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You may be dissatisfied with these particular models (so far), but let me tell you your sketches and fluff are brilliant.

Please keep these dudes coming.

 Moltar wrote:
Please keep these dudes coming.

i second this

Thanks for the encouragement!

Most of my hobby time over the weekend went to moving all my stuff into a dedicated hobby room and setting up a new work-table, but I've also gotten some painting done on the latest batch of henchmen. I'll try to get some photos soon — the challenger is looking pretty good but I may need advice on the color schemes for the mercenary and fencing master.

 weirdingway wrote:

The guy in the middle has a distinctive Dark Souls feel. I can imagine him holding his sword aloft and shouting "PRIASE THE BEACON" after a long day of exploring the cosmos and confronting the horrors of the unknown.

I like everything about this thread.

Magnificent, weirdingway. Thanks for sharing.

Thanks guys!

Real life has once again demanded a lot of attention, so I haven't had time to post updates, but I have squeezed in some painting and modeling.

First off, some painting updates. These are all wip, although I've set them aside for the time-being so I can make models that I will never paint. Sorry for the photos; I can't get my lighting setup in my new hobby-room to work as well as it did in my old setup. I will be getting a new iphone in a few weeks which will no doubt help.



I'm happy with how the mechanical parts of the Failed Challenger are coming along, but I still want to do more work on the skin. More layers of color variation, more bruising, etc. It's tough painting such a large area of skin and haven't quite nailed it yet. The photos are unfortunately washing out a lot of skin detail.



I added lots of ports and sockets to the Challenger's flesh. The idea is that when he was a full-fledged Navigator he spent his life hard-wired into encounter suits or Navigation couches, and now they remain as sad reminders of his former life, weeping fluids. I'll play this up with more ink washes.





And there you see Mercenary Lt. Brahe. I'm still not sure how I'll paint his shoulder-pads and back canister, but the current plan is to leave his beard white. Obviously more cleanup and shading is needed but I'm pretty happy with his armor. I will probably also darken hi skin a bit; the last round of highlights went too far.



The Hidden Sensei is the roughest of the three. Still trying to work out a color scheme. The cloak is more green in person, but he may still need more green or blue on him to tie into the rest of household. I was planning on giving him freehand patterns on some of his robes but I'm not sure now.

I also started painting the drones:



I tried a new technique which was incredibly fast. So far they are just grey primer, white zenithal spray, two layers of very thin paint-based washes, sponge weathering, and a little wash with a diluted bronze. Clearly they need more detail work but I'm pretty happy with how they look after only a few minutes of work! The pink may be a little crazy but it looks a bit paler in real life, and some weathering washes will tone it down. I think this will be roughly how I approach the vehicles if I ever get to painting them.

---

But I've been more focused on converting lately.



First, a new head for the psyker. It feels a bit cliche but it's just such a nice head. Maybe an icon or something over his eyes will help make him more unique. I also found a box of old figures from highschool that included some unpainted Gorkamorka orks (now that was a fun game!). With the news that Twin Peaks will be coming back after 25 years I decided to make an homage to the Little Man From Another Place ... leading to this dancing little person. I think I need a head that better matches the actor, with the wide set eyes and side-parted hair. Fluff-wise he could serve as a mysterious psyker with a gift for chrono-manipulation, seemingly always out-of-step with the surrounding time-stream, able to warp reality by rubbing his palms together or snapping his fingers while dancing, etc.



And I've started my first proper Beaconite Priest. I may raise the helmet and push it back on his shoulders a bit. Right now he's standing on a ledge of rubble with the front of his robes trailing down, but I may slice off more of the bottom of the robes so he sits flatter.

Finally, a sneak preview of the female henchmen. I'm very happy with them but have some anatomy issues to sort out before sharing more ...

The mercenary lieutenant and the hidden sensei both exude badassitude. The failed challenger exudes.... oozing stuff. He creeps me the feth out, so mission accomplished!

Do not move the head on the priest! He doesn't need it sitting up properly on his shoulders with perfect posture, that slightly hunched looking positioning is much better

It really is a joy to read this blog and the models and background really fire up my imagination for my own future projects so thank you for sharing.

The Sensei reaching for the sword is a great conversion, really liking him and the Beaconite Priest is just great, such a simple design but with so much character.

I think the pink on the drone is spot on. These are supposed to be incredibly rich families and the pink gives it that Renaissance/Rococo/Louis XIII period look that you see a lot in the 40K artwork - you should paint some little black hearts on it or something like that!

Great stuff!

Thanks so much!

