Beastmarine Tutorial

This tutorial is used to create the following conversion.

Hey, this is my first attempt at writing an article detailing a conversion that I’ve worked on, so please bear with me.

Beastmarines for those unfamiliar with my army, are  herd of genetically divergent humans who are fiercely loyal to the Imperium, but due to their genetic mutations are treated with suspicion. So basically they are beastmen in power armour, but due to the nature of there existence have to salvage the majority of their war gear and thus look pretty beat-up, cool glad we got that cleared up

So now onto the actual tutorial bit of this post, for this build you will need a complete beastman model, either a gor or bestigor, unfortunately the ungor models are a bit to small, but make awesome scouts. A complete space marine from the belt up. For extra credit any additional gubbins you have laying around will come in handy, largely due to the salvaging nature of the herd.

Once you have your supplies collected you need to cut the gor/bestigor in half, just below the nipple.

When I’m doing this step I like to use the razor saw mainly because it lets me be pretty accurate where I make the cut. If using a knife be careful here, as the plastic is pretty think you run the risk of slipping and doing yourself an injury.

Once you have the top cut off, you’ll want to remove the overhang from the back of the beastman, on the original model this bit was its overly pronounced shoulders.

For this I used a pair of plastic cutters.

Next you want to start shaping the back of the body section. Basically the goal here is to round off the stump so from the models belt it goes strate up, and towards the top curves into meet the front of the model.

The idea is to basically make a ball and socket join, much like on the standard space marine legs. Leave the front of the model along, further into the build we’ll discuss how to get it to line up nicely.

Next up is to grab a standard marine torse, both from and back. We need to cut off the belt, and by extension the tummy plate, bit with the power cables. This is because the beastman model already has a belt sculpted onto the model, and it looks a bit odd having two belts.

The front of the torse should end up looking like this…

When I was building this model I forgot to take a photo of the back part of the torso, but I just but above the belt line and it should all line up with the above section.

Once you have your torso shaped you can now start trimming the body’s front section to match the shape of this armour segment. This set is pretty hard to take photos of, but the process is basically lining up the torse on the body, and marking which bits need to be gone, then cutting them off.

The end result should look like this…

Now once that’s all done you can go ahead and glue the body to its base, glue the torso together and then onto the body. Because the marine torso is largely untouched arms and the backpack should fit with no issue, for this model I used regular arms from the space wolves sprue, but you can also use arms from either of the gor on bestigor kits, as the scale between the two sets of arms is pretty much identical.

Once you have attacked your arms and backpack your model should look simular to this.

How we run into our first problem, you’ll notice a large gap between the models spine, and the backpack, this is because of the marines armoured arse Now we  can’t leave our beastmarine in this state, because well its pretty ugly and or comical depending on your outlook on life. This is where the extra credit gubbins comes in handy.

Personally I like to glue a shield in this gap, as it looks pretty cool, and helps bring the beastmen back to there fantasy roots. Though one of my Wolf Guards is carrying his combi-weapon in this void.

In this case I have used a square shield from WFB goblin kit.

Now the last stage, here we need to give this guy a head, on the gor kit you’ll notice a bunch of different horns, unfortunately using all of them is pretty tricky, as there are two main types, the straight horns, and the ones shaped like rounded goat horns.

The problem with the rounded horns is that they are tricky to fit due to the marine shoulder pads, so I tend to not use them, unless the pose allows. You’ll more than likely need to only use the straight horns.

This guy is the leader for my Long Fang squad, so I have used bestigor parts over the standard gor.

Hope that you enjoyed my first tutorial Any comments of critiques on the style and quality would be awesome.

Thanks for reading.

Iain

Droppod

Hey, finally gotten around to finish off my dreadnoughts droppod, unlike with the Dreadnought I decided not to apply large amounts of battle damage, mainly because one the dreadnought lands the pod is pretty inoffensive, unlike its cargo

I did on the other hand decide to got slightly over the top with when applying some forge world weathering powder, firstly I mixed some ‘Orange Rust’ in with some water and painted it on in between the armour segments. Once that had dried I then flicked on some more rust water combo using a lollypop stick and a dry brush. The technique is basically dry brushing, though you dry brush the stick to get the pigment to spatter the hull.

Once the rust had fully dried I then mixed some ‘Black Soot’ and caked the lower half of the droppod, once the pigment has dried I then took some tissue paper and started to rub off any pigment on the edges. I also made sure to leave smudge marks along the hull.

Right enough text, onto the piccys

Next up is building my second Grey Hunters squad and a unit of Long Fangs.

Grey Hunters with Rune Priest

Hey, this should finally catch my plog up to where I am in terms of my painting, what you see here is my first grey hunter squad, with attached wolf guard and my rune priest.

These guys go inside the Rhino I posted yesterday evening, and makeup half of my 1000 point lists scoring units. The unit has a 6 grey hunters with meltagun, wolf standard, mark of the wulfran, 1 wolf guard with combi0-melta and power fist, and the Rune Priest has no extras, now enough text, onto the pics.

Right thats that, hope you enjoy.

Rhino

Within my 1000 point list I have two Rhinos and a Razorback, this is the first of my tanks, and as such I went pretty light on painting additional details because I wanted to play around with the weathering powders I got from Warhammer World during the fantasy launch.

As I was playing around I may have gone a bit over board with the application, but sometimes over board is fun

One of the things I really like about scale models is trying to make them look as real as possible, now I’m not professing to any kind of aptitude, but I personally think the gooey matted grass that has collected at the bottom of my tank is pretty awesome, this effect was achieved by mixing PVA glue, weathering powder  and static grass to form a thick paste, which was then spooned onto the lower portions of the hull.

Dreadnought

Hey, to kick things off for my ‘The Cloven’ chapter of marines I have converted and painting for Assault on Black Reach dreadnought.

Unfortunately while I was working on the conversion part of this model I’d lost my cameras charger, but the build process was to separate the legs from the torso at the hip, then break down the right leg so that it could be repositioned on to be standing on the rock.

Once the torse was separated I processed to carve out the sarcophagus so that I could replace it with one from the new Venerable Dreadnought kit, this was done mainly to give the dreadnought an air of uniqueness, as  Black Reach model is a pretty common sight.

Finally I positioned both arms using green-stuff in an attempted to make the model generally more imposing pose, the DCCW arm is from a standard Dreadnought kit, as I wanted to use the heavy flamer.

Valkyrie hoo update

Hey, had a bit of free time over the weekend so I managed to finish off most of the cockpit and apply some shading to the whole model.

All thats left to do is paint some random logos and icons over the body, the imperial aquilla and the weapons.

Now, without further ado, onto the photos, sorry about the quality, I’m having to take these photos on my phones camera, so the quality isn’t really representative on the actual model

Valkyrie hoo

Right, so I’m starting a guard airborne army, and what good airborne army would exist without any Valkyries, looking around on the internet to find some inspiration I came across Petay1985’s Elysian force and was really impressed, and as with most things in life decided to ninja loot the style.

Having had a long term issue painting up anything larger than a Rhino, I decided to go about painting a Valkyrie first, mainly because if I couldn’t get it looking right I could change my plans without dropping a ton of cash on lovely lovely Forge World models.

So onto the painting, below you will find a few WIP shots of my first Valkyrie, hope you enjoy.