Tyranid Warrior/Ossiarch Bonereaper Conversion: building a better warrior

 Back to the retronids, sort of.

It's interesting to note how old some of the GW miniatures are. I was at school when the plastic Leman Russ tank came out. The current tyranid warriors are probably twenty years old or so.

And they do look a bit dull. Actually, this isn't such a bad thing, as it wouldn't take too long to get a tyranid swarm ready for gaming - for one thing, they don't have clothes or equipment, really, so you wouldn't have to paint all the little bits. But the current warrior models are a bit uninspiring.

As if happens, one of the many, many weird little factions in the Age of Sigmar world is (are?) the Ossiarch Bonereapers. It's hard to describe these things: they're like undead, but they don't seem to be the animated remains of anything. They're more like Necrons painted to resemble bone, with swords. Anyway, they're weird.

Among them are Stalkers, four-armed spindly monsters. I've seen several people on the internet suggesting that they resemble the very old tyranid warriors from the mid-90s, but I've never seen anyone trying to mix tyranid and ossiarch parts. Which is where this blog post really ought to have started.

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I bought a Stalker off ebay and got to work. The first thing to point out is that the Stalker models are spindly and, while well-sculpted, fragile. I challenge anyone to cut one of these things off the sprue without damaging it in some way. In fact, this whole conversion was awkward and fiddly, so be warned that it isn't easy at all.

The photo gives some idea as to which bits came from the original kit. Essentially, it was a head and upper arms swap. I only had the back half of a tyranid warrior's head, so I had to chop up an old genestealer head to provide a face (as well as cutting off its oversized tongue and what seemed to be testicles coming out of its chin...).

Here is a guide to what I did:

1) Cut "little tail" off groin piece. It looks weird anyhow.

2) Cut flaps of ragged cloth off left and right body sections.

3) Attach groin piece to legs and build body as usual. Leave off the chestplate (it'll get in the way).

4) Add lower ossiarch arms as usual (use the bigger of the two sets of arms). Be careful to make sure they won't get in the way of the upper arms, which will be tyranid arms holding the gun. Test-fitting is advised. You could also use genestealer rending claws here, if you don't want boneswords.

5) Add tyranid gun arms to upper body. This will be awkward and fiddly. It'll require some cutting, and probably some green stuff work too. 

6) Add tyranid head to body. The neck may take some filing down to fit.

7) Your giant death prawn is ready to eat. It'll probably be eating space marines.

And this is the end result:

I really like this guy. He looks very weird, but so do all tyranid warriors, one way or another. I think he's got a nice balance of old and new styles, as well as a suitable H.R. Giger shape (despite being bright red). As giant alien dinosaur shrimps go, he's doing well. The only way he'll serve the Emperor is to the Hive Mind, on a bed of lettuce.

I've got a choice now: I could do some seriously retro tyranids, or wait until some new models arrive. I found some brilliant fantasy soldiers on ebay, and they would be fun to paint. We'll see!

"Fun" with Chaos Spawn

Weird and pissed off.

From time immemorial (ie about 1988), chaos spawn have been an important part of the Warhammer Chaos army, not least because they're a good way of using up all the bits you've got left over from other projects. A while back, I converted one of the strange creatures from the Killteam Rogue Trader box, and that reminded me of some old spawn conversions that I'd done a while ago, and which were gathering dust in a cardboard box when they could be raising hell on the battlefield.

I dug the conversions out, re-based them, and gave them a new coat of paint on the flesh. I more-or-less followed a tutorial that I found here: HERE. It's probably not the most exact method, but it produces a pleasingly disgusting, but not too rotten, effect. Here are the re-worked spawn.

It's rather hard to explain what they are, but there are a lot of tyranid bits in there, along with some skaven parts. The overall effect is... lovely.

Here is a family photo.

Anyway, I actually find them quite gross to look at, so the tutorial obviously worked. I think I'll paint something cartoony and nice next: a knight, maybe, or a wizard. The spawn are going back in their box. Ugh.

Glottkin Titan: Jam for the Jam Gods

I've always been interested by Warhammer's Glottkin model. It's a fantasy miniature, made for the End Times campaign, and features a massive Nurgle chap being ridden by two Nurgle champions, a wizard and a fighter. As with a lot of Nurgle models, I'm not that sold on it. However, it's always seemed to have a lot of conversion potential.

In particular, the left arm seems too big and the right arm feels too small, even for a gun. And it's always been much too expensive for me. However, when I saw a rather battered Glottkin on Ebay for a reasonable amount, I bought it and got to work.

I hacked off the weird mouth-lamprey-thing from his right arm, which I intended to use as the mount for a thermal cannon left over from my knight titan. Then, having made a good start, I chopped off his left arm and shoved it up his bum. The join was covered with DAS clay and green stuff, and the big tentacle made a nice tail. And by nice, I mean revolting.

Then it was time for a bit of an experiment. I'd seen the new GW contrast paints as a good way of covering large areas. The Glottkin is big and very warty, which would hopefully be good for the paint to take hold. So I sprayed him white and got to work with a pot of Blood Angel Red.

Hmm, not bad, if a bit like strawberry jam. Obviously, it'll need some extra work, but the basic effect is quite "nice", by which I mean that he looks like the rotting love-child of an Imperial Knight and a randy squig.

He then got a gun emplacement on his back, again courtesy of the knight kit. This bit is an icarus autocannon.

Here's a rather washed-out picture of current progress, together with a delightful pink stomach. This is what happens when the chaos gods make jelly!

