Birth of a Chaos Dread Reloaded, pt.1

Building and painting my first Chaos Dread was really a lot of fun, and I am still very pleased with the result. And that is precisely the reason why I really wanted to build a second one right after the first one was finished. Well, that and the fact that I lack any sort of impulse control, but that’s another story…

So here we goe again: Join me for the second season of “Birth of a Chaos Dread”. I promise it’ll be fun (at least for me…).

Once again, I had a couple of things I wanted to achieve when building the model:

• again, I wanted to avoid the refridgerator look as much as possible
• this second Dread was going to be a lot shootier than the first (who totally focused on CC). I felt that the plastic Venerable Dreadnought kit was the way to go here, considering all the weapon options included.
• I really, REALLY wanted to use this head for my Dread:

The big question in order to find out if you are as much of a nerd as I am: Does anyone recognise this? Then go on and drop me a comment. I’ll be waiting 😉

Anyway, I thought that it would be really cool to feature a part of one of my old toys in a conversion. Plus I think the head has a bit of a resemblance with the head from the original FW World Eaters Dread. But that might just be my imagination. In any case, I liked the slightly inhuman look created by the single eyeslit, a bit like this.

So I immediately bought the Dread kit, hurried home, broke out my knife and yellow-tac and made a mockup of the thing. Here’s what I got:

As much as I love the head, there was no getting around the fact that it was simply too big: It did not fit between the shoulders, like I had intended it to, so it was left facing slightly downwards. And with such a large head, the Dread looked somewhat misshapen – and not in a good way. So, with a heavy heart, I discarded the head that had inspired the whole conversion in the first place. Don’t feel bad for it, though: One day, its moment of glory will come. For example, if I ever do a Dreadknight conversion, then…no!…must…resist…temptation…

Fortunately, there was a good alternative: I still had some leftover parts from my Defiler conversion, and my fellow Khornate slaughterers Doombreed and Guitarasmus turned out to be very inspirational with their own Dreads. So I got to work again and ended up with this:

Much better! While this version is maybe less original, the head just fits better with the rest of the body. I changed the position of the left arm to give the model a more interesting silhouette (and to make it look like it was celebrating a successfully destroyed enemy vehicle or something like that). I also wanted the Dread to be standing on something with his left foot, so I used a sandbag as a placeholder. A stylised maw from the Ogre kingdoms was once again used to represent the World Eaters legion badge.

While there was some detailing left to do, I felt that this worked as a basic pose. However, in contrast to my CC Dread, a bit of thought would be necessary to figure out how to best build the different weapon options and give them the “Chaos treatment”…

Next time on Birth of a Chaos Dread Reloaded: the details. Until then, thanks for looking and stay tuned for more!