Khorne Berserker Conversions (plus bonus elf with gun)

 It's been a long while - three months or so - since I painted anything that wasn't an Eldar. I happened to be looking at ebay, and saw a bunch of Warhammer chaos chaps going very cheaply, so I bought them, and well.. 

It's well-known that the models for Khorne berserkers are awful. They're extremely old, and probably looked pretty cool back in 2003, but now look very clunky and clumsy. New models are coming, but they're not actually as mental as I'd like berserkers to be.

For those who don't know, berserkers are entirely reasonable people who fight as elite assault troops for Khorne the Blood God, who is like a cross between the artwork on an 80s metal album and a child's drawing of the Balrog from the Lord of the Rings. The berserkers rampage around the galaxy, hacking and slaying and presumably regretting their poor life choices.

The models I had bought were all from Age of Sigmar, which meant I needed to convert them to wield more futuristic gear. They were, I think, "blood warriors" (all the AoS Khorne models have silly names). In some cases this was a standard weapon swap, but in others I had to replace entire arms with space marine ones. 

The end result was a bit of a weird mishmash, but I doubt that the frothing warriors of Khorne would much care. Incidentally, there is some bare skin on show, but that's the same with the official GW kits. GW has always been pretty lax with the idea of power armour making up a sealed suit, after all. That's why I didn't add any backpacks to these guys. I expect that the evil magic of the Warp protects them, or something.

Also, none of them has the standard "Khorne bunny ears" on his helmet. That's simply because I think they look a bit silly and over-large, so I just trimmed them down or used Chaos heads instead. Here are some WIP shots of 3 of them (I did the other 3 conversions earlier and just repainted them).

This guy has two new arms and a new head.

This chap got a new left arm, a new head and pistol, and a spike on his shoulder pad.

The champion of the unit was originally holding a massive banner. This snapped off, and I replaced it with a plasma pistol. I added a new head looking in a different direction to the original one, so he'd be pointing his men forward with his ridiculous axe.

And here they are painted. The first two:

The second two. Both of these are based off the same model. My conversion tip here is that the way that heads and weapons are pointing can really change the look and feel of a model.

And the third two. The guy on the left has a really fortunate lasgun that I had lying around. The big scale of these guys makes it easier to use old plastic fists and weapons, as a lot of the fists have sausage fingers that aren't obvious on hefty blokes like the berserkers.

Actually, if anyone's missing elves with guns, I did paint one such model. It's a Privateer Press Scyrah model, and it's made out of some kind of weird plastic-resin stuff. Unfortunately, this stuff doesn't hold detail all that well, and there were some nasty mold lines. I was able to scrape a lot of it off, but it doesn't have the crispness of metal or proper plastic.

Two More Warlocks

 Here are two more warlocks for the retro Eldar army. There's not much to say about them: they're Jes Goodwin sculpts, they're from the early-mid 90s, and they're really good miniatures. They're obviously based off the same basic model, but the detail is excellent and they stand apart well. I particularly like the fact that one chap has antlers.

Eldar Autarch Conversion

 Even more Eldar! After all this painting, I was missing doing conversions, so I thought I'd make a converted leader for my Eldar army. One of the characters you can have now is the autarch, who is a sort of super-warrior who can mix and match skills and gear from the various Eldar aspects. I thought this would give me the opportunity to build something suitably unusual.

I started with the plastic Dark Eldar archon model. It's got an interesting pose, as he's standing on a pile of rocks with his legs close together, presumably supervising his minions. I used the legs and the front of the body. The rocks had a skull and ribcage in front of them. I removed these to make the model look a bit more heroic and less sinister. 

The back of the body came from an old metal warp spider jump generator that (I think) originally came with a metal autarch model. In one of those weird "this was meant to happen" moments, it fitted perfectly with the front of the Dark Eldar body. Excellent!

The arms came from old Eldar bits. The right arm and weapon were from a Shining Spear conversion kit (they're an aspect who ride jetbikes and carry lances) and the left came from an extremely old Guardian part that was lying in the bits box. The pistol is from a Dark Eldar wytch, but looks quite like a standard Eldar fusion pistol. 

Her head was an old Wood Elf part. It's got an odd plate on the left side, presumably as armour, which I painted up to match her body armour.

Painting-wise, I tried to incorporate some of the colours I've used on other Eldar units, to suggest that she has studied all of them: she's got purple hair like a Warlock, a white Warp Spider backpack, blue Guardian armour and a green/blue fade on her rear insignia, like the heads of the dreadnoughts that I've made.

Now the army has a leader! I've got plans to do more warlocks and a farseer or two as well. Watch this space elf...

Warp Spiders!

Time for some Warp Spiders. The Warp Spiders are one of the odder shines of Eldar aspect warriors (although not as odd as the "weirdly terrifying" Slicing Orbs of Zandros, it seems, who don't have miniatures and only exist on one craftworld). The Spiders use short-range teleporters to appear next to their enemies and shoot them with death spinners, which fire balls of sharp wire and function rather like flamethrowers. 

The Warp Spiders were introduced slightly later than the rest of the Eldar aspects, and the models lack some of the style and sense of movement of the others. The models are rather chunky lumps of metal, but then a lot of models of that time were static and hefty, with massive robes and cloaks and suits of armour. They're quite detailed, but the detail isn't very exciting - certainly not as dynamic as Marc Gibbons' cool artwork:

A friend bought me a pot of unusual paint in a sale. It's from the Turbo Dork range from Exit 23 Games, and is meant to be a metallic paint that goes from blue to pinkish-purple, in a very 1980s way. It looks rather weird, and I thought it could add an unearthly look to the Warp Spiders, which would fit their habit of flying through warpspace. I decided to use it quite sparingly.

