With the Apocalypse looming, the Kimball Prime Manufactorum has belched back into life. Mostly there’s a bunch of Necron flyers and lords as well as some Space Marine airbrushing experiments on the table. But this evening on a whim I assembled another HQ for my IG:
The dude abides.
Nobody f’cks with the Jesus!
He’s a simple conversion from the cultist champion in the Dark Vengeance starter box. It would be a really simple conversion except I actually bought him assembled from the bits bin at NOVA this year. I therefore had to carefully cut out the head without damaging the collar behind. Fortunately this was pretty easy. I gather the main body is two pieces, and the head is entirely on the front half rather than being molded into the collar as I originally feared. Instead of having to basically drill it out, I just had to slice through at the neck; the champion’s head is actually still pretty usable. It was then real quick to drill in a bit of a recess and pop on a head from the Tempestus Scions box. A Space Marine Scout rope coil adds some more bits while covering a small Chaosy looking bojangle on the rear of the jacket belt. An embedded Chaos star in the gauntlet is covered with a very thin layer of greenstuff. The Chaos brand on his chest I covered with a greenstuff triangle which I’ll probably notch or line later once hardened. Several of the standard IG commander models have a very similar device indicating rank. The base I think is actually from GW, but I’m not sure. I stole it out of Colin’s basing supplies tub when he left it here to work on our NOVA board.
The PAGE crew maniacally churning through the bits bins at NOVA.
Originally I had no plan for the model, but figured I couldn’t go wrong with $1.50 for such a cool figure. I came across him again tonight while scrounging for some other bits and realized he’d make a great colonel. He’s dead on for two of my favorite pictures in the IG codex, Colonel Straken and the Company Commander.
Colonel Straken. He lost his arm to a landshark. No, seriously. That’s its skull on his side.
A Company Commander.
The original black and white of the latter was actually my favorite in the book alongside the 5th edition Ogryn picture; the face was less distorted in that version.
In any event, those are great pictures and characters. Unfortunately I don’t really like most of the Catachan jungle fighter models. They’re getting up there in years and often kind of dated and cartoony. Hopefully they did redone at some point soon.
So, Army-wide I’m much more drawn to the look of the Cadian shock trooper models than the Catachans. Conceptually though the artwork for the latter have a lot of appeal. Much of it really exudes a strong Vietnam feel of guys stuck in a horrible nightmare for ages. At some point looking at that company commander image I got this idea of a grungy, ultra-veteran sporting that burnt-out, rogue look who is nonetheless leader of a prim and proper Cadian army. Him and his closest troops have just been through too much to care about much else or anything. With this conversion I now have just such a model, with a scrawnier, starving look that I like and think is more appropriate for that concept than the mega-buff Catachans. I don’t have a name or other background story yet, though there’s definitely an interesting juxtaposition to be had between him and the more WW2 English looking Captain Higgenbotham.
Unfortunately this does mean that my IG is getting pretty top heavy: Two Company Commanders and a Lord Commissar to lead a Command Squad, two Platoons, a Heavy Weapons Squad, and a Sentinel? Hmm…