Gogsnik: exactly right on the pink. It's such a common color in early christian frescos that I had to try to incorporate it here.

SisterSydney: just what I was going for! You will probably be interested in the following update with female henchmen btw.

Shuppet: I adjusted the head a bit but kept the hunch.

I've been thinking that my warband was lacking in diversity and needed some female henchmen. I know we're dealing with an authoritarian fascist space empire, but I like the idea that the Imperium's prejudice is so focused on aliens, mutants, psykers, and most of all heretics and free-thinkers, that modern-day prejudices wouldn't really be a factor. And I've been aiming for a diverse gang of individual crazies, so it doesn't make sense to stick to only male henchmen. But because my models have almost all been built from mixes of a limited number troop boxes I haven't had any female components to work with. But when I saw Nordicway's amazing female models, I decided to try making some of my own.

I ordered the witches from the Dark Elf Cauldron of Blood because I thought they'd be easier to make into less dynamic models (I've already got my abuman death cultists and didn't want female ninjas). It turns out they are incredibly tiny, delicate models. Such small hands and heads! Nice sculpts, and with little enough clothing that I figured I could sculpt my own on top.

I started with these two models, made from the top and bottom of a single witch elf:


The witch elf heads were too small to work with the non-elf parts I was using, but I discovered that there are some heads in the Empire Archer kit that I think are supposed to represent teenage boys. With a little shaving and in this context I thought it could work as a woman's face. And you'll see I spaced out the elf's hips, wanting to give her more human proportions.

This lead to this intermediate stage:


I toyed with a third simpler conversion (who would get dressed in robes or something) using only a head and foot swap, but it just was way off proportion wise. I've seen people (thistle among them of course!) use flagellant heads on daemonette bodies and liked the idea of a grizzled crone warrior, but that head on that body is ridiculous.

Then I ended up with:


Here the plasma gunner and crusader really take shape. At this stage I had adjusted their proportions with plasticard spacers and started green stuffing. And I felt like I was hitting two classic wh40k archetypes, but missing a sillier, raving lunatic type of character, so tried that flamer-nun type. She may have some promise with enough green-stuff but I'm just not as into her as the other two and have set her aside for now.

Which leads me to the almost final forms of the two henchwomen and the beacon priest:




I'm thrilled with how they're turning out. Just a bit more greenstuff to tidy things up I think. Maybe the crusader's purity seal is too big and needs to be replaced with a scratch-made one. And her shoulder pads could use some fancying up. I'm also considering some hair poking out from beneath their hats/helms, particularly on the plasma gunner, because she probably reads less clearly as female. I haven't sculpted hair before but my wife suggested two braids which I think may be both more sculptable and play up the valkyrie angle.

At some point I realized the Valkyrie Plasmagunner was inadvertently referencing John Blanche's masterpiece cover of the 2nd edition Sisters of Battle Codex. Not a problem at all!

Oh and finally, my new idea for how to paint the beacon priests' space helmets is to try some of this crazy Japanese stuff:

Hasegawa Mirror Gold

im glad you picked up on the john blancheness of them cause i was gonna say if the sisters looked anything as good as these i would start collecting them as always great models man i alwas get inspired looking at your blog

also that gold stuff looks god very curious to see how it turns out might be tricky to get it crinkle free over a sphere thou good luck with that

Love the female henchmen. They mesh very nicely with the rest of the force. Out of curiosity what is the base for the Beaconite priest?

Such beautiful work as always.

Can we assume the middle guy from the sketch (fatter one) is on the way with the release of the new Blightkings?

Thanks!

kencotter: yeah it may be impossible! I'd have to practice a lot I'm sure.

bronzefists42: the priest is based on the corspemaster (or some such) from the WHFB Coven Throne / Mortis Engine.

Medium of Death: The original plan was the classic Nurgle Chaos Lord, but yeah now I'm considering a Blightking (or 2) instead. I wanted to do an homage to all the great Inq28 Nurgle Lord conversions but the more dynamic poses of the blight kings are tempting. I really don't need a whole box of burgle bits though and the cheaper lord may win out in the end.

Ah yes, the ubiquitous nurgle lord. It'd be rude not to have him!

Perhaps a box of blightkings could be justified if you used them as a Terminator unit counts as?

Perhaps hardy ship crewmen/mutants that deal with the most radioactive elements of the ship. Bodies riddled with cancers and tumorous growths.

If not I'm sure you can snatch up one of the torso's off a bits site!

Looking forward to that sketch coming to life regardless.

Ha. Love the henchwomen. persons of hench.

