Improved Blight Lords and Plague Marines

I received my second box of Death Shroud today, and promptly tore into the sprues, snickering manically and swinging my scalpel, saw and cutters... Well, not exactly, but I was very excited, since I had some cool ideas for them.

This next batch almost put even more of a fight than the first batch - as I told you in the previous post,  they are NOT easy to convert - everything fits together in one way and ONE WAY only; which is great if you're a beginning model builder, and you don't want to make mistakes. Lord knows I've assembled many kits the wrong way, only to find out the plastic glue is dried solid and there's no way to pull it apart without destroying everything.

Anyway, this quality is not so much of a quality, when a madman such a myself wants to do unspeakable things to said kit - so I used a lot of cutting, measuring, cutting again, a bit of greenstuff and some weird parts to make it work - but in the end it is so satisfying to "beat" a conversion - to pull off something that looks almost hopeless.

I'm really satisfied with the unit, and they look and feel soooo much better to me than the regular kits. Granted, it is a really expensive unit to build - but hey, this is the guy that once bought 8 (!) Chaos Lord in terminator armour kits, to build a Berzerker terminator squad with lightning claws. ;)
In the end, I'm a one-army-guy. I don't play much, modelling and painting is my main hobby, and I want this to be the best army I've ever done, with all of the models looking awesome - so it was worth it. :)

Also a shot of the new Plague Marine unit I've assembled - only very small conversions, but I wanted to show off how great a kit it is:

... Blight Shroud Terminators?

As promised, here is my progress on the "Blight Shroud Terminators". I'm much more happy with this, than the standard Blight Lord Terminators. They just don't feel or look right to me. These however - these I feel give the massive, hulking feel of 1.5 tonnes of armoured decay, evil and ceramite that I want them to have.

I will warn anyone attempting do these however - these are NOT simple arm swaps or easy conversions. They involve very complicated removal of arms, sockets, etc. and some quite complicated cutting to get the new arms to sit right. However, I think they're definitely worth it, and I can't wait for the other box of Death Shroud (which seems to be sold out almost everywhere in Denmark at the moment) so I can make another two combiplas/axe guys and a Mace of Contagion carrier. More to come soon...

And a size comparison; even though it's the biggest of the Blight Lord Terminators, the champion (second from right) is still dwarfed both in height and girth by the new conversion - and the Grey Knight just seem to have lost all hope. ;)

Bits have arrived! But alas, the warp storms are affecting the bitz store...

Hi guys - my bitz order arrived from bitzbox.co.uk today, and I frantically tore open the nicely packed envelope, and basked in the glory of the new body parts for my Daemon Prince, his means of motion, his grotesque, mutated... Two left legs?

Dangit. They've sent me two left flying hive tyrant legs by mistake. To their excuse, they've immediately answered my mail, and they'll send me the right one promptly. So, the prince will have to wait a bit longer for his legs. On the positive side, they seem to fit really nice, and they seem to have the right dimensions - I've made a few cuts, and mounted on the giant hooves, to see how it fits, and I suspect that they'll look great, once they get armour sculpted on. Please excuse the picture - he really is a mess of non finished green stuff, blutack, and plastic parts as he is:

As you can see, I'm also toying with giving him a mutated, extra right arm.

I also grabbed the chance to order some useful bits, while I was browsing their website, so I got a few mkIII helmets and every single exhaust they had - one can never have too many exhausts!

I wanted to take a shot a converting mkIII helmets into Plague Marine helmets, and with a very small grinder bit, my dremel and some patience, I think it works pretty well (still needs some cleanup, I can see with the closeup):

I've also gotten some more green stuff on the Helbrute, and with the exception of some small details and tubes, he's about ready for paint - really satisfied with this one:

I got another idea, while rummaging through my bits box last night - there lay the wreck of my old Dark Mechanicus mauler fiend, which I was never really satisfied with. I had used the body of a FW Blood Slaughterer, and looking at it, I found some Necron Stalker legs, an Aracnarok body, and the gears started churning; I'm gonna do a defiler. It's only on the sketching state at the moment, but I think it has potential:

(Very much inspired by the Grievers from Maze Runner on this one - obviously needs another head)

Lastly, I'll just leave a small teaser of my project for the army, that's being worked on, on the side - it WILL get done, but I want to take it slow, enjoy it, and do it right. Any guesses?

Update:

I've been working some on the Defilers battle cannon - I wanted to make it into a combiweapon of sorts, combining it with the reaper auto cannon; still needs the bayonets, but I'm kinda digging it; It might not seem like much for a few hours work, but I always find mechanical stuff time-consuming - everything has to be straight as an arrow.

I also added some detailing to the Helbrute; some plague censers where the eyes used to hang on the sarcophagus, some insectoid limbs on the right side of the sarcophagus, a few spikes and a couple of extra exhausts - better?

A quick bad pic of the Defiler as a mockup - barely held together by blutack

Still going strong - the cultists are no longer grey plastic.

I've been a very busy little bee this week, and finished off one of the cultist units - Actually, I had to strip them once, since my first colour scheme didn't fit in with the power armour boys, but I'm pretty satisfied with these. Pretty much all washes on a white primer (click the pic for a full scale version):

I took an all nighter last night, and the second unit is almost done, only missing the eyes and some small details, so hopefully some pics of those later this weekend. :)

I'm getting close to actually finishing a project - Hooray!

Next stop; finish the modelling on my Spawn and Champion, and getting some paint on those.