Old Lead

In my continuing efforts to work through the vast heap of stripped lead that I've acquired - I've got a whole Cadbury's Roses box full of metal models, which weights about a ton and reeks of Dettol - I had a look at two of the oldest models I own and tried to make them look at least presentable.

The first one is an ancient metal termagant. Termagants are the lowly footsoldiers (hoofsoldiers, technically) of the Tyranid hive mind, and have gone through several iterations over the years. Personally, I think that the old metal models capture them best: small, fast, vicious and nasty, scuttling down pipes and through the underhive, looking for things to shoot and jab.

In keeping with this image, I based the termagant on a cast-off piece of plastic and painted the base to look like a metal walkway rusted by the toxic sludge below it. The termagant itself was not converted, and was painted an unhealthy fleshy colour, like a mixture of the facehugger from Alien and the last chicken in the rotisserie section of a large supermarket, spinning sadly on a long-neglected spike, avoided by all but the very drunkest customers.

Not for human consumption, but good at consuming humans

The next model was a Squat "living ancestor". Apparently, this guy used to sit in a sidecar, and was propelled into battle by his biker-dwarf brethren. I have no memory of buying him and I certainly don't have his bike and sidecar. I gave him a pair of Ramshackle Games robot legs and the engine/exhausts from a tractor.

Since I couldn't cut him off his resin base (as I quickly discovered), I broke the edges of the base off to make it look like rock. He then got a red paint job.

I like this guy: I could see him as some sort of guildmaster or other important, but physically feeble, type. Perhaps he represents a merchant guild. I could see him having a Dickensian name like Jedediah Clench. He's probably really good on the local football team, assuming that he doesn't die of old age mid-game.