I went with the Namarti head and i'm pretty happy with it! Getting close to finished with them, and the narrative around them is starting to crystalize a bit, I like the idea of kind of a street gang style literal group of outcasts, some misfits that aren't quite right even in their own forms of existence, and are unified by that status of outsider. Since at most these guys'll be a warcry warband I feel like that smaller scale weirdos angle feels fun, particularly to give them all personality. Another member of the crew i've settled on is the only mini I have that can actually fit the Kurnoth bow forearms, but I like the idea of a more outcast, outsider equivalent to a kurinothi just being a Beastman enthralled with the Spirit Song as the height of primeval reality- a victim of cirumstance having the normal hatred of civilization now channeled through the lense of unbridled primordial life present in Ghyran's song
So I've just checked this whole thread and I must say, im impressed, theese conversios look great. Keep up the good work
Thanks for the supportive words! I've finally put together the Priest from the Starblood Stalkers and my Start Collecting skink starpriest, and decided to give both of them some personalization. Kixi-taka just got a new head for his staff (though i'll be putting snakes on his scenic base), while I modeled the Starpriest off of the Skink i've been playing in Soulbound lately who had most of his ornamentation immediately stolen by a pirate in the first couple sessions, and approaches most combat situations by carpeting the ground with celestial snakes.
Anorhwe conversion, I got a handful of dominion models pretty cheap so i've been playing around with stormcast for the first time. This is a dry fitted attempt at a more Redeemed style Yndrastra, and i think it works pretty well? It'd need a scenic base to get the same height as her but that'd be a fun project. Stormcast have a lot of interesting narrative perspectives that lend themselves to conversions really well, so i'm happy to get a handful of the new boys and girls to try stuff out with. For this guy i'm thinking something like x-Follower of the plague god, eyed with more suspicion than most Redeemed due to pacisifism with followers of chaos, declawing their warriors and toppling their profane altars, but leaving them alive with hopes that if one like him could be redeemed, so could all those forced into the dark god's thrall. Maybe given the thunderstrike armor more as a punishment than a reward, with the expectation that it would incinerate his soul due to the impurities it must hold, but instead he sprouts these vestiges of the plague god's influence on his history- like a power-up that both expresses his uncomfortable reality as a Redeemed, while showing those who question his presence among them that to do so is to question sigmar's own judgement in reforging him and granting him this power. Something fun like that, i think
I ended up swapping out his arm for the champion variant, and then got to painting. It's my first real attempt at painting a stormcast and i'm worried it's a little too red toned with only the wing membranes contrasting, but it's still early days. I wanted to go for a more traditional colour scheme to really integrate the wings and make them seem like part of a stormcast, so the stormhost silver + thinner aethermatic blue on the membranes was meant to align with the traditional vibe of the Prosecutor wing crystals, giving it a faintly magical sort of thing, like they're shimmering. I think i'm going to go for a yellow/red/orange gradient on the head plume to give a bit of a brighter red tone that pops, then some kind of contrasting colour on the hammer head in some capacity- he's holding it so close to his body it's a bit hard to make it straight gold without clashing with the chest, i think? Then another member of his Redeemed crew, a Lord-Imperitant with some... eccentricities. I wonder what his favorite animal is? Finally another member of the group, with a little aelf flavor (though it feels chaos-y enough). Shadowstalker head I had laying around with an upgraded spear head and bladed buckler in place of a shield (both courtesy of the black dragon kit). This one i'm pretty proud of, barring the perspective making the spear look bent in the second image, since it holds the feel of the base unit while giving it some cool personality.
A bit of a departure from my usual order antics, painting the one Sylvaneth-Gor from a bit ago turned out to be really enjoyable, and after looking into some forbidden lore the dark gods have successfully tempted me into making an Idolators STD list as my project for next year. The warcry cultists are unfortunately too sweet of an ambrosia to not grab. For the first part of that comes the Idolator Lord, mounted on a gorebeast chariot. As usual i've converted it a bunch, swapping the gorebeast's head for a dnd monster and replacing the chariot driver with an Untamed Beasts beastspeaker with a Gor head. Since the cultists are already going to be an ecclectic mix of aesthetics, and i'm probably going to BoC-ify a bunch of the untamed beasts in general, i really wanted the lord to have a more standard chaos flavor but also represent the skittles stylings his forces are going to have in some little ways through having a more bestial driver, driving a more wacky beast than the traditional lizard-gorilla. While the actual Idolator lord i'm holding off on for a bit, his ride is definitely being pimped in the meantime
Fantastic Dwarf conversions and a lovely mixture of Warhammer Fantasy Dwarf and AoS Fyreslayer bitz. Both would make worthy warriors in the quest to restore mighty Grimnir! Though it seems I'll have to give you closer coaching in enlightenment by Grimnir's finest - personally I think Fyreslayers are great and deserve much more attention than what they're currently getting, they have potential that GW misses despite the fact that it is right in front of their nose.
