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So the last mini that I needed to do to get to 1500 points was a commissar. Given the recent price hike, I would be damned if I was going to pay for a pewter one, so I set about making one myself out of infantry bits and greenstuff.

The first thing I had to decide on was the pose. This commissar is going to be charging in swinging a powersword, but I didn't really want to do an epic charge pose for this guy. Not only am I starting to run out of epic charge poses, but also, when I think of a crazy guy charging into combat with insane abandon, I think of priests, not commissars. No, for this commissar, I wanted to stress the "no step back" rather than the "Everyone forward". I wanted him to look like a commissar, not just another dude charging in with a power weapon.

So I started with the basics of the pose. Pictured here is a pair of regular infantry legs and torso, and the arms from the new chimera sprue (fingers folded in, and a piece of plasticard for the pointer):



With this to my satisfaction, I continued on to finish the plastic part of the model. The head is shaved down from the cadian heavy weapons team, and the power weapon is a piece of plasticard with the bottom of a chainsword, some wire, and a touch of greenstuff.



convinced of the appropriate commissarriness of the model, it then fell to the laborious process of greenstuffing the greatcoat. I've got some pictures of this in mid-progress (where it looks like he's a catachan, or that he's wearing a bath robe), but I'll skip straight to the end:



I was actually sort of intimidated by the prospect of painting this, as I'd never done commissars before, and I didn't want to screw up a nice GS job. As such, I basically stuck to the paint scheme that is in the codex. It definitely gets the job done.


(note that the skin is actually not quite as red as the picture makes it look)

And, for the lulz, a final propaganda poster:



Anyways, I hope you like it. I look forward to making a few more of these in the future.

Very well done, I wish I knew how to sculpt.

Jesus, thats a REALLY good conversion

Wow awesome GS work. Here I am pulling my hair out just trying to remake a space marine foot!!

AWESOME*

Space marine feet are one of the worst things in the world to sculpt. Believe me, I've tried it before and personally I'd rather sculpt a zombie dragon then a pair of SM feet. Make an oval blob as feet or hide them in a pile of mud or something.

But don't let the defeat of the feet take your spirits down! Move on and try your skills on something else more fun and exciting, I'm sure you're a great sculptor otherwise.

Thanks!

One of the things I tried for the first time on this model is the idea of putting down a structural piece of greenstuff and then applying a second coat to act as a veneer. Perhaps you can try that with the feet. Put down a small blob of GS and once that's hardened, sculpt the actual overlapping oval shape foot plate thing over it.

Looking good! Any chance of some step-by-step pics of the coat? My grot kommissars would be most grateful

Very nice indeed. Will save this for reference

Arlexius and Ailaros - thanks for the advice and words of encouragement. Haha those feet are quite tricky! I don't feel as bad now, though I may have to scrap my initial job and start over.

That's a quality conversion right there. He looks a little portly on account of the coat - it looks pretty big, and makes him look kinda chubby. Definitely a good conversion though!

CommissarKhaine wrote:Looking good! Any chance of some step-by-step pics of the coat? My grot kommissars would be most grateful

Sure!

So, once I had the plastic down, the first step was to finish off the base of the model. This meant putting the ears on and going in and filling the gaps of my chop-together plastic work (I also had a bit more sword hilt work to do). Once that was done, it was time to start work on the coat and the hat. As both of these would require several stages, I always worked on both in a single GS phase.

For the hat, the first thing I did was put on the headband so that it sit properly on the head. For the coat I made two thing flat squares of GS and cut a notch out for the arms (so that they had sort of a U-shape). Putting these together to make the top of the coat was easy, as, with the exception of the very front, all of the GS was squished directly onto the model (nothing was free-standing).



Of course, with just the headband and the vest-looking top of the coat, he really looked Catachan (or, as my friend said "who said YOU could skip gym class?")

The next step, then was, to add the visor to the hat (which wound up being surprisingly less futzy than I'd feared), and the cuffs to the coat. Then came the hard part - the free-standing part of the coat. For this I once again made two flat rectangles of GS (of the width I wanted the coat to be). The right arm part went on okay, actually, as it was mostly draped over the sword scabbard, so it had something easy to shape off of, and had structural support. The left side was... well... worse. With nothing to really pin it down to, I wound up being forced to cling the coat to the side of the leg (rather than billowing out, like I would have wanted, and that the top part of the coat prepared me for). I would have to come in later to make an extension to get the left side to lift away from the body, using the first stage of GS as its support.



