Retinue table challenge - 4 Harpies

Another one finished for my Lost and the Damned Retinue Table Challenge - D4 Harpies. Only the Minotaurs and Skaven to go now before I'm done.

I've been enjoying getting back into my converting, rather than just painting old miniatures and this was no exception. The Goblins from the LotR range are nicely mutated with some interesting shapes, textures and poses to play with. I simply removed all the weapons to go for a more feral appearance and substitute them with some bones and heads to show their primitive and evil ways. The wings are from a variety of sources (all bitzbox) as I'm trying not to buy any new models for a while and work on the backlog. The curved wings on models 1 and 3 are from some Reaper Bones female statue/angels that I had knocking around and model 2's I believe are from a Dark Angels sprue and the model 4 from an old dwarven banner top.

I had previously considered a range of different models to create the Harpy look, but none of them really fitted too well with the Nurgle theme of my growing collection. I nearly went down the more feminine/avian look, with sculpted boobs and claw feet from plaguebearers, but realised quite quickly that this was a lot of extra work for very little return. Who says Harpies have to be female? A small compromise (and to add some gender ambiguity) I sculpted some longer hair!

This is my first attempt at basing flying models, I only briefly contemplated using the transparent, plastic flying stands before thinking along more creative lines. Initially I was thinking of having them perched in trees, or about to fly from a branch, but the prospect of making four trees from wire was a bit daunting and could easily look shit. A much easier solution was to create rocky outcrops from some extruded foam off-cuts from my dungeon tile project. With a pva/sand coating they were quickly textured to look like rock faces. Easy. I just had to delve into my diminishing pile of skulls for the final decoration to the bases.

WIP - you can see the small conversions and the extruded foam/sand combo for rock form and texture

The image that inspired my idea - apologies for not being able to give credit to the creator, but my these are awesome.