Seb's SM tutorial – part 1 – Converting
I have very little experience with conversions, or sculpting, so take everything I write with a grain of salt, but after finding the @weird_witticism profile on instagram, I was inspired and decided to try my hands at a conversion.
Since I knew I would make plenty of mistakes, I bought two Warhammer Heroes Space Marines, since they are more affordable than most Warhammer miniatures. In addition I got myself a hand drill, a pack of brown stuff and some wire. And got started. These are the two miniatures I got:
I decided to use the one on the right, but to use the arm (with the grenade) of the left one, as I wanted to do a Cthulhu/Mindflayer possessed Space Marine, and by cutting off the grenade, the smoke looks kind of creepy. I cut the miniatures apart as needed:
Then made holes with the hand drill where I knew I wanted to have tentacles or the body parts of the Mindflayer protruding:
Cut of some wire and glued into the holes with super glue. This will create a stronger bond than if I only used brown stuff between the body parts:
I then had a skeleton and something to work from:
I cut of two equal parts of the two-part epoxy putty, and mixed them into a ball of brown stuff, that I then made thin and flat by using the handle of my hobby-knife as a rolling pin:
Dipped the knife blade in water so as to not stick to the brown stuff, and cut out a strip:
Bent some wire into the desired shape, and wrapped it in the brown stuff strip:
After gluing the tentacle into the hole, I took some more strips of brown stuff, and wrapped it around the area where the tentacle meets the shoulder pauldron and used a pointy metal tool to poke and prod it into a natural texture. I was pleased that I chose to sculpt organic material for my first project, realising that making natural texture requires much less technique than sculpting armor, guns or other inorganic material. Throughout the conversion, some random prodding and poking at the brown stuff while it was still soft seemed to do the trick. It took approximately a few hours for the brown stuff to harden.
To make the tentacles, I simply rolled a piece of brown stuff under my finger, until it became thin and sharp. Cut it off, and put it in its place. The brown stuff attaches easily to other brown stuff, so a little push was enough, no glue necessary.
The final result looks quite messy, but I’m hoping with paint, the organic parts of the Mindflayer will separate from the Space Marine’s armour, and look alright.
Latest articles
- Alps Diorama part 1 Marko Paunović, 16th December 2024
- TOP TIP – Wooden Beam Flooring Krunoslav Belinić, 10th December 2024
- Back to Basics workshops at Zagreb City Libraries 2024 Krunoslav Belinić, 26th November 2024
- Big Panda and Tiny Dragon drawing workshop Krunoslav Belinić, 26th November 2024
- We visited: Slovenian State Championship in plastic modelling, Ljubljana 16.11.2024. Marko Paunović, 20th November 2024
Latest battle-reports
- 22nd April 2022, GW - Warhammer 40.000, Borna Pleše (Space Marines) and Kristijan Kliska (Tau Empire)
- 17th November 2021, GW - Warhammer 40.000, and Nino Marasović (Space Marines)
- 27th October 2021, GW - Warhammer 40.000, Borna Pleše (Space Marines) and Josip Strnad (Space Marines)