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To view other of my commission work, click here.

As some of you may remember, a few months ago, I did a commission work for a friend to make some storm shields and power axes for the purpose of being put in henchmen squads. I scratchbuilt the bitz, and then gave them over to the client for him to make the crusaders out of.

... and then several weeks went by, and he realised that he had no interest in assembling them into completed crusaders himself, so he came back to me. He gave me back the axes and shields, and a dozen of his worst miniatures to mount them to, with the instructions to rip them apart and do whatever I want to them, so long as he gets finished crusaders.

I was then a bad person and sat on the project for a couple of weeks more, while busy working on other stuff. I was sort of just staring at the half-painted minis and the bitz I'd made, completely devoid of inspiration. Morale was low on what I assumed was just going to be taking some models and adding shields.

After some gentle chastisement, I finally got on with it. At first, I started doing what I thought the project was supposed to be about, ripping apart some minis and gluing them back together in a dry engineering exercise. After I put a few of them together, I decided to liven things up a bit by taking a few of my cultists and converting them into henchmen.

And that's when it finally clicked. The client wanted a mix of guardsmen, the idea being that the inquisitor had collected them and thrown them into a squad, and what was left of them were the lucky survivors to continue on to the next mission. It's why they had the crude storm shields, and why they had the various "ethnicities" of guardsmen. It was an inquisitor who treated his henchmen like... well... disposable henchmen.

As such, the project wasn't "the guardsmen don't need to look like they're from the same planet, for ease of assembling them", but rather it became "I don't care where the guardsmen are from, just take a storm shield and keep moving forward". The open-endedness was an opportunity, not a begrudging concession.

When I came to this realisation, I had three guardsmen left that I could do. With these, I sort of went wild. I took a couple of WIP shots (before they'd be covered in shields) to show off some of the conversion work.





On the right, we have an Attillan (or whatever). He got a fur jerkin a la my chaos dudes and a mongolian-style fur hat with pointy bit. He also has an extra sword (I got access to the client's spare bitz, mostly catachan), but my favorite little bit of conversion work on the model is that he has spurs.

In the middle, you've got the ad-mech. Unfortunately, this picture completely washes it out, but I scratchbuilt a mechanical arm for him to hold the axe in. I also gouged out his jaw (but left the lower lip on, just to be creepy), and shoved a big ol' hose in there. I then added more tubing with GS on the back, and another bit of wire coming in from the arm. The one thing you're missing from this picture is that instead of holding onto the shield, I put some rivets on the inside of the arm to make the shield be bolted straight onto his arm. The joke quickly became that this let him have his hand free to hold the inquisitor's coffee.

On the right, you have my favorite piece - full napoleonic guardsman. I made the epaulettes from plasticard and two stages of greenstuff. The head was a cadian one shaved down, with ears and some mutton chops GSed on a la my Folerans. The kepi was assembled in a few stages, but the real genius of it was that, unlike usual, I didn't shave the helmet all the way off, but left the part on top there, so the GS is firmly anchored to a plastic core, which made the whole thing a lot more stable to work with. The extra classy touch was the feathers, which were chopped out of a dark angel terminator shield. That and the aquilla on the front of the hat, which was just more GS in applique.

Anyways, getting the axes and shields in place wound up being as boring and tedious as I thought it would be, but by now it was made up with the previous bit of creativity I had. When it was done, I brought it to the client and he loved them. He especially liked how to created a Last Chancers motif.

No painting for this commission, because the client has a very particular way of painting his minis. Meanwhile, his payment was peculiar, in that this whole project was traded for a few random catachan bitz, a pair of window AC units, and the world's larges coffee table. He was moving in with a girl, so didn't need all of his stuff as he left his old apartment.

Anyways, these are the minis.

A fighting Catachan:


A fightinger Catachan:


An at-least-he-knows-how-to-use-the-shield Cadian:


A Salvar Chem Dog:


A scared-straight hive ganger:


A noble (if thuggish) former-horseman:


I don't know where he's from, but he dances a mean robot:


He keeps telling us to "look sharpe", whatever that means:


Anyways, this wound up being a neat little project after all. It was nice to be able to play around a bit. It was kind of surprising just how much you could do with the basic two plastic kits, and that was only with spending a few hours on any one of them. It was easy enough that one might almost consider the possibility of making even stranger guardsmen, or an entire company of something like this...

Nice work, looks great!

The pics are broken.... Nevermind i can see them now

Cool stuff, really nice little convertions, did you sculpt the aquilla on the last ones hat or is that push molded?

Thanks!

And it was sculpted, not moulded. Well, it was appliqued.

I am digging on the chem dog! Where are the body and legs from?

Its one of the new DV CSM cultists. With the chaos star removed and a scratchbuilt =I= symbol put on. Or, well, an attempt at that, at least.

That and the arms were removed and replaced with catachan ones.