Necromunda Beetle Knight

 Hello again! This post was supposed to be about more House Escher gangers, but I didn't paint them in time. Then I thought that it could be a tongue-in-cheek post about painting some iffy plastic dinosaurs from a museum, but those aren't quite ready either. So, this is about a space knight riding a giant beetle with a bionic arm across a wasteland.

There are a few conversions that I've had planned for ages and never got around to doing. One of these is to turn a Nurgle plague drone fly into a riding beast. For some reason, the idea of weird people riding strange monsters really appeals to me. 

I assembled the drone much as normal, although I swapped the front and middle legs around to make it more of a quadruped. I used DAS clay and green stuff to fill in the rotting bits and the wing-holes, and gave it a head from a tyranid bit turned upside down. The head makes for nice faceted eyes.

The rider was more complex. He's got legs from an Eldar guardian, an upper body from a very battered Bretonnian knight that I've had for years, and a lance arm from a dark elf. The front of the head comes from a chaos cultist and the helmet is a bit left over from some weird Age of Sigmar bone monster. I think his backpack, with carries water, is originally a dwarf bit. Quite a lot of green stuff was involved. The bits and bobs stuck to the beetle come from all sorts of  places. 

Halfway through construction, I dropped the model on the floor. I decided to replace the beetle's left small arm with a mechanical arm that I'd built out of junk a while back and never really found a purpose for. 

There's nothing especially complex about the painting, It was difficult to make the rider look interesting, in that he felt a little drab compared to his beetle. I decided to give his armour a verdigris look: perhaps, in the wasteland, that sort of discolouration is seen as impressive. I'm not entirely sure about the stripes on the beetle - I like the concept, but I don't think they work all that well in practice. I'm not sure how I could improve them without an airbrush, though.

Overall, I really like him. I think he's got a weird charm: as much inspired by Moebius as anything in Warhammer. I could see him riding about on the dunes, prodding enemies with his lance.