The Lost In the Warp Model Building....

James Craig of the ‘Lost In The Warp’ fame, approached me earlier this year about converting a beastman for his ultra cool beastmen army. James like myself loves the images of the beastmen, below is an example of his work. 

I've known James for quite a while, and have admired his work over the years. I think the idea to actually do this collaberation originated back when a whole group of us here in North America got together to do the whole Primarchs project for Gamesday. James can correct me if I'm wrong, but I think it was while we were sitting at a panel talking the hobby with people at Chicago Gamesday way back then, that we first thought about or discussed this idea, or maybe it was on the Herdstone Forum or something like that, but was around that time period. I do know that at one point we had all talked about playing a game against each other at some point also with our armies.

Anyways, I thought this project would be cool to do. He is a much more accomplished painter than I am, having won numerous Golden Demons for various elements of his Beastmen army. So the model I build will be painted by James to match up with his army. Having done tons of commission building work over the years, I always enjoy seeing how people paint things that I have built for them.  The thing about building is that I have this image of what the final look will be in my head in color, and when someone else paints that piece it gives me a very fresh perspective.

To start the project, I asked James what it was that he was looking for. Thankfully he pretty much gave me free rein, asking me to do something in the Khorne realm with two hand weapons, something that would look like it could be in my Khorne Beastmen army from back in 2003.  Something that looked like these bad boys that we last visited on an Old Stuff Wednesday:

Old Stuff Wednesday - October - Converted Gors

So I scrounged through my bitz boxes and came up with this cool stuff. An old style gor torso, some weapons, that marauder spear bit, a head, horn bits, some Secret Weapons cast skulls. That's a pretty good start.

Onto the model, I changed out a few of the bitz as I went, not liking certain things. Early on I decided that if it is going to be Khorne, it simply must have axes, no swords. The sword arm however is a coolest beastman arm, with the heavy armored gauntlet. Back in 2003 when I built, my beastmen army, I was not very good at sculpting chainmail and even struggled a bit with plate armor. Nowadays, that's not as big of an issue for me, so I added the plate armor and mail. Going through my orc bitz I found this chain thing that I placed on the front, so I added that to tie it in with the back banner and the straps that would hold the backbanner in place. The back banner is something that I had been thinking about for a bit as I thought the marauder cavalry spears would make for cool banner poles and actually have used a couple with my orc builds not that long ago. I quickly realized that I was lacking horns in my bitz box for whatever reason, so these were donated from a chaos knight head, I purposely did not want symmetry in modeling them on the head. I then added the hair. One of the major design elements in my Khorne Beastmen is hair and lots of it.

One of the poles got a Secret Weapons broken skull on it and the other a decapitated marauder head.  What is Khorne without some skulls, you have to have some skulls? So, I pinned and laced these in from Secret Weapon's grab bag onto the models hip. I did not do a whole lot to converting the weapons, but I think they are suitable.

The backbanner with with all of its wraps, leads to the straps attached to the chain.

 Above better view of some of the chainmail work.  Added a torque for the left arm.

Then as a complete after thought, I decided to quickly make a Midgetgor. A beastmen army nowadays is not complete without a midgetgor. 

 

It’s a quirky conversion that I’ve been doing lately for my band of mutants. I did not spend much time on him and did not even tell James that I was going to do this for him. So, James has to have one of these midgets in his beastmen army, doing what I don’t know.

As to basing, I’ve seen many pictures of his army over the years, and I decided right away that I would allow him to base the models how he sees fit. This way the will blend in a bit better with his army. This is a pretty common thing for me to do when working for others.

So with all of that work done, I packed them all up and off to Canada they went. James will pick up the paint work there on his blog. I eagerly await to see pictures of how he paints them and to hear back on what he likes and dislikes.

Now since I was doing this as a favor, I asked James to build me something in return that I could add to my Mutant Marauder army. I’ve been working on this band of misfits since around 2005, building and painting pieces of it every so often. I sent James a link to my photobucket account that showed all of the stuff I had completed thus far and James was agreeable with doing up a model that he thought would fit in with my misfits. As I told him, anything basically goes, and the main thing I wanted him to do was have fun doing it. If it’s not fun then why are we doing this? 

In the next post I'll show what James came up with.

Ah, but the story does not end there. James is a huge fan of Mike Butcher’s nurgle work, much like I am. Something that he had mentioned to me in passing is that he would love to get his hands on a Nurgle beastman that Mike had modeled that he could paint. Well Mike and I have been friends for quite awhile and we often attend many of the larger events together, and usually team-up together at the team tourneys. So, James and I approached Mike and he was cool with it. If you want to read about what Mike put together and I recommend that you do, you will need to go to the Butcher’s Bill and I'm sure he will be posting something about that.

Update:
Mike has posted his build here: 
http://mikebutcher-thebutchersbill.blogspot.com/2012/10/something-little-wicked-this-way-comes.html#more

So, there you have it, the kick-off of our blog crossover event amongst friends. I hope you have enjoyed it so far, I know I have. There will be more coming on all of this crossover, I plan to do a bunch of updates, as things develop on my miniature that James built and on James’ progress, so keep tuning in for the progress, and please checkout these blogs also:

Lost In the Warp

The Butcher's Bill