If it is a modeling aesthetic then go back and do it. Other than that aspect I doubt anyone would ever notice, or care if they did.

First of all welcom back Ailaros!

These new warriors look great, the fur really sells it for these guys, they look great. Hopefully we'll get some good bat reps out of this army too.

Great thread, really enjoy your models and descriptions of how/why you are doing what you are doing.

Brother SRM wrote:My favorite is the third one in your first new post, with the "old tyme" helmet.

So, I found the original CSM model I ripped apart to make this one. This one already came to me assembled with a fair bit of attitude...



He originally had an antenna on that little box he was holding in his hand to look like a detonator.

Brother SRM wrote:Also, as an added note - I missed your battle reports an awful lot, Ailaros. I hope you don't mind that I totally ripped off your reporting style for my own reports!

I certainly hope you do. I didn't write battle reports in the way I did because I wanted to copywrite the way I did battle reports. I wrote them because basically all other battle reports were unreadably terrible. It pleases me to know that my influence has increased the quality of the batrep pool even in my absence.

Tortured-Robot wrote:either greenstuff or paint a sole on their boots?

Skalk Bloodaxe wrote:I agree the sole on your current Berzerker looks too smooth, but putting things in perspective (literally) these are tiny little army men and the chances of someone other than the people reading this thread looking at HUGE high-res photographs on a monitor noticing that detail is slim.

You're both correct here. Only a few of the berzerker boots come with traction on the bottom, and while you absolutely can't really notice it in person, I've been considering more and more making that a part of the conversion. The only thing tricky about it is that putting these legs into pose is tricky, and I'd hate to GS a sole on only to have it warped or smushed while posing the model.

Brother SRM wrote:You're doing some great work with those old berserker kits.

So, I've noticed that the berzerker set really is the converter's set.

On the one hand, you get more models for you buck, and can easily be converted (even to loyalist marines), with a little work. Also, there are some things which are GREAT for conversions, such as some of the legs already being separated at the knee joint, saving me work. Plus, some of the bitz in this kit are absolutely excellent, and really convey a lot of attitude.

On the other hand, some of the bitz are absolutely wretched, and you need to already be a good converter in order to make them look passable. For how good the legs and arms are, for example, the backpacks and pauldrons are awful, and need a fair bit of knifework and GS not to look really lame.

So, onto the next update. This pair would see me doing another regular berzerker, and then tackle this project's arch-nemesis...

First the berzerker. I wanted to put this one together with a more usual running pose, but I had so many right-foot forward, left foot up in the air behind that I really had to do something different. Specifically, I went for the opposite.

The more I worked on this, however, the more off-balance and really awful the pose looked. After much futzing, I wound up switching which leg was on the ground, and getting sort of a duplicate of the previous leg pose. This definitely looked better.

As well, given my disappointment with my previous model, I decided that this one would definitely have horns again. To class things up a little, though, I put down the horns and then GSed a thin ring around the base, so they look like they're actually attached to the helmet, rather than just stuck on there.



The painting went smoothly. Originally I did the horns white like usual, but wasn't completely satisfied, so I took a risk and did them white-brown-black like I'd done once other. In the end, the more "natural" horn look came out nicely.



And now, let me regail you with a tale, 6 months in the making.

Long, long ago, when I started my first army (eldar), I made the mistake of buying a vehicle first (a vyper), and then basing my color scheme on what looked cool on a vehicle. It turned out that said scheme decidedly didn't look to great on infantry models. As such, when I started my guard army, the first thing I did was to make certain that I put my scheme down on my infantry first, which I would undoubtedly have more of.

This carried over to this project. My first model would be a regular foot soldier. My second model would be a aspiring champion. With the sarge and grunt down, I could be certain of having it come out well.

As such, this miniature was supposed to be the SECOND of this series, all the way back in April.

Like my first berzerker, I started with a model from my pool of assembled CSM that I'd inherited.



And then re-assembled him with the truescaling, and did the touch-up work, and put down the base of the fur.



Then it came time to do the powerfist. As you can see, there was already a plastic core to the fist (an actual CSM arm, it would help ensure that I made the powerfist long enough). On top of that, I wrapped around a small amount of GS to make the part in the back look nice where it connected near the elbow, and to give a round, smooth surface that I could start mounting fingers and such on later.

