Thursday, August 5, 2010

Renegade Imperial Guardsman Conversion

I've been contemplating it for a long time, and finally I am actually starting on a new Warhammer 40,000 project. Specifically, I'm starting a renegade Imperial Guard army.

The concept behind the army is that it started out as an Imperial nobleman's palace/household guard. The power-hungry nobleman fell in with a chaos cult, and began plotting a coup with their support. He spent his considerable wealth building up his household guard until he had his own personal army. He then used it to stage a coup, overthrowing the Imperial ruler and taking over control of his home planet for himself.

Because of their origin as royal palace guards, I want the uniforms of the soldiers to be fancier and a little more ostentatious than the typical Imperial Guard uniform. They would have to look good standing at attention in an opulently furnished palace as visiting nobility walked by.

Much of this look will have to be accomplished with an appropriate paint job, but I think I've come up with a conversion that will work. Below are pictures of my first converted renegade guardsman.

Most of the model is just one of the new Wargames Factory Shock Troopers. The head is from the Victrix Limited Napoleon's Old Guard Grenadiers box. That set comes with 56 of those bearskin hat heads, with 14 unique sculpts. I plan to do all of the standard guardsmen in this fashion, putting the Grenadier head on a Shock Trooper body. You may be wondering, then, what I intend to do with all those headless Old Guard Grenadiers I'll have left over, but you'll find out soon enough.

There was some difficulty in making this work, because the Shock Trooper heads have a much larger ball joint at the neck than do the Grenadiers. Because of this, I had to use some modeling putty to fill in the large cavity in the Shock Trooper body. I have no sculpting ability at all, so I didn't want to attempt to sculpt a neck for the figure. I therefore just bunched up the putty to hopefully look like a shirt collar covering the neck. I imagine the come from a pretty cold world, so they'd want to have some warm clothes on under the coat. So if it makes it easier to work with, I can live with them all wearing turtlenecks. Hopefully it won't look too out of place one it's painted.

Considering how many of these I will have to convert, just this extra step of filling in the neck of each figure is going to add a lot of time to the project. But I do think the results look pretty good for what I was trying to go for, so I hope it will be worth the effort. Let me know what you think so far, or if you have any suggestions for the conversions, or the army in general.

5 comments:

  1. Very nice stuff, I really like the conversion.

    Scotia Grendel do some minis that might make for nice characters:

    http://www.scotiagrendel.com/Products/index.php?main_page=product_info&cPath=60_71&products_id=744

    http://www.scotiagrendel.com/Products/index.php?main_page=product_info&cPath=60_71&products_id=742

    some of the Perry miniatures Napoleonics might be good for command squads, too:

    http://www.perry-miniatures.com/images/fn/FN%2052.jpg

    Keep up the good work!

    ReplyDelete
  2. For the neck, what about just making a tiny little ball, smaller than the actual neck size, and press the Victrix head down so the putty spreads out? It will give a sense of fabric but still be fairly quick.

    Consilience

    ReplyDelete
  3. Yeah, the neck is unnaturally long. Makes him look a bit mutant-ish...

    And I doubt it's what you want. Just press the head deeper. Other than that - it's looking really cool.

    --
    Mahon
    Chest of Colors: All About Miniature Painting

    ReplyDelete
  4. If Napoleon had these guys in 1815, we'd all be speaking French ;o)
    Well done!

    ReplyDelete
  5. Thank you for the comments, everyone. I appreciate the feedback.

    Consilience, that's basically what I did, but I still needed to smooth it out afterward so it didn't puff out in the middle. Then I also added a hint of texture to make it look like the cloth was bunched up, but I think that was unnecessary.

    ReplyDelete