By this point I had a guy in an accountant visor and a bath robe. Needless to say, I was becoming a little concerned that my vision might not pan out.

After this, it was finishing the base of the model. This meant throwing on the untucked part of the sash, finishing the hat off, and adding the collar / open flaps of the coat. I felt a million times better once the collar went on, and actually started to feel confident that I might just pull this off once I got the hat done.



You can see in this picture how the left side of the coat is small and wimpy. After this stage, the first thing I did was to extend the coat out in the back, and add, in a painful, two-stage process, an addition to the front left of the coat. Also you can see the belt added on. This was actually a cut piece of hardened GS that I had lying around for the straps on my heavy weapon loader's satchels. That and a few bits of GS to tack it on.

After this, it was detail work. The purity seal, the tassles on the sash (made two of them flat on the desk and once they were cured peeling them off, gluing them back to back, and then gluing them to the bottom of the sash), the aquilla on the hat, the buttons on the coat, the buckle on the belt, etc.

The final result, once again, was this:



Then it was a matter of cleaning it up, filing things down, supergluing in some of the more aggregious pits and pockets and then priming it up.

There is definitely some roughness still to this model (especially on the underside of the cloak), but thankfully most of the GS is painted black, so it doesn't really show.

Brother SRM wrote:That's a quality conversion right there. He looks a little portly on account of the coat - it looks pretty big, and makes him look kinda chubby. Definitely a good conversion though!

Yeah, so as mentioned, I intended the coat to billow out more, and when it lacked structural support, it sort of just makes his butt look big. I did cut it down a lot, but there is only so slender you can look in a huge great coat. I mean, if you look at the commissar models GW has done, most of them actually come across as rather rotund.

I mean, if there's anybody who's going to get a proper meal on the front, it's a commissar.

awesome sculpt...
and while i agree with srm that the coat kinda buffs him up, i think it suits him nicely...

no use in havin a scrawny commissar tryin to boss people around...

Amazing conversion, Perfect pose and your greenstuffing is spectacular.

That is one excellent looking commissar, your greenstuff work is emmaculate! I still think Commissars need a giant red powerfist, but that's just personal preference
Great work!
Granesh

krusty wrote:no use in havin a scrawny commissar tryin to boss people around...

I eat three squares a day - they hatin'
I summary execution - no more complainin'

Granesh wrote:That is one excellent looking commissar, your greenstuff work is emmaculate! I still think Commissars need a giant red powerfist, but that's just personal preference
Great work!

Thanks! Unfortunately, this is a lowly platoon infantry squad commissar, and thus cannot take a fist. I'd consider putting commissars in my officer squads, but the indignity of losing my precious Foleran officers to off-planet loonies on a power trip is just too great. Of course, if I ever decide to include a lord commissar...


2x PIS (with flamers, sarges with PW), 2x commissars (with PW), priest (with eviscerator), lord commissar (with powerfist): 370 points

The look on your opponent's face when two dozen guardsmen cause that 10-man terminator squad he just dropped disappear after a single round of assault: priceless.

Looks great!
simple and effective!

Great sculpting... simply brilliant use of the trench-coat to ooze an aura of authority.

Wow, that makes my attempts to sculpt a long coat look sad by comparison. My hat goes off to you, sir.

That's really, really cool. Looks every bit as good as the metal models. Well done!

That's amazing! Especially impressive to someone like me, who couldn't sculpt his way out of a paper bag .

Impressive, thanks for the tutorial! I was trying to do my coats in one go, that might have been the problem...

looks awsome.
what did you use to sculpt the cloak.

Impressive.

Thanks everyone! I'm glad you all like it.

CommissarKhaine wrote:Impressive, thanks for the tutorial! I was trying to do my coats in one go, that might have been the problem...

No problem. So one of the things I've learned about freestanding GS from this is that not only do you really, really need an anchor, but that old, cured GS provides such an anchor. As such, for the next one I may well do the coat in 3 or 4 steps rather than in just 2.

muppet slayer wrote:what did you use to sculpt the cloak.

So I have exactly one tool: my trusty X-acto knife. You just need to be delicate with it, which isn't that much of a curse as you need to be surprisingly delicate with GS anyways - the knife just gives you an extra hard kick in the teeth when you're not.

Damn this is one nice conversion

might steal this idea from you..

You sir, are a Greenstuff God!

Nicely done, and looking forward to more!

Suberb awesomeness!
I want YOU, to sculpt GW figures!

Great work, absolutely!

Thanks!

nyyman wrote:I want YOU, to sculpt GW figures!

Heh, if you know of a job opening...