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Another character addition to my Blood Angels, this time Mephiston, the Lord of Death. I was never really happy with the Finecast version, so here he is! A little extra TLC for this guy than my usual treatment Incidentally, he has parts from a lot of kits: Sanguinary Priest, Blood Angels Upgrade, Vanguard Vets, Command Squad, Sternguard, and Death Company.

As always, thank you for looking, and I appreciate all comments and criticism!

He's typically well painted, Talys - the eye glow is particularly good. The black armour and red robes are a cool choice.

Modelling-wise there are a few things:

Personally, I really don't like that spiky neck ruff at all and would not have used it on any model ever, let alone the Lord of Death.

The sword arm isn't really anything, it just looks like he's holding it up in the air for no particular reason, this is accentuated by the passivity of the model in general. Given the restrictions placed on you in that respect by the base model used, it might have done to have the sword arm down in more of a braced / 'come at me bro' pose. The blade itself could be more BA, perhaps an SG glaive encarmine?

He's also lacking a bit of the ornateness you generally associate with the upper echelons of marine command, let alone as iconic a character as Mephiston. Some of the new tactical squad pads or Sanguinary Guard ones probably would have helped in this regard. The winged SG ones, in particuar, could have really helped add a bit of bulk to make him a little more imposing, too.


I don't want all that to come accross as overly negative, like I said, the painting is top notch, I just think a few tweaks to the actually modelling could see some massive improvements.

wow talys, I love it... I just started building ba and I think Ill build something like this

the red robes are really awesome, and his face is amazingly painted, where did you get that head? I don't see it in the ba kit, I like the crown with the gem hes wearing

i really like the blue thing behind his head, and that plasma pistol too!

btw I like the sword, he's supposed to have a straight sword... but its supposed to burn red with his rage not blue tho the gw model also glows blue

Thannks guys

@sockwithaticket - I thought about a lot of the things that you brought up, though I really like the Sanguinary Priest torso, including the piece behind his head. The other choices I considered for the torso were the captain and the new LE centurion from FW. I ended up not using the centurion, because I didn't have the right arms for him, and I preferred robes over cape. At some point, I may swap the backpack for a cape; I didn't have one that fit well for the model.

I actually considered having the sword across the chest, and I painted about 6 different swords at the same time including the power sword from Purifiers and 2 glaives from the Sanguinary Guard box. I ended up not really liking the swords that were too plain or too short or left handed, and the glaive, as Zen put it, is inaccurate as he is supposed to have the Sanguine Sword. I had one done really nicely with lightning bolts (like the Codex version, or the BA sergeant), but the NMM effects were inverted (for a sword down position), and it was left handed -- I will use it on some future model, perhaps a custom Sanguinius

In the end, I didn't put the sword across the chest for two reasons: first, it makes the model quite a bit smaller, and on the tabletop, he's less visible as the warlord. Second, it obscures a lot of the chest and puts both of the shoulder pads in the same position, which is a little more boring. If I had a cape, I would have done this, though.

@zen - thanks! the head is from the blood angels upgrade kit. I really love how expressive it is. The cowl and the plasma pistol are both airbrushed; the robes are wet blended with a couple of highlights layered on at the end.

Great stuff as ever, man!

so now Mephiston can fly on the wings of sanguinius and drain the blood of the heretics....thats OP. haha

Nice conversion!

Very cool. I like the kitbash, a somewhat different direction that we've seen from other Meph jit bashes. Both in terms of modelling and paint job.

Great work.

D