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.