Another Weirdo From The Wasteland

Things we have a lot of in the apocalypse:

Spears
Pistols
Hair dye

Things we need:

Armour
Properly-fitting t-shirts
Shoes

This week's painted model is a real oddity. It's from Sphere Wars, a Spanish game which seems to be discontinued. Sphere Wars made the Masalan Phallhounds that I picked up cheap at a wargames fair, and the rest of their sculpts are pretty good too. I've ordered some other weird bits and bobs from the only person on the internet who stocks them.

This lady is some kind of pirate, and was firing a big harpoon gun, which hid most of the front of her. I gave her dark eldar weapons and painted her in a colour scheme to reflect the not-Escher gang that I'd done. Given her primitive outfit, I reckon she would make a decent Ratskin Scout for the gang - and she has the added bonus of not wearing a dead rat on her head.

 

And here's a work in progress. This thing started as a Feculent Gnarlmaw, which is Age Of Sigmarese for "Nurgle tree" (Who comes up with these names?). It was £17 and, like a lot of GW's terrain, pretty decent value. Anyway, I've started to convert it/him into a greater daemon of Nurgle.

Trust me, it will look find in the end. Well, disgusting, but still fine.

Bloodletting for Fun and Profit

The forces of Chaos have had some great designs over the years, but they have also had some very wonky ones, and there's always been something of an over-abundance of big muscley men in lieu of anything genuinely sinister. The forces of Khorne have suffered from this in particular, and still do to an extent: the bloodthirster, their greater demon, has had a tendency to look like Tolkien's Balrog as drawn by a 1980s metal band (and, in one bizarre incarnation, had the head of a dog wearing a kaiser helmet).

Likewise the bloodletters, the smaller demons of Khorne. In their first incarnation (genus tadpoleus) they looked like this:

These weren't painted by me (I think they're pretty good, and you can see them HERE) but I did have a squad of four of these weird, spindly metal things. Sadly I can't find them: among the lost and the damned, they are most definitely lost.

Then the bloodletters got bulked up. They went through a late '90s phase of looking much more muscular and strangely middle-aged (a lot of models were a big ropey at that time) and then they looked like little wingless bloodthirsters for a while - savage, but too much like beastmen and not quite right somehow. More on the (un)natural history of the bloodletter can be found here: HERE

And now they've got it right. The current bloodletters have all the scrawny viciousness of the originals, but the sculpting is much better. They look three quarters medieval demon, and one quarter Giger's Alien - and not like a picture by a medieval person.

All of this preamble leads to the fact that I've painted five of them. I bulk-painted them, which is never a guarantee of the best results, but the fact that they're basically just red and the models are so nice means that they come together pretty decently.

I've not converted them, apart from cutting the tongues off three of them (what is it with GW and monsters sticking their tongues out?). I haven't finished their big black swords, as I've not decided how to do them justice yet. Anyhow, I seem to be building a chaos warband now. At least it will force me to paint those Dark Vengeance marines I've had lying around for the last three years.

Meanwhile, in Khornwall

I have returned from holiday in Cornwall and, in a truly awkward attempt at a segue back into model painting, I have been working on some Khornish miniatures.

These were the Blood Warriors from the Storm of Sigmar boxed set. Like the other Khorne soldiers, I thought it would be good to convert them into post-apocalyptic types. A basic Blood Warrior looks like this:

The rabbit ears would have to go. I was slightly nervous about this, but simply hacking them off and filing down the result left the warriors with interesting plates over the sides of their heads, like a neckbrace. At any rate, it looked solid and a darn sight less silly than the original outfits.

I removed the slightly weird shield-things and replaced some of the axes with less medieval-looking weapons, including a couple of guns. Likewise, the strange stomach-mouth on one of the models was filled in. In the model shown above, I cut off the silly beard, which even ZZ Top would regard as excessive, and replaced it with a roll of cloth (that probably looks like some kind of mutation, now I think about it). So here we are:

This guy is in charge, as much as anyone could be.

This one is my favourite.

It's actually a ball and chain.

The painting looks a bit rough and ready, largely because it is, but I think it suits the miniatures. I went for a rusty, daubed look. Presumably these guys smear red paint on their armour or, failing that, Chicken Tikka Masala. In fact, painting things with curry is beginning to look like a theme of this blog.

In other news, it's exciting to see that a new version of Necromunda is being released. The models look pretty good, although I've never been very keen on House Goliath, and high heels on models is (are?) a pet hate of mine. My only concern is that they might be a bit big. Everything from GW seems to be getting larger, and it would be nice if they scaled against the original models.

The Hounds of Hell

Masalan Phallhounds are large, muscular predators thought to have developed during the fifty-year Spice War, during which Masala was isolated from the rest of the galaxy. These creatures are belived to be decended from guard dogs that became mutated after wallowing in a huge pit of food waste known as the Slurry of Curry. This, it is said, gave them their distinctive colour and their pungent odour. They are known for their fiery temprament. Despite being technically poisonous, their meat is regarded as a delicacy in the British Space Empire.

At Warfare, during my deep-diving session in the bargain bin, I acquired two random metal dog-like things. They cost £1, which seemed like a pretty good deal for - well, for whatever they are. Too bad I threw away the blister pack. They're pretty good sculpts, I think, and I really like the musculature on the models. They were quite easy to paint, in that I used red mixed with black and then multiple glazes of thinned down red.

Not bad for a quid!