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Hello folks, I have begun a scratch build of some leathery wings for my old oop metal Daemon Prince because he is tired of running across no man's land and getting gak'ed on by 7th edition gunfire. I don't like the dragon wings on gw's site and I didn't want to spend the money on them, also can't afford one of those spiffy plasic princes so here we go! I will post WIP pictures as I go and if people are interested in a detailed tutorial at the end I would be happy to put one up.

So,... I started off with a pile of paper clips and blue TAC,... What a horrid idea... So after brainstorming for a little while I remembered scratch building a piece a long time ago for my wife's Monty pythons the holy grail themes brettonians. I had made a Trojan rabbit out of sprue bits and plasicard. So I pulled out a pile of sprues and started clipping. Then using a grill lighter I used a small flame to heat the plastic in the areas a I wished to bend it, bent it into place and dipped it into a bowl of cool water to harden the plastic.

Using this technique I created a frame for my wings. The frame made up the bones for my wing structure. Once I had the structure in place I cut out very thin plasicard to be the membrane between the bones and glued them in place. Afterwards I took my hobby knife and smoothed out the sharp edges from the sprue and sanded them down with a fine grit sanding block and brought the bones to points. This is where I am currently and I apologize for the beginning of this to be very rushed, I initially didn't intend to post any of this to dakka but figured maybe it could benefit others in my shoes.

you can just say it has flight. there isn't a rule that says it needs wings. i dont think those wings work personally

I don't think the wing works, mainly because it is way too big.

Make it smaller, and more muscular. Daemons are huge.

https://i.ytimg.com/vi/vE0qpuoO8n0/maxresdefault.jpg

This is my go to thought process on daemon wings.

If you read my post this is a work in progress... This is not complete by any means. Literally all I have done is built a basic frame with a basic leather in between. I have alot of sculpting to do and many many details to get this to the point of me being happy with this in a finalized sense. I'll post a picture tomorrow of my Khorne herald I put wings on for gaks and giggles so you can see what an end result might look like. I'm going to tag the post with WIP so hopefully rather than get "looks all spindley, ewww" you can appreciate it for what it is... A work in progress.

The wings don't look oversized to me at all. I'm no aeronautical engineer, but I'm pretty sure that you would need wings that big to lift something as hefty as an armored daemon prince off of the ground (then again, is it an African daemon prince or a European daemon prince?).
I think that you should keep going in this direction. Will you be sculpting muscles over the frame too? You could even take the project a step further and create a tail to stabilize its flight.

I agree, a creature with such mass and size would need wings large enough to generate enough force to get and remain airborne. @ Whacked - if those wings were outstretched they would be just as big as the ones I have started to mock up. Those wings are totally relaxed and resting behind the creature. @eosgreen why would I want to just pretend it can fly rather than make a model that looks badass! @ Youidiotkid I agree completely on the size aspect, thanks for the feedback! I want my prince to be able to carry a coconut as far as he needs to! I plan to sculpt muscles and spikes and what have you soon once I have the basic design complete. I am going to post a picture of my Khorne herald so you can see what I have done on a similar yet obviously smaller model. Check back and let me know what you think!

 youidiotkid wrote:
The wings don't look oversized to me at all. I'm no aeronautical engineer, but I'm pretty sure that you would need wings that big to lift something as hefty as an armored daemon prince off of the ground (then again, is it an African daemon prince or a European daemon prince?).
I think that you should keep going in this direction. Will you be sculpting muscles over the frame too? You could even take the project a step further and create a tail to stabilize its flight.

Ooh I like the tail idea.

I do like the idea of this blog as well, I shall def follow the progress

Alright, so I have a few pictures of my herald. This is one of my first attempts with green stuff so a couple seams aren't perfect but I was happy with it. Hopefully this will give better insight into what's going on here.

I don't think it's the size of the wings so much (the size makes perfect sense and looks good IMHO). It's the thickness of the wing bones that is throwing me off. The skin between the bones looks ace. Maybe as you add greenstuff, the bones themselves will look less bulky.

I totally agree with you Gordon. I regret not shaping them prior to initial assembly. I am quite happy with the back of the wing, the bones are thin and look quite nice, but this was due to me positioning the narrow side of the sprue toward the back and the wide side toward the front, and because I have already put the leathery stuff in between the bones it makes it very hard to get to. Thankfully I have a dremel tool that I can probably get in those little nooks and crannies to thin them out and add some mild texture to the wing membrane. If I am unsuccessful with the dremel tool at thinning out the bones I think I may restart from scratch, but if I get the dremel out I can have a new set of these bad boys done up and to this stage within an hour tops and have the bones thinned out nice and smooth.
Thank you for your constructive criticism and interest in my project everyone! Maybe things will work out here yet! I have also chopped up the Daemon Prince and have been reposing and changing the body scructure, so we'll have to see how it goes!

Nice Herald. Looks like you're off to an excellent start with GS sculpting. I was never able to successfully sculpt musculature on a ~28mm miniature myself, so I can't offer much guidance in that pursuit. That being said, maybe I can share with you what I've learned about anatomy/creature design.
As they are now, the wings are a sort of hybrid between bat wings and bird wings.

If you really want to make this project complicated, you can try to adjust all of the different ratios to make the DP a realistically flight-worthy beast, but that's probably a little bit much. Instead, I'd probably just decide upon which style you prefer and run with it. Because bat wings would make more sense on a Khornate daemon, I think that you should just take a peek at how their musculature works before you start sculpting. This should give you a rough idea of where the muscle groups are:

You don't have to match the diagrams exactly, but the wings will look much more convincing and just plain sleeker if you keep them in mind as you work. I'm looking forward to seeing where this project goes from here, so please keep us posted!

Well I know it's not a huge update but here it goes. @youidiotkid thank you for those diagrams! They really showed me what kind of structure I should be looking for and the musculature will help me when sculpting.

After screwing around with my dremel this evening I have decided to start anew, the dremel melts the plastic rather than sand it away for one, and two I am unhappy with the width of the bones in the wing structure. So here are a few pictures of my new skeleton and design, the drawing shows a sorta kinda plan as to the shape and design of the wing in the long run. I don't think I will be able to use plasicard on the membrane on these ones without being very creative with how I shape them to fit, so I may look for other materials that I can use. Any suggestions would be appreciated!

Also decided to kitbash and sculpt the Prince to be not so damn boring, this is in the planning stage and at this point it's a bunch of random pieces stuck together with blue TAC but I think I'm starting to get on the right track!

The new wings are a big improvement. I'm glad that the diagrams were useful to you. The WIP body is a lot more characterful and dynamic than the original, but you might want to fill in the abdomen a bit to more realistically support its large upper body. If the mini starts to look too top-heavy, a tail might help to balance the composition without losing the bat-like feel of its proportionally smaller legs.

Oh don't worry the torso will be filled in! I made a green stuff spacer to lengthen the torso just in the hopes the height would make him more imposing. I am contemplating cutting the legs at the knee and extending them slightly to bring things back into proportion. And I gotta figure out what I am going to do with the sword arm. I know I will be making him an axe rather than the sword (Khorne seems to like Axes ) and I think I need to make the fingers longer on the Helbrutes arm. Any suggestions please send em my way!