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Hey, i'm VERY new to this sort of thing so i was hoping you guys could help me. In earlier years I had bought a box of Chaos Space Marines which i cannot for the life of me find. What i found instead was an incomplete box of Assault on Black Reach Space Marines. I was wondering if it was possible at all to convert these marines and make them Chaos Space Marines? (as well as Chaos Terminators, Dreadnought, Biker,, pretty much all of it). Also any general tips for beginners would be very helpful.

I'm pretty good around glue and paint (the marines pictured were painted by my brother, not me), so any tips on how to convert them would be great. Also I couldn't seem to find a thread about this, i'd be grateful if someone could share it.



Here are some images of what i have.



EDIT - I dont know how to insert images so here is the link - http://imgur.com/a/ca4V8

Thanks guys

-Zepol

You will never have them look exactly like CSM unless you do a lot of converting but it seems like you have some decent shoulder pads, backpacks heads and weapons that should do a decent job of making them look a lot more chaosy id strip the paint off and use you best judgement in adding chaos bits and pieces. If you're looking to do a nurgle theme i heated up a pin and poked 3 holes in the shoulder pads of normal marine pads and they came out looking awesome. then a decent paint job and you will have perfectly chaosy marines.

You could leave them as they are and have a few with chaosy bits. They could be a chapter freshly fallen to the Dark Gods and are fairly unscathed in the way of battle damaged or suffering the effects of the touch of their Dark masters.

As you purchase more Chaos stuff this could represent their increased fall to Chaos, as everything gets to look more warped and spiky.

You could always keep the Space Marines as a small second force and use them as a Chapter that fights Chaos in the Eye. You could sat that the reason for the slight Chaos - y armour is that they have been there for a long time and had to do patch up jobs to continue the fight.

For Nurgle I just added a some green stuff to my guys. In the case of the below guy I stuck to one side representing the gradual spread of the taint. Others I made holes in, representing unrepaired battle damage stuff like that



Ub1k put forward a good idea for the 3 eyed symbol. I will have to try that myself.

Go Nurgle. the best part about converting for nurgle is that messy is good, so you can easily work it and make it look awesome using second hand marines. Missing an arm? make some greenstuff tentacles!

Get some greenstuff and make them look infested.

On any vehicle, you cover them with blemishes in this vein

I find the best way to convert loyallists to chaos marines is with these things:

https://www.games-workshop.com/en-GB/Chaos-Space-Marines-Back-Packs

They very quickly change the sihoulette of the marine from one that says "loyalist" to one that says "chaos".

If you don't want t spend money, you can of course just us the backpacks the models come with but achieve a similar effect by removing the vents and adding something to space the vents from the main backpack (a length of wooden skewer, sprue, brass rod, greenstuff tentacles, et cetera).

The second thing that will change the appearance of your marines from loyalist to renegade is to either sculpt or paint over any imperial insignia to replace them with either chaos insignia (or at least defied imperial insignia).
Things like painting the imperial eagle on the chest to match the rest of the armour and free handing a chaos star on top instead, or crossing out chapter markings with red paint.

The third thing you can do is to swap out the arms/heads/shoulder pads/weapons to more chaotic versions, but this might require some intricate work for old starter box models.


Automatically Appended Next Post:
Something to consider is to paint them in a more sinister fashion; heavy use of shading, giving the models a grittier, grimier effect instead of the bright, heroic look of ultramarines.

I painted a couple of starter box marines to a basic standard this way, and even without conversion the paint job helps reduce the 'heroic' look.

Strip the paint off the painted space marines and repaint them in a chaos legions' colour scheme.
Do some backpack, shoulder pad, and helmet replacements. A lot of CSM bits have extra spikes and chains and have a slightly bulkier silhouette, so changing those would be a good start.

Elsewhere, adding skulls, blood, and spikes will work, and maybe sculpting extra warp-y things out of green stuff.

Thanks for all the quick and helpful replies, i will definitely have to go and buy some green stuff and replace some missing limbs. Just as a side note, how would i go about removing the heads, backpacks, etc from some of the models? They look pretty well glued on (i don't know what type of glue), should i just tear them off? Also, how would you recommend i strip off the paint?

Thanks again

-Zepol

Clippers are pretty good for de-heading space marines,but you may need to trim away at the new head a little in order to have it fit properly in place.

Yeah clippers are the way i do it. then just a bit of scraping out where the neck was

Another nice looking effect from an old CSM codex is to paint to the models with a range of loyalist chapter paint schemes, and then deface any Imperial insignia (in the example given, they painted red Xs over all the markings), modifying them with any Chaos bits you can find or buy. Not exactly fitting if you want to play one of the original traitor legions, but looks good for recent renegades.