Something big, pt. 2: A bit of progress and some additional musings

Work on my Chaos Knight continues apace: I have finally started to build the model’s second arm, and have also added some additional bitz and bobs here and there. The Knight is now rapidly approaching completion, and I think it shows:

What I really like about the model right now is that, while it’s still clearly identifiable as a Knight Titan, the various chaotic details and added armour have managed to alter the model’s silhouette quite a bit. Let’s have a look at a couple of different angles:

As you can see in the pictures below, the braziers from the warshrine kit were added to the Knight’s back:

I would have loved to use these to replace (or complement) the Knight’s regular exhausts, but that would have rendered the top carapace plate impossible to take off, and I really wanted to keep it flexible (so one can take a closer look at Baron Harrowthorne in his cockpit and the engine block). So the only compromise left to me was to add them to the Knight’s back at an angle that wouldn’t interfere with the carapace. That said, I don’t actually see them as braziers so much, but rather as extra exhausts that are there to vent some heat/warp energy/whatever when the Knight goes into overdrive mode.

As you can see in the pictures, I also added some bitz to the right shoulder pad at last. While the left one already sports a huge icon of Khorne, I want to use a World Eaters decal on the right one:

Of course this means that whatever I wanted to add to the pad at this point must not interfere with the position of the decal, which complicated things a bit. I tacked some spikes in the area surrounding the space where the decal will be:

Since I rather liked the effect, the spikes have already been glued to the shoulder pad:

I may still add some additional detail on top of the decal at some point — a chain of dangling skull trophies, for example. However, I will only be able to sort this out once the model has been painted.

I also realised by sheer coincidence that the standard from the Ogre Mournfang Cavalry would actually make a pretty cool banner for the Knight:

That hole at the centre of the carapace certainly looks like it was intended for something like this!  One thing I will need to do, however, is to add some kind of chaos icon to the top of the banner in order to give it a more distinct visual footprint when seen from the front:

I am not sure whether I like this element enough to make it a permanent addition to the model, but it might be a fun optional bit, to be added whenever I feel like it? We’ll see…

All those small additions notwithstanding, I am very aware that there’s a danger of overcluttering the model which would make it lose visual coherency. Therefore, I will try to restrain myself and only add a couple of bitz to the weapon arms in order to tie them together with the rest of the model. And then it’s time to call this conversion finished and get this big boy painted, I guess – a prospect that fills me with equal parts anticipation and dread, to be honest…

One thing I realised is how this model – and the last two years in the hobby, really – have changed my outlook on conversion projects, especially when it comes to big models:

When I got back into the hobby in 2010, I was mostly used to working with regular, infantry sized models. A Terminator seemed huge to me back then, and I remember that converting and painting my first Dreadnought seemed like an enormous undertaking. Then came a Defiler, a Basilisk, a Heldrake, the Wargrinder, and, lastly, the Knight, and without even noticing it, I grew more and more comfortable working with bigger models.

Now when I recently picked up a Black Reach Dreadnought in an ebay auction, I realised that it took me about fifteen minutes of messing around with a couple of bitz to produce something that would have taken me ages to complete a couple of years ago:

Now this guy is very, very WIP at the moment, and none of this has been glued together yet. In fact, I am not even sure whether the completed Dread will end up looking like this or completely different. I am just showing it to you to illustrate my point: That things that used to feel like the absolute pinnacle of my hobby achievements can now be accomplished in a short break between working on bigger things — a pretty cool feeling, actually 😉

So, I would be very interested in hearing any feedback on my Chaos Knight you might have! Just drop me a comment!

And, as always, thanks for looking and stay tuned for more!

EDIT: David Grundy raised an excellent point in the comments about the “white space” above the Knight’s head, created by the too clean armour plate. I started working on that area right away, using some leftover parts from the warhshrine kit. Take a look:

Not only does the armour plate appear less empty and clean now, but the decoration also repeats a visual element that already appears on the model (on the shoulder pads, to be precise). Cheers for pointing this out, David! Hope you like the solution! 😉