Even I’m not immune to the knights bug. While I already have one Chaos Knight and a pair of Helverins I converted, I split the Renegade box set with a friend right after the re-release and have been wanting to do up a shootier knight. It’s also a good time to do one with the upcoming Apocalypse game we’ve got in the campaign I’m running. In this first of several posts, I’ll detail the process and progress of converting and painting this bad boy, taking him from slack-jawed Imperial dickhead to the strong, confident Chaos boi we all know he can be.
Since I already used one of the forgefiend heads on my Helverin, I needed to go a bit bigger on this guy. Fortunately, I have a Slaughterbrute sitting around whose bits I’m not using — the Slaughterbrute is a dual kit with the Mutalith Vortex Beast that I picked up to eventually join my Thousand Sons army. This is the Slaughterbrute:
And this is the Slaughterbrute’s head on the front of my knight:
I’m not the world’s strongest sculptor, but I can do enough when the projects are simple. Mostly I struggle with keeping fingerprints off the epoxy and creating crisp, smooth surfaces so I tend to do better with organic shapes like muscles and veins. Which makes this a perfect fit for my skills. My goal is to model the knight as though it were a daemon trapped in the shell of a knight, and is bursting to get out. I also didn’t care much for the triple tongue on the slaughterbrute, so I made a new one out of greenstuff. Here’s some more detail on the greenstuff work:
I added a spine coming out the top of the model to provide more organic detail on the back. I’ll probably have to expand on this so it doesn’t look like it’s popping up out of nowhere, but I haven’t decided how much work I want to do on it yet. I also put chunks of corkboard on the base. I’ll paint those up as pieces of a destroyed road later on to match my other Chaos Knight. It’s a pretty easy effect and it’s in-line with my general goal of “make the bases kind of interesting, but don’t put too much work into them.”
Chains are a common motif on daemon engines, which usually have chains crossing key hatches to represent the daemon locked inside being unable to escape. This is pretty easy to replicate over larger surfaces with jeweler’s chains and some hooks from the old Chaos vehicle upgrade kit:
Overall, I’m very happy with the progress so far. I’m going to try my hand at more greenstuff work to add spikes and star points to the shoulder pads that match the Chaos Knight since those seem easy enough to do. And I’ll need to add more spikes and bursting horns to the top carapace before I’m done. Plus I need to figure out how to make the arms look more organic. I still have a bunch of Maulerfiend bits, so that might be the way I go on this. I’m not the biggest fan of the knight having bits that can still move, so having them glued/stuck in place isn’t a big deal for me.