The next step was to form the body of the fist:



For the next step, I hooked up the power source (this would take WAY more futzing than it was worth, and would ultimately plague the model to the end), and finished off the non-fingers part of the glove:



Then it was time for the fingers. To do this, I drilled into the GS slightly, and then glued in some tiny pieces of aluminum rod. This gave me an anchor around which to start the fingers.



Then it was merely a matter of fleshing them out.





What I had now was a pretty darn close approximation to what the actual CSM powerfist (currently residing on my Melchoir model). But this wasn't a project to simply make some minis, this was a project to make a work of art. To really expand my sculpting repertoire. Oh how must come pride before the fall.

I was trying to figure out how to make it a "power" fist, not just a gauntlet. I wanted all of my armor-ignoring stuff to have the same effect, and I thought it would look really cool to have said stuff be on fire.

So I went about sculpting flames on my powerfist. This was an endless battle of attrition between me and the aspiring champion. After undergoing more burnout than I thought possible, I finally got something good enough:



But this was it. After burning out on playing (leading to this article), and burning out on dakka (in part due to the fight over this article, this was it, I was done with modelling.

6 months later, I came back and painted the power fist. While I may have gotten to some degree of competence sculpting fire, I found myself nowhere near competent in painting it. I spent hours trying and re-trying. It turns out, though, that painting something that is supposed to glow with something that doesn't glow is nearly impossible to get to look nice. I've only ever seen it done on very scant occasion, and that's only been in cases where you can strictly control the lighting, which I can't.

It was almost enough to stop my re-entry, a burnout bounce if you will. Instead, I did what I felt I had to do, cut off the hand to save the body. With the flaming fist gone, I was free to start work again, resulting in the last few models. The time was drawing neigh, however, to actually friggin get the skull champion done.

Once again, I pondered how I should do my power weapons. One idea was to make a power fist that was basically a giant fur muff with bones covering the top, and with bony claws for the fingers. Another, far more conservative option, was to put down some more red and gold plating with a plain, boltgun fist at the bottom. The problem is that neither of these were particularly satisfying enough for power weapons as well.

The problem, though, is that red and gold is really hard to match to, as far as glowey power weapons are concerned. In the end, I decided that the color was going to be black with just a little bit of a faint purple highlight, heavily glossed. That way power weapons would look like obsidian, or like nightmares and shadows, taken corporeal form.

With that decided, it was time to put the fist together. On top, I actually liked the red and gold plate, as I didn't want the fist to look too gaudy (my problem with the way most people do power fists). On the bottom, the stupid power lead was still causing me problems. Plus, even after 4 scratchbuilt power fists, I still couldn't get the underside of the knuckles / palm to look anything like I'd wanted. The only way about this was going to have the underside continue the fur motif.

So I started on the powerfist again. Like last time, it started with a nice GS anchor blob. When that cured, I put down the beginning of the back of the glove. After that, I put down some of the border.



Once the concept was proofed, it was merely doing this on the other side to finish the top. I also then put down a knuckle guard in the same style.



Then it was just putting on the fingers, same as last time. I had forgotten the lesson of putting down anchor pins, though, so this time was decidedly more futzy. At least I got the pose of the fingers more like what I wanted.

I also learned (or re-learned) that I needed to do the ends of the fingers in one single piece of GS, rather than cutting out the individual fingertips and then gluing them on. As I'm sure other sculptors out there know, there is little more difficult than making freestanding fingers...



Then it was just a matter of painting the powerfist, and then finishing up the rest of the model.



Once again, the camera has sort of failed me, and the fingers are actually more discernible in real life, rather than looking like a shiny off-purple blob.

That said, I'm still not completely sold. My next skull champ already has the fist GSed in this style, but perhaps I should go over to a bone motif for the fingers instead, especially as I'm no longer convinced I'm going to have power weapons at all in my army.

As such, I'm still plagued by this nearly 9 month problem, but at least now I have something I can put down on the table.

Great blog. It's fascinating to see the stages you go through with each model. I often see pictures of awesome conversions but when you know exactly how much work and effort has gone into them it makes them even more impressive. I look forward to more updates.

