During the last month I've had some hobby time out partly enforced by work commitments and partly lack of motivation. So to get out of my slump I painted up a conversion I completed some time ago. Now I have realised recently that I've always subconsciously divided my work into two distinct camps; convert the fuck out of new plastic or carefully collect and paint old lead. I give no value to plastic but hold the lead in a high regard, mostly because of nostalgia and of course the fact that it is oop (certainly from Citadel anyway). So I thought it was time to change that, I'd always been inspired by the lead conversions from White Dwarf back in the day, so let it be my turn to return to something I thought nothing of as a teenager in the 80's. Time to break out the jewellers saw and the pliers and get to work...
Now I didn't approach this willy-nilly, I chose a lead model that I wanted to paint up (i.e. it is one of my complete collection of the Citadel Minotaur Lords) but one in which the sculpt is a bit shit and could be improved upon by me. With this sculpt I always felt that the head looked odd without a neck and that the arms were disproportionate (i.e. Too short) and strangely tethered to the sides of the body (no doubt due to casting constraints) so I chopped it all off and ended up with this:
A new pointing arm from an Ork was added to give him the look of a leader and a mid-hammer minotaur head that had a bit more menace about it:
Now I didn't want to completely discard the chopped off pieces and decided to re-use them on the conversion. With the head I thought that it would be fun to make a three headed minotaur with the new head in the middle and the old one (and a re-mould of it) on the other. I'm a sucker for symmetry. So I used the Instamould to get a cast of the head:
And filled it with milliput initially:
Which really didn't work so went with greenstuff the second time around which really worked surprisingly well:
I also re-used the club which I had earlier cut off; attaching it the belt behind him:
And re-sculpting the haft with some milliput:
Here with the two heads re-attached and banner pole inserted:
And some additional work on the pole, garden wire wrapped around the paper clip to help me sculpt a gnarly old tree and a plastic vulture perched atop:
The final greenstuffing on the banner pole and some old-school mushrooms on the base:
And then decided to add some plastic horns and a bell to add some more detail:
Now of course there was another source of inspiration with this build; John Blanche's esteemed minotaur banner bearer which also has multiple heads and a myriad of other conversions:
So I too went to town on the banner design, following a more obvious route of Greek Mythology for the banner image:
I think it's an improvement on the original.
Now onto the rest of my collection of Minotaur Lords...
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