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When I look at most Imperial Guard armies I see that the normal infantry are more like copy and paste clones.

Yeah I know that painting and converting up to a hundred guys can easily go over bored, but does anyone know any little modifications that help give personality and a sense of ... Ehh, humanity to all the different guardsmen on the "line"?

Different heads, different arm positions, different equipment, squad markings, etc

Mixing in things you find in your bitz box can help

Whst kenshin said also I like to mix up regiments in my army Cadians make up the bulk of my army but I just picked up some preatorians of ebay and they are now my ceremonial guard I have a few DKOK engineers which i use with the hades drill there are lots of old cool miniatures you can pick up, even necromunda miniatures are great there autoguns are the same as kasguns and can be explained away easily as mercenaries or perhaps things have gotten so bad that even the gangers are joining the fight.

I highly recommend Pig Iron productions heads. They are great, especially the Kolony Militia heads. They make guard look great!

Sorry to shamelessly plug my blog but http://www.dakkadakka.com/dakkaforum/posts/list/30/450439.page
I used differn't rifles and torsos'
Everything I've used on my blog I refeance so you can find/do it yourself

My IG troopers may as well be clones.

Grist for the mill.
Meat for the grinder.

Nothing more. I don't need to "humanise" them - or inspire empathy for them.

OTOH, my commissars are ALL individuals. As are my stormtroopers (I don't care how useless people say they are, I have 50 of the bastiches and they are all precious little snowflakes).

gluing on all the extra bits helps... nades, ammo pouches, other random stuff on belts, shoulders backpacks and other stuff helps a lot! im currently working on my scouts and adding all the extra stuff helps a lot

Thanks for all the suggestions guys haha

@Newabrtion - I've considered using those torsos before on my guardsmen ... So I might have to take your inspiration and use em too.

I use the Pig Iron heads on my Drop Guard, although I use the Heavy Infantry heads with the visors. Usually I try to give each Guardsman a different pose, which is hard when the legs only come in 5 poses and I only like 3, maybe 4 of the poses.

Here's what I do:

* Cadian torsos, arms and lasguns
* Catachan legs
* Pig Iron heads
* Forgeworld/Hasslefree Minis grav-chutes

I more try to differentiate between squads. My most decorated Veteran Squad is all Forgeworld Elysians who have all been customized with hip flasks and individual equipment. My two other Veteran Squads are the above recipe, to fit with their Grenadier loadouts. My Infantry Squads are the Mantic Warpath Corporation Marines, who are pretty much all rank-and-file, aside from some slight paintjob differences.

I really wish I had a picture to attach but I'm waiting until I have my whole army painted and my early paintjobs redone to fit my newer standards - no photos until the big reveal.
EDIT: Derp, only the FW veterans have the FW grav chutes. If you want to add some flavour to a unit that rides in a Valkyrie, Hasslefree Minis makes some kickass grav-chutes for super cheap - about half the price of FW.

If you're willing to kit bash, I take Cadian flamers and put them onto catachan figures. All you need to do it cut the gun to fit the gun grip in the catachan hand and make a hose/straps using green stuff.

And if you're willing to pay the extra for that you can buy a few squads/SWS's off Forgeworld to throw in.

As everyone has already said bitz are the best way to add diversity to your Guardsmen.

Victoria Lamb has some great conversion kits that can be sprinkled into your army to create unique pieces. Down side is her bits are metal so they require more work but the end result is just lovely.
http://www.victorialamb.com/store.html

Kromlech has some great bits as well and are easy to work with resin.
http://kromlech.eu/

I changed the heads (pig iron) and made the lasguns into large bore carbines by cutting them down, trimming off some detail and adding a 2mm tube stub barrel. But that really just sets a different theme.

To individualise them or at least add some variance I have found the IG vehicle, HWS and command sprues give you plenty of options to mix the look of your squads and there tend to be lots of spare bits from these sprues anyway.

I personally reccommend crossing bits with some WHFB empire and even britionians' work fairly well. Its a little bit of a bite on the wallet but, the turn out can be fun.

The way I did mine was to think of the things that infantry guys actually do when in combat. The standard bits easily allow you to do firing/advancing poses. In my view there are 2 sides to each model. What the legs are doing and what the upper body is doing. the two can be mixed and matched pretty easily to multiply up the overall poses you can achieve.

Adding in heavy weapon team legs gives you kneeling. one of the "walking" legs works great for doing prone guys as indicated below:



That probably covers leg poses without actually needing to cut anything, but you can also do some simple modifications to get sitting poses or snipers braced against scenery. I've also seen some lovely jumping poses based on the stock leg types.

Now for arms you can have standard firing or shouldered weapons with no modifications. With the range of stock arms available you can also do reloading, fiting scopes, drinking from canteen, holding knives, attaching bayonets and bracing weapons from the side or above again all without any cutting required. What about crawling through wire, calling, protecting the head, clasping wounded limbs and the ubiquitous pointing and shouting for the sergeants

conversions can be as simple as cutting a hand and repositioning it representing hand signals or bracing a weapon, i.e. the kneeling GL guy:



For my Guard infantry I ended up mucking about in my room striking different poses and seeing what parts would be needed to match up. It was surprisingly good fun

http://colgravis.blogspot.com/ he has a store now too.

You could also do conversions on the weapons. If you ahve a vet squad, give them cut-down compact versions of las-guns, or give some of them autoguns. Get a handle on greenstuff and add bandages. Heck, grab a necron kit, slaughter it and use it for bionics.

Headswaps are by far the easiest way to customise guard squads. I find that enclosed helmets or gasmasks look better, in my opinion, than the open Cadian helmets because it removes the problem of a bunch of guardsmen with identical faces instead they become an anonymous horde. Perfect.

Just a few minor arm repositionings and slighlty altered posing.

I use differnet poses and squad markings. Also Skin tone, I try to make my guard racially diverse.

 ObliviousBlueCaboose wrote:
I use differnet poses and squad markings. Also Skin tone, I try to make my guard racially diverse.

I can't say enough about having them look racially diverse. "Ok, your turn". "Alright, the Brutha with the Heavy Bolter moves here and fires...." I do wish I was good enough with the green stuff to make a couple look more asian. But they're small enough, the skin tone is what matters. I have some old Ral Partha paint "American Indian" and that stuff is great.

It says in many 40k books that almost all regiments end up mixed as they're put together to form full companies from what's left over from the meat grinder. So really, there's no reason you can't mix Praetorians with Cadians with Mordians or whatever else you want. It's your money, it's your miniatures, as long as they have the right guns in their hands to fulfill Codex requirements so you can play 'em outside your circle of home-rules friends, then make them however you want and bugger anyone who tells you it's wrong.

I think the Codex actually cites an example where Elysians were joined with Cachatans and it was a great success.

Actually, I think with all the aftermarket conversion parts it's way easier to get unique looking IG than Space Marines. I've seen so many Space Marines they don't seem to differ much other than the paint job, no matter what head-swap you put on them. A bolter is a bolter, but you can have IG with 10 different style lasguns, bolters, shotguns, plasma guns, melta guns, flintlock rifles....whens the last time you saw a Space Marine with a lasgun or shotgun?

Please don't revive threads that are more than one month dormant.