It is Christmas time. Which means I do have some hobby time. I thought that I would try to finish the Hell Lord build and perhaps even start painting during the holidays. This build is something I started a way back, almost a year ago, mostly because I had this burning need to try to mix the Lord of skulls with a Hell drake and see if it was possible to make it look better than the original model. I am not to fond of the Lord of skulls in it original shape, especially not with the tanks and the back end of things. I have seen some people mixing the Lord of skulls with the Imperial knight kit and swapping the torsos between the two undercarriages. All in all I think that is an improvement to the Lord of Skulls but the Knight legs barely make it with the Knight kit, they are just to static. Instead I went with defiler legs, build from the front claws of the kit. This meant that I would need to make quite a lot of custom bits and that is about where the project stalled out. I kind of knew what the over all look of the model would be like but not the details. So I tried some variants of armor to the legs but could not find a style I was happy with and the project ground to a halt. But lately I have been sneaking some time into it just to feel it out and now I have found an aesthetic that I like and the details are coming together so I am hopping to ride the wave and hopefully finish it with out compromising the quality of the build just to get it done. Some things like my Green stuff modeling will be what it is as I have no hope of improving enough in time to actually make the GS details as good as I would like. But if I don't try I will not get better.
I am currently working on four different parts of the build, the legs, the shield, the axe and the flight pack. All of them are a mix of GW parts, plasticard and GS. I wanted the model to be striding across the battle filed towards the enemy so I decided to place the legs in a walking pose. I find the "normal" walking poses for GWs two legged constructions to be a bit clumsy. They tend to be walking with the legs far apart, pointing outward, like a toddler, swaying from side to side to move the feet. A more realistic walking style is where each foot is placed in front of the other as you are walking. This is something that I also did for Unbearable Desire, one of my war hound (which caused me some grief to to weight issues). So to get a feeling of motion I placed the feet in line, angled the legs a bit to get them under the centre of gravity. Next up was to cover the legs in plating, I have tried three different sets I think. In the end I settled for the simplest design with not to many curves, sections edges etc. They are inspired of the layered armour seen on the torso of the Lord of skulls. To give them some interesting details I added the alternative horns from the kit. I split the horns in two and folded them out so that I got two pieces forming a face on the thigh plate. Now I just need to adapt the mounting plates to get them to sit right on the legs.
Instead of the "small" one bladed cleaver like axe I thought it would look better if he carried a large, long hafted double bladed axe that he could sweep around him with, reaching the smaller models at his feet. The Lord of skulls has very stubby arms. I also wanted to use the front shield/plough from the Lord of skulls kit so I decided to make a shield for his left arm. I have seen it used as a shield before but the it was trimmed down to a smaller shield. I wanted to go the other way, making it to more like a large full body shield, so I added a lower part to make it longer. Off course I had to add something to make it interesting so I worked with the features already on the original part to create a leering face on the shield. Sadly the skull parts worked into the kit is of such high quality I could not hope to reproduce them so I made what I could and did some press moulding of a skull border on the shield. It turned out rather awkward but I do not think a second try will make it better so I will leave it as it is for now.
Lastly we have the flight pack. This is really the only part so far that comes from the Hell Drake. It consists of the back part of the main body of the Hell Drake. Instead of the neck I added one of the front ends from the Lord of skull guns. It will act as air intake to the pack. I then had to sculpt a new underside to the piece that would fit to the back of the Lord of skulls torso. I opted to make some cabling to cover voids, placticards and joints. In the end I do not think much of this will be clearly visible but it will make a nice back drop. In the end I will attach the Hell drake front arms with the wings sticking up above the shoulders of the Hell Lord torso. I am also thinking about adding a smaller set of secondary wings to the back of the backpack, but I have not decided on that. It might just look forced, like I have to use as much of the kit as possible, so I will see what I will do with it.
Even if I am not there yet I am starting to see the end of this build and I am looking forward to start the painting it. It will one big mini.
To day I finished the build of the Hell Lord. It came about quite abruptly. I was working along with the green stuff and suddenly I could not think a any place on the model where more green stuff was needed, so I concluded that it was done. Sure, I might have added some more detail, but it was not sure that it would improve the model. So I laid al the pieces out and cleaned them up for paint. Once I got them sprayed I just had to start with the paint. I choose the legs and the armour plates so see how it would turn out. These are some of the parts that I have put most conversion work into so if they do not turn out well, the rest of the model will not look good. There is still some touch ups to do but once mocked up the legs look god and when put next to each other like they will be on the model they really look good so I am happy.
