I know that at least some of my readers will have little to no experience with kitbashing and the world of Games Workshop miniatures. Therefore I will include some links to wiki pages that go into more detail on some of the terminology and background for those who are interested.
I first started doing kitbashing at a young age. I would chop up and combine HO scale model railroad building kits to create larger or different buildings. I also kitbashed a few 1/25 scale vehicle kits, but my interest in those waned pretty quickly.
My dreams of having a huge model railroad have never come to fruition. By the time I was in high school, all of my model train stuff was packed away in boxes. Every now and then, they would be unpacked and I would start a small switching layout. However, I would inevitably end up moving, and everything would have to be packed up again. As I have lived in at least twenty different apartments over the years, this happened fairly often.
In the early 90's, I got interested in Warhammer 40K and converted a few Orks. This one is a very simple conversion, I just cut the right hand off at the wrist and rotated it so that he was shooting 'gangtsa style'.
For this one, I chopped both arms at the shoulders so that they would stick straight out from the body, and added sleeves with putty to cover the mess I had made of it. I also cut the right hand off at the wrist and added that knobby bracelet for reasons that escape me. I have the memory capacity of a goldfish. Plus it was about 25 years ago.
Another very simple conversion. You can probably guess what it was.
A quick Google search gave me this picture of a sprue of the above miniatures. They were pretty simple kits with limited options, but they did have character.
Google turned up this image for the next batch of miniatures on a sprue. As you can see, they had no options. You glued on the arm and stuck him on his base.
For this fella, I cut the middle horn off his helmet and glued it along with another one to his shoulder pad. This was apparently before I began drilling out the gun barrels. More on that later.
For this happy fellow, I cut into his face, bent his lower jaw down, and carved off his mangled teeth. Then I added new teeth (or teef, as Orks call them) made from whittled down bits of plastic and a tongue made from putty, if I remember correctly. I also cut off his axe and gave him a second gun.
This guy was supposed to represent the leader of my army. I cut off his side horns and turned them downward (I still like the look of those). I gave him a power sword and a kustom shoota made from three imperial boltguns and a chainblade. At one time he had an odd-shaped piece glued onto his belt buckle that represented a kustom force field generator, but it is now long gone. Although it may be lying in the bottom of one of my many bitz boxes.
The bright and cartoonish paint jobs were typical of the day.
I much prefer the gritty, rusted look that is popular today. I painted these guys about four years ago. I think my painting technique has improved a little bit. I'll go into more depth on the process to make these guys sometime down the road.
No comments:
Post a Comment