A year since i've last posted, but definitely not a year without hobbying! I've been building my slaves to darkness force slowly and surely but didn't end up feeling much drive to post any since they don't fully match the forum's theme (and... i realized how little actual painting i'd been doing, compared to just conversions. Putting it on paper makes it harder to avoid seeing my backlog!) but I got myself the Hunters of Huanchi and a box of bloodbowl lizardmen for the holidays and i've been absolutely loving diving back into the scaly little guys. After I blitzed through them (and converting most of them into Huanchi's Claws, because I would actually like to win some games when I use them for warcry) it turns out you're left with a couple spare heads and arms after you're done, and that sent my mind reeling for what I could use them for. Then it hit me- I've had a set of secondhand rippers sitting around since 2020 that I gave up on after not being happy with my paintjob, and a Ripperdactyl Chief is one of the best seraphon allies you can run with a Hunters warband. So, given i'd already written a little lore about a chameleon skink named Yukana'zeeme that i featured earlier in this thread- I gave him the full upgrade into a hero unit. He's a ripperdactyl rider's body with the head, tail and hands carefully removed and replaced with the Hunters of Huanchi equivalents (except the tail, which came from a bloodbowl chameleon) and i'm very happy with how he turned out, hopefully my skills have advanced enough to give his mount a paintjob i'm happy with now, so he doesn't end up collecting dust for another couple years.
Finished up my conversions for the Hunters of Huanchi themselves, mostly standard to the guide i linked above to turn them into Huanchi's Claws (I figure that'd be fine to run them as the normal blowpipe variant in aos too, though?). The exception is giving the Alpha a bigger weapon from the Carnosaur kit to make them stand out more, and replacing one of the heads with one from Bloodbowl as a goofy experiment i loved too much to not use. I somehow forgot to take a picture of my actual Huanchi's Claw that came with the kit, though, but I didn't do any conversion work to them so it's just pretty standard anyway. Spoiler: Closer images I've also been working on some Necromunda stuff since my partner has been starting up a campaign there, it's such a good outlet for my conversion juices to flow into! The rebelling ogryn slaves was the gang I chose to use, and it's been a blast combining all the different ogre, ogryn and ogor bits to put together a squad of little guys. It was also the final push I needed to pick up some greenstuff and start learning the craft, with a sprinling of blue stuff casting in as well (which I honestly wish i'd gone for sooner, it would've made making huanchi's claws much easier if i could just duplicate the hands and shields of the one in the kit). Spoiler: The Chain Chompas
Good work on those conversions for the chameleon skinks. Are they available for separate purchase yet or only in the giant box set still?
Nice work, those headdresses go amazingly good with the Chameleons. They are not yet separately available(except for secondhand of course ) Grrr, !mrahil
A big WIP i'm very proud of the progress on, another Necromunda kitbash for my extended Ogryn Gang. This is a Onmyodo Coven, the little free delegation of fighters you get for allying with the noble House Ty, consisting of a trained Telepath Psyker and their paired psychic blank that serves to limit their power. House Ty doesn't have much lore beyond that they're a relatively young noble house that claims descent from old earth japenese nobility and emulates everything known about japanese culture in the 41st millenium, probably entierly to give themselves some Old Money street cred that they don't actually have, but they're also the sneaky shadowbrokers of the noble houses of Necromunda. The art for the Onmyodo Coven depicts them with kind of a geisha aesthetic that I didn't feel confident in being able to source parts to emulate (and sort of implies their social status within the noble house via that association), so my pair are decked out in more traditional western noble attire, I guess they're more on the down-low for this outing and blending in with the rest of the schmucks. I like the idea of the telepath being a House Ty noble herself, an elderly branch of the family tree following her own whims and desires out into the underhive and given a little more length to her leash as long as she continues to service the interests of the greater house. I originally intended to swap out her arms for something else while keeping the lacy sleeves, but once i saw them on the model I liked the idea she was a little lanky and strange from the rejuvinat treatments that got her to this advanced age (and that maybe they're an indication that she's at the limit of those youth treatments available to her, some of the length to her leash being that she's finally on her way out), so this younger psychic blank as her bodyguard/limiter would be maybe her third or fourth partner over her lifetime and firmly in the subservient role (though perhaps with a little grandmotherly care to her treatment). I like the idea of the Ty noblewoman supporting the Ogryn gang partly out of pragmatism (it helps to have some muscle to direct around, and they have a lot of muscle) but also because she finds the idea of Ogryn psykers with dreams to be a sanctioned house of their own to be so novel and charming that she's simply got to find out how this will all play out, and is willing to aid them for as long as it keeps being so charming and