So, lots of people are already talking about the new Horus Heresy plastics. I might at some point in the future, too. For the moment, though, I wanted to look back
at the last big sci-fi set...
(okay, seriously, how do we describe the connection between
30K/Heresy and 40K? Are they just the
#0K games? Imperium-based games? Grim
Future games?)
...their last box set from mankind’s grim future, and show
something fun and cheap you can do with that.
You can still find lots of Dark Vengeance stuff online, most of it at half to 1/5th what you’d pay for them as individual units.
A full tactical squad is about twenty bucks.
A lot of HQ characters are just two or three dollars. And you can usually find the Dark Vengeance Dreadna—sorry,
old habits—Helbrute for under ten bucks.
Now, as I’ve mentioned before, there’s a reason for
this. Like most of the Dark Vengeance models, the Helbrute’s a block of plastic
that takes some serious time and effort if you want to do any major
conversions (that said—I’ve seen some great ones). But it is possible to do some neat looking ones on the cheap without half as much effort.
For example...
This particular Helbrute is going to be named Occulus Blight,
and it’ll be joining my Death Guard.
Before I even started putting him together, I rolled up a little ball of
green stuff. A little bigger than a pea,
a little smaller than a marble. I rolled
this back and forth between my fingers until it was as round and smooth as I
could get it. Then I very carefully
pushed it into the hood/collar hole where the little face piece would normally
go. I didn’t want the teeth/claws around
the hole to gouge the surface of the ball.
Once this was in place, I stretched the putty out on either
side to help hold it in place. Again, I had to be careful so I didn’t force it
into the teeth/claws on the other side. This was tricky and I had to try
twice. Fortunately, on something this
simple, messing up just means pulling the blob out and rolling it smooth again.
So don’t panic too much. It maybe took
ten minutes from starting to mix the green stuff to having it in place. I let it
dry for another fifteen minutes—face up! I didn’t want its own weight
to make a flat spot on the ball—and then assembled the Helbrute as normal.
Look at that. One big
eye in the socket. Much Nurgle. So pestilent.
I did a few quick detail things. An old scenic rubble piece went on the base. I snipped off the chains that hang from the
power fist and added some “tentacles” made from the horns of a Chaos Marine
helmet. It’s hard to tell, but I also added
a big tentacle to his power plant—one of the ones from the old mutation sprue. It looks really good there, and it’s got me
thinking some of those bulkier pieces might work really well on other Chaos
dreadna—sorry, did it again—Helbrutes.
I didn’t glue the front plate-armor-hull piece in place
because I want to paint the eye without too many extra bits around it. So I’ll
prime those seperately and assemble them later.
As one last bit of detail, I added a centered horn to the armor
plate. It’s something I pulled from the bits bins at one point—I think it might be from the Chaos Terminators
set. Central horns are distinctively
Nurgle in 40K (and related games).
All in all, maybe an hour to make a distinctive Helbrute. And about a third of that was just digging up
parts and mixing drinks.
(Primed and basic paint pictures coming this weekend)
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