That champion is a boss. You don't see reasonably sized powerfists on Space Marines of any flavor very often, and it's refreshing to see. I like your point about the Berserker kit being a converter's set though; it's great for its age. I loathe the gorilla hands and the backpacks require some work to get on, but otherwise it's a solid kit. I'm working on my squad of vanilla Berserkers right now.

So, I've got another one done. This is one of two minis at the end of my bitz, thus the old-tymie CSM sword and legs.

I wanted to bring back a little more of the steel-and-bone face look, so I GSed a respirator. Also, when I quit playing this March, I used my downtime to pick up the guitar. Now that I actually have lots of spare guitar wire hanging around, I thought I'd use some. It's not very obvious from the pictures, but it adds a nice touch, I think.



With this one I put on a little more red than usual, making this berzerker much more clearly a red and gold model. As usual, though, my pathetic camera can't tell the difference. In real life, the shoulderpads fade from Dark Flesh to nearly full-on red. Not that you'd notice by the camera...



And I'm sorry I missed the poster the last couple of times, I've had some good ones, but not the time to put them up. Here you go, now:



Also, breaking news. While working on my other champ (look for another post very soon), I decided to abandon the obsidian look for the other champ's powerfist. I'm now set: the fingers are either going to be gold colored to complement the armor motif, or will be bone colored to continue the bone motif. I'm still struggling to determine which one I like better, so the next champ will probably be with the gold fingers and I'll make them uniform after I decide which one I want.

In the meantime, this is what the other champ looks like with bone fingers:



I don't know if I like it better than metal fingers, but I certainly like it better than the obsidian. I think the biggest problem is that it might just look to an outside observer like he's wearing a padded white glove, rather than segmented bone pieces.

Will my bother over this mini never end?

Bone looks great! I prefer it too, I don't think it looks like a padded sport glove, it looks segmented and bone enough to work well! and you can then easily distinguish him in a squad as it's bright and different enough, if it were gold, I feel it would blend in to the armour too much and not even stand out as being a conversion! which would be a shame as all of your work to date is amazingly good and even a small piece like the fist should be recognized!

Nerdfest09

Ichewawa. These are some amazing conversions here... Your green stuff wizardry is amazing...your running poses are great. Paintjob is clean.. Just kudos all around, very inspirational berzerkers. I will be borrowing some ideas from here in the future i think.

Once again, helluva job, Ailaros.

I like the bone coloration for the hand. It stands out better than the black does and serves as a pretty well coordinated tertiary color.

So, a mini-update.

I'd forgotten that I'd made a change recently to one of the minis that I hadn't posted up yet.

After the success of a recent polished horn model, I went back to one of my other recent ones that I just didn't like and gave it an upgrade to include horns.

I decided to go all-out with the polished brown/black look, and because these were ram's horns (and thus much of them is anchored to the head), I decided to spice things up a bit by putting some ridges in it.

That and, as recommended, I put some traction on the guy's feet.

Here's the original:



And with the update:



Also, as to the gold v. bone problem. I'd thought I'd show you my nearly-complete second skull champ to show the comparison. The pic makes the gold look a little worse then in real life, but, with some changes to my camera settings, at least things aren't as bad as they've been over the course of this project.



Obviously they both look okay. The problem I'm having with the white is that in darker environments (so, not directly under my lamp), the white fingers look wierd, because you have this red and gold with the offset helmet, and then these random white things popping out one side. On the other hand, the metal looks great because it makes the whole thing look like a giant armored gauntlet, which is basically exactly what I was looking for.

However, while there's nothing I dislike about the gold, and something I do dislike about the white, there is also something I like about the white (which is untrue of the gold). The thing I like with the white is that what the model looses in pure red and gold classiness, it gains in barbaric witchcraft savagery. The bone LOOKS more like sorcery which, given that it's surrounded by a disruption field, it basically is. The gold, on the other hand, just looks like metal.

So back and forth I go... back and forth... I might just have to have mismatching fists until I get it straightened out, as my second skull champ is getting pretty close to done.

So, I just went up and did a mockup of my options, actually...



For a more comprehensive list of the options, click here.

You might have to view in a separate tab to see it at a large enough size.

The bone-white Power Claw totally works.