novel. For the parts they're made of: The core of the telepath is from Malifaux's widow weaver model, with all the spider parts cut away and the parasol intertwined with a grey knights warding stave to represent the model's shock stave weapon (though i will be shortening it down a whole lot, probably cutting away the entire center of the staff when it gets attached to the widow weaver hand). Both of them have harlequin torso that better proportion them with GW scale bits, while the blank is otherwise entierly made of bits from a genestealer magus (except the fan hand, which is from Yvraine and probably getting re-posed before its stuck on). I'm not entierly sure of the heads I want to use yet, though. I like the idea of something mysterious and masked like the cypher-lords, though I think they might be too bulky. The coven throne vampire head would work well for an old lady, but something like the blood bowl wood elf team (maybe blood bowl amazons?) might give me masked female heads that work better
Not a major update on anything, but i snagged a pretty cheap Slann from the new army box and i've been planning out what I want to do with him. It'll be my first, I intentionally avoided them before since I haven't really been a fan of their look (and that they're resin) and their narrative vibe hasn't been something I wanted to include in my army before, but this model is so nice and my window to get them cheap is so narrow that I figured I might as well just go for it, and i've been intending to use every piece of the animal if i can. I do have a big soft spot for relic priests, though, so my ideal kitbash would be replacing the slann with Kroak's old model to represent one (Not that I have any dislike for modern kroak- he's just too big to fit into the seat from what I can tell, with his boney legs out to the side), but he's so hard to get a hold of these days so it's a bit of a pipedream since I have no interest in shelling out a 100+ bucks for him. Spoiler That last one I might run as a solo starpriest if i get too attached to slot it onto the chair, and also might make him a chameleon too if the pose fits them right and I haven't run out of tails by then. With Animosity coming up soon I might honestly just finish the chair first and take my resin starmaster out for a spin in an upgraded chair, still running it as a slann but just giving old Tubok a nice upgrade befitting the acting leader of a constellation.
Got my slann yesterday and boy that thing is complicated to put together with all those fiddly little connection points and bad angles in the instructions. I guess i'll hold off on putting it together and painting it up until animosity starts in July, but I can see most of my assumptions on what I could do with it were right. For the guy below all you need to do is put the skink attendant together and carefully behead them, then the chameleon one is super easy to put on there. Unfortunately the second attendant is a little smaller than normal skink size so the Starpriest head was too big to fit their proportions, but I have a unit of Raptadon coming and their helmet heads are basically mini-versions anyway so i'll just use that. I also found that you can mix and match the arms of the slann between the two torso options, you'd just have to glue them together as normal and do some precise surgery to cut both torso in the same place and glue them back together so they fit normally. The head won't fit perfectly because it's positioned slightly differently based on the torso options, but it looks like the gaps are so minor you wouldn't notice them and could fill them with a tiny bit of greenstuff (or possibly even just a little more liberal application of paint) anyway, so i'll definitely be doing one arm outstretched and one arm raised holding the sceptre.
I ended up putting the slann together like I mentioned above, it fits pretty perfectly aside from some tiny gaps on the side of the head that i filled in with greenstuff, the bit under his chin is mostly just me filling it in a little to ease the transition for the chin that's normally hidden by the bigger amulets. I really like this pose, it feels more like he's casting a spell than the other normal options. I still think i'll steal the stop of his staff for a Starpriest at some point, but I haven't figure out what to replace it with yet so until then he doesn't have to go under the knife again.
First hobby submission for Animosity this year, I took the Eternity Warden I created back in 2021 and gave him a bit of an upgrade. While the main Saurus is destined to become the Alpha of a saurus guard unit made of fellow bloodbowl lizards, I gave his weapon and hand new life as a bit more of a down to earth Astrolith Bearer, fusing it with the banner from my attempt at one from forever ago. He's blinged out with the extra necklace from my slann up there to really show off that he's equipped with the best the Seraphon have to offer (though they skimped out on giving him a weapon, I guess the banner is probably heavy enough to work anyway).
Second animosity hobby submission, painting up that Chameleon Skink ripper chief i converted back in January so Yukana'zeeme can finally make something of himself. Yukana'zeeme just copies over his paintjob from when i first converted a chameleon skink from bloodbowl, while the ripper's is a tweaked version of a scheme i saw someone paint terrawings in somewhere back when the Hunters of Huanchi were released, and subsequently forgot how to find again (forcing me to tweak it to fill in the gaps). I'm very proud of this one, both the conversion and the painting, since i'm usually better at the former than the latter.