Some great work



Mysterio is pleased!

Great blog mate! Your conversions look all brilliant and its awesome, how creative your kitbashs are. Keep up the great work

Great updates.
The females Are phenomenal.

amazing, having rec entry been working on female minis myself I take my hat off, you have achieved results that I could only dream of

Thanks guys!

I've got terrible hobby attention span and instead of finishing the female henchmen I've started some new models instead.

First up, a Squat! I've never really liked Squats. I've always the idea of divergent human evolution paralleling fantasy archetypes. Shadowrun kind of took that idea and ran with it in an interesting way, and Rick Priestley revisited some of the same ideas in the Gates of Antares project.

But although I liked the basic concept, the realization of Squats was just too silly for me, even in the diverse and crazy Rogue Trader universe (I must admit I'm also not much of a Dwarf fan). So back when squats were dropped I didn't mind, but I did start thinking about the challenge of how to reboot them. My idea was to make them an (ab)human counterpoint to the Imperium; hi-tech, rational, corporate, sci-fi miners, with anime-inspired technology. Here's a crude sketch I posted on my high-school 40k website along with my proposal for a Squat reboot. This was before the Tau were invented, so the anime-mecha visual space wasn't yet occupied.



Recently there've been some great modern reinterpretations of Squats. Spiky Rat Pack/izecolt's army is amazing (particularly the transport!) although the helms are a bit too fantasy norse for my taste. And Jeff Vader has made some great Squats using the bearded Space Wolf heads (something I am stealing):

http://spikyratpack.blogspot.com/search/label/Squats
http://convertorum.blogspot.com/2013/06/cyan-dwarf.html

So I've been thinking it would be fun to add a single squat to my henchmen, incorporating the new fluff that the squats were destroyed by the Tyranids. I like the idea of a grizzled old survivor, who is as far as he knows the last surviving Squat, a bedraggled and grim abhuman mercenary. Something that would fit in with my army.

So here's what I have so far:



I'm pretty happy with how he's coming together, especially the rogue trader style bionic foot, although the meltagun and his arms clearly need a lot of work. I like that although he's definitely shorter than a regular human, he's not that tiny and actually has thighs and knees. I will probably keep the bestial arms with the shoulder fur; it plays up the abhuman angle, and is not really much of a mutation after all. I may try to give him some tau-style tech to play up the hi-tech angle but we'll see.

Next, I've been thinking about using the other mutant from the WHFB chaos war shrine I have leftover from my Novator project. I think it could make a nice counterpoint to the Failed Challenger, acting as another monstrous bodyguard for the head of the household.




The idea is that this was once a normal human, but the household's Magos Biologos has been experimenting on him. I'd cover the body with drug dispenser vials and bionic implant type details. Which head do you prefer? The bearded one is more expressive and sad, but if I use the dapper facial hair head I could make him a rogue trader or other merchant who broke a deal with the household, and was duly punished with “life” as a living weapon. I suppose beardy scion-eyes could've once been a merchant, but I feel like he'd need different fluff.

I don't think it needs to be said at tthis point, but stunning stuff as always.

I think I prefer the beard/scion head as it doesn't jar the way that the pointy beard does but it still gets across the point that this poor chap has been mutated terribly.

yeah i think the second head also

I'm going to get a thesaurus out to come up with more words to describe how awesome all this stuff is as I'm quickly running out of words!

The latest creations are stunning as always. Really nice work on the female henchmen (women?), some excellent posing in all three of them.

The priest is just terrifying, he exudes menace with that long robe and staff.

Loving the new big mutant as well. The bearded face seems to work the best in my opinion. Have you considered having him holding a vat of chemicals in one arm? Perhaps it could be wired into him as some kind of life support-type liquid.

Keep up the great work!

Ooh, forgot about the squat! Very rugged looking, just how I imagine he should look.

Bearded head mutant! Bearded squat! Beards for everyone!

Man the stuff I built for my Navigators is really underwhelming compared to this awesomeness. probably one of the most original armies i have seen in a long time. Also FW made some HH rules for Navigators on their website. Thought you might be interested.

Thanks guys!

Bearded scion head it is. I like the idea of him carrying life support chemicals.

In the meantime I've been bad and started yet another new project; a scratch-built counts-as land raider! I'm not sure if it will ever materialize but I'm excited about it right now and if it goes according to plan I may have pictures in the new few days.

I'm looking forward to seeing that. If it's as original as your other vehicles then we are in for a treat!

Fantastic stuff! Really makes me miss my hobby crap from back in the good days.