Take 1 standard Visarch kit



I've got a bit of a thing that HQs should be more physically imposing than the rank and file, and the easiest way to do this with Eldar models is to stick them on some ruins the rubble from the High Elf Lord kit should work nicely



Trimmed to size, and I'm sure that little bit left over will come in handy



Next up is the legs.



This is basically what I was going for. Clip off the Tree Revenant leg, and offer it up to the Visarch legs to see what sort of angle you need. Then, clip off the Visarch leg and discover that you've got the angle wrong again (noticing a trend?). It's always useful to cut off a little further up than you actually need so you've got some extra material to play with when (not if) you get it wrong.



After a bit of faffing about I got them to mate up neatly enough. So glued in place and onto the base, making sure that the back foot covers up the hole in the High Elf ruins.



Next up is the body here's the plan:



After some fairly fraught cutting and clipping, I managed to separate the little masks and the cloak intact (it's too cool of a bit to ruin, if I didn't want to keep it it would have been much easier to remove)



Onto the tabard.



The Visarch cloak is blowing to the left, but the tabard is blowing to the right. The only way you'd get that happening in real life is if the character is spinning his torso around, which doesn't quite fit with the relatively static pose of the Visarch. So, we cut it apart and repose it.



Much better!



Glue it in place, and I must admit I'm not sold. It adds a lot of visual bulk to the lower torso that just doesn't look right (you'll hear me witter on about 'visual bulk' quite a lot with the Triumvirate, although with a little modification they can be very delicate indeed).



To test out whether it'll still look ok, I started gluing together the rest of the model.



When I went to test it again, I accidentally pulled apart the tabard and thought it looked much better cut down! Result



Now, right arm (again, Tree Revenant):



I forgot to get a picture on the glaive arm, but this one should demonstrate. A lot of AoS stuff now has sculpted connection areas for arms, meaning that they naturally fall into a single pose on a sculpted to fit torso. This makes the models themselves a lot friendlier to put together for a novice, and thanks to the sheer variety of bits on AoS models you don't get monopose stuff, which is very impressive



Luckily, it means that there's excess plastic to play with so you can adjust the pose slightly when you cut it flat.



Now, if you're a clever person you'll spot the little nub on the Visarch torso that helps locate his arm in a monopose and clip it off before you stick everything together. Because on occasion I am categorically not a clever person, I spotted that and thought 'ah well, I'll deal with that later'. Nearly pushed the recently-stuck and still malleable model apart trying to get it flat.




And stuck!




It's at this point that the whole pose of the model starts to come to me. He'll be pointing at something with his glaive, looking in that direction too. One of the things I know from my psychology degree regarding body-language is that when people are concentrating on something, their leading foot (or the foot closest) tends to point in that direction too. Otherwise the pose tends to elicit a little 'well that dude looks slightly awkward' thought in the back of people's heads without them realising it. So, the tree revenant foot had to rotate slightly.




Much better luckily you can be pretty rough with the clippers on the tree revenant foot as it's full of odd little ridges anyway. This takes a little more carving to flow if you're doing it on a smooth Eldar leg.

Left arm!



Cut down to fit into the Visarch socket (which is half an arm bonded to the cloak).



And done



Then to test the head I'd originally planned him having, which came up a little short.



So, better idea to reuse the idea from Thaegr the Son of Kurnous. Note how the hair piece I picked is also blowing the same way as the cloak.



Roughly cut the antlers off longer than you need them to be.



Taking a sliver off each time you cut, and starting well in advance of where the final cut needs to be, start cutting a little 45 degree angle into the antlers. The reason you're starting so far back is because getting the angles similar enough not to look wonky when you stick the horns on is a little tricky, and too much cutting can result in some short antlers...



Head in place. It's also a good idea to model with a cup of tea (or a beer or glass of wine ), as you need something to occupy yourself while the glue dries enough to keep the head still when you're posing the antlers.



First stab at getting the antlers in place.



Not so good. Looks more like insect mandibles than antlers. Cool, but not what I'm looking for. Because plastic's such a forgiving material to work with, they're easy to repose.

Much better!



Through this whole thing, I was never quite happy with the tabard. Either too much bulk or not enough. So, I clipped off some of the upper bits and stuck some little greebles from the Wood Elf Wild Rider kit on the bottom.



Little greebles like that are a godsend when you're converting. Things like Purity Seals for Imperial stuff, and various pouches and grenades can hide a multitude of sins in the 'gaps' department

Lastly, I didn't thing the model needed it particularly, but I'd been dying to use some of the gribblies from the Tree Lord kit, so it got sprinkeld with gribblies



And then, best bit about it, I've got all of these bits left over for other conversion jobs! Plus the masks and tabard too



That one was a bit more involved than the 4-armed Bloodbride, but I HQs give you the opportunity to really go the extra mile as you only have to do one dude and not 10 of them!

Hope that was helpful

I've thought a reasonable amount about Chaos Eldar, coming to the conclusion that the idea of 'Eldar that just decided to worship Chaos' and 'Eldar who were corrupted by Chaos' don't quite cut the mustard fluff-wise to me. However, I'm of the opinion that you can do whatever it is you please with bending 40k fluff so long as you have a good enough reason for it, and twisted chaotic Eldar is too good of an opportunity to pass up.

I quite like the idea of Eldar who dedicated themselves to another Chaos God to try and get their protection from Slaanesh. That's got just the right nuance of desperation to it for me to like it as a piece of fluff. I can just imagine a desperate Corsair or Outcast coming to the end of their life selling their soul to one of the other gods in a desperate (and probably futile) bid to avoid being devoured. Furthermore, I can imagine one of the other Gods flaunting the fact they own an Eldar soul, demonstrating that victory over Slaanesh. It's definitely something I want to explore in the future, but for these guys I had another idea

My other idea is that Slaanesh strikes me as the sort of entity that plays with her food. Contained within her, she has billions upon billions of Eldar souls which i expect she could resurrect and toy with as she pleases, in any form she wished, before consuming them again. These Eldar wouldn't truly be alive in the conventional manner, but also wouldn't be like resurrected phantoms. As the Eldar soul retains consciousness after death, they'd not only remember who they were, but they'd also remember the centuries upon centuries of torture within the belly of Slaanesh. I imagine them as somewhat like conscious living Eldar whose souls are bound to the whims of Slaanesh.

I'd imagine the figureheads of the pleasure cults would revel in this existence, and be looked upon favourably (Favoured Playthings I've called them). For the rest of the population caught up in the cataclysm their souls would be stuck in perpetual torture, and being resurrected as a plaything would be a desperate window in the endless torment. Also, with billions of potential souls to choose from you can bet that Slaanesh would pick up on anything that displeases her, no matter how small, and replace you with another potential candidate. So, you'd get a society constructed of Eldar desperate to please Slaanesh in any way possible borne of a desperate self-centred desire to avoid being returned to torment. They're normal Eldar, reduced to committing horrific acts by the trap they find themselves in. One of my favourite types of villain plus, there's tons of potential for things like Learned Helplessness and Stockholm Syndrome to make interesting characters with

Edit: also, reading this has made me realise just how much I dislike the word 'Aeldari'. So long as you steer clear of Newcrons and inter-species co-operation I try to be upbeat about fluff changes, but honestly it makes me shudder. It's less that we already had a perfectly serviceable word for it: Eldar (although that's part of it), it's more that it's just an ungainly and ugly-sounding word in of itself. In addition to it being completely superfluous, it just doesn't sound nice, so I shall hereforth refuse to acknowledge its existence