Otherwise, I went for a traditional colour scheme, incorporating red, black and white. I mounted the models on slightly larger bases than usual, which I found on ebay. This is only because I didn't realise that they were slightly larger than usual until I'd purchased them, but I think they give the models a bit more "space" to stand in. 

The exarch for the Warp Spiders is much more exciting than the rank and file guys. The big blades on his arms gave me the opportunity to add some more of the Blue Raspberry paint, which came out rather well. 

They're clunky models, and they need new sculpts to fit with the rest of the range, but I like the overall result. The sparkly blue and red armour go together quite nicely - by fluke, I should add. Anyhow, they made a good change from painting things light blue!

Eldar War Walker

The Eldar war walker is a curious thing. It was one of the first Eldar vehicles, along with the dreadnought. It wasn't in Rogue Trader, but appeared in the blue Citadel catalogue. Where the dreadnought was a serious damage-doer, the war walker carried two big guns, like a walking AA battery. It was comparatively flimsy, and functioned like a slightly improved version of the Imperial Guard's sentinel. The somewhat gangly model re-used cleverly parts from the dreadnought. 

In the late 1990s, a revised version of the war walker came out - still entirely metal, though. The second version of the war walker was slightly changed: the original pilot had little dangly legs, like a baby in a harness, which looked a bit daft in practice, and the pilot in the new version was sitting in a seat. The new pilot also wore armour like a modern guardian. The guns were refined to be less clunky and more elegant.

I've painted one of these second versions. It looks both sleek and slightly dippy. For one thing, the pilot is ridiculously exposed to enemy fire, and for another, the guns would be going off right next to his helmet, which can't make aiming (or thinking) very easy. But still, it looks weirdly cool.

I went for the standard paint scheme I used for the guardians, to suggest that he's "regular" army. I added some bits of detail: decorations to the gun shields and a couple of markings on the exhausts. Otherwise, it's fairly simple-looking.

Striking Scorpions

 Here are a few Eldar Striking Scorpion aspect warriors. They're the old 90s sculpts - the first aspect warrior models. I think they were sculpted by Jes Goodwin. I think they're great miniatures. Despite the restrictions of the time, they have a nice sense of pose and movement. They're not as gymnastic as the Howling Banshees or Harlequins, but they've got heavier armour and they look as if they'd be pretty tough in a fight.

Whilst I went for the standard green, I tried to tie them back into the rest of the army with their faces, bases and blue holsters. I was worried that they'd be fiddly to paint, but actually they were fairly easy. Using a simple colour scheme helped, as did the various ridges on their armour. You might have noticed that I have three of the same model. That's because they were going cheap on ebay. Sadly, my camera is too rubbish to let me get a decent picture of all five together.

Eldar Fighter Skimmer Thing

 So, in an earlier post I mentioned the Eldar equivalent of a pickup truck...

You don't have to be an expert in Warhammer to realise that the 40k world is a bloody ugly place. Whether it's lumpy tanks, snarling demons, Gestapo-lite commissars, zombie-bondage-mutant things (that covers a fair chunk of Chaos, Sisters of Battle and Dark Eldar), or just skulls and more skulls piled on a big unimaginative heap of skulls, there's not a lot that could be called elegant in the 40k setting. The Tau and the Eldar are the two main exceptions.

I happened to find two partial Dark Eldar venom transports for sale on ebay. Once you take the crew, chains, spikes and guns off these things, they're actually very sleek and stylish. The curved body looks really cool. They remind me of the smooth, fishlike spaceships of 1970s science fiction art, like this picture by Chris Foss:

Back in the 90s, a company called Psygnosis made computer games for the Amiga. For their cover art, they used a lot of pictures by Roger Dean, who also drew album covers for the prog band Yes. While I am wary of prog to say the least, some of Dean's pictures have the sort of feeling I'd want for my Eldar.

I don't know if that makes any sense, but it's something about the blended pastel colours and the lack of intense detail (which is fortunate, as detail isn't my area). Anyway, with all that slightly pretentious stuff out of the way, here's what I did with the "broken" venoms.

First, I took off the little pods under the fusilage, which carry guns and hooked blades. This made the silhouette even more sleek. Then I needed to add a shuriken cannon somehow. Putting it under the ship looked clumsy, and mounting it on the top made the venom look like some kind of space pixie version of those Toyota pickups equipped with machine guns in third-world warzones.

So, I cut what looked like a headlamp from between the two "pincers" at the front of the ship, just before the cockpit. I sliced off the barrel from a shuriken cannon and pinned it into place there. It looks even more sleek than before, if you ask me, and doesn't interfere with the "line" of the ship. I assume that the workings and ammo for the gun are inside the fusilage, like a nose-mounted cannon on a fighter plane.

You've got to admit, it's a nice silhouette.

And that's all the converting I did. I then started painting it up in the blue that I've used for the rest of the army. I decided to add a new colour: I toyed with some kind of peach, but this was too tricky and so I went for purple instead. 

The pilot was the standard Dark Eldar one, with a smooth, featureless helmet. I thought it would look cool to put some kind of reflection on the helmet, like the reflections of the Arizona desert that Highway Patrol cops have in their sunglasses in films.

The canopy went on fine: I didn't glue it, although I might do later. It has a slightly naff heads-up targeter type thing, which I defy anyone to paint well. As it stands, the targeter just looks like a fancy symbol, which is fine by me.

I've got to admit, I'm pleased with this thing! Neeeeeowwwww!

I've got another of these to do, which ought to be a bit easier as it doesn't have a pilot. I'm sure I'll find some new way to make it awkward and difficult.