State of the Hunt, week 35/2020: Blood and Plague

Another update today, and while I only have a few things to show you, I don’t want this blog to fall silent again, so here goes:

First up, I thought it would be fun to take a quick snapshot of all the models in my World Eaters collection that actually use the modernised colour scheme:

In addition to “The Hateful Eight”, there’s Euron Hearteater, Brother Argus the Brazen (the FW World Eaters Dreadnought I got from my buddy Augustus b’Raass, and, of course,  “The Hound”, renegade War Dog.

Definitely not an army, but they do look pretty cool together, if I do say so myself 😉

Having finished “The Hateful Eight” – or at least a first squad of updated World Eaters, depending on how you look at it – it was back to a spell of light kitbashing this week. But in fact, everything started with another endeavour that was very much World Eaters-related:

I had been eyeing up a particular set of bitz for a conversion for a rather long while now, so I finally gave it a try and made this first mockup:

A model wearing a massive, studded suit of Mk. III armour, as you can see — there’s such a brutal, workmanlike look to that armour, and I think it works really well for an officer of the XII legion. Believe it or not, though, the legs and body actually came from the multipart plastic Plague Marines — that conversion had been on my mind for such a long time that I finally caved and bought a box of Plague Marines. But hey, it’s not like I won’t put all those bitz to good use — more on that in a minute 😉

Anyway, back to the model at hand: I was already pretty happy with the first mockup, so I worked on the model a bit more and cleaned up the conversion:

I shaved off the Nurglite mutations and tentacles and added a few additional bitz: The head came from a Custodian, the left and upper right arm (and pauldrons) are from the vanilla CSM kit. The left-hand axe came from the Forgeworld Red Butchers (I think), and the right-hand axe was taken from one of the Blood Warriors from the 1st edition Age of Sigmar starter box.

…Oh, and I did add some trophy skulls while I was at it, of course 😉

I am currently working on a smaller trophy pole/back banner, but I am honestly not sure whether it’s the right direction for the model:

The Plague Marine kit, in the meantime, is fascinating for a number of reasons:

The kit maybe goes a bit too far with the mutations and gribbly detail in some areas — some of those parts look like something you would expect to see on a Scooby Doo villain. At the same time, I really appreciate that many of the parts feature callbacks to some of the very classic Plague Marine designs, especially the seminal concept artwork by Jes Goodwin. And, probably the thing that surprised me the most: It very much feels like a classic GW kit in that you end up getting lots and lots of leftover bitz. Modern GW kits are fantastic, but more often than not, you end up exactly as many parts as you need to finish the model, with maybe an extra head or shoulder pad. Not so with these guys, where each of the seven models in the box allows for at least two or three general equipment/assembly options. And by committing to one of them, you end up with lots of extra parts.

By the same token, “using up” that one body for my World Eaters champion shown above made sure I was left with the Plague Marine bitz that should normally have been combined with that body. And seeing how I still had a set of three of the cheap-o Easy To Build Plague Marines (from one of the first issues of Warhammer 40k Conquest) knocking about, I decided to have a bit of fun:

I started with the parts for the Plague Spewer and threw them on one of the snapfit Plague Marine bodies:

It took a bit of cutting and bending, but in the end, I am pretty happy with the outcome!

While I was at it, I also started to put together a model completely based on the parts from the Plague Marine kit:

Not really that much of a conversion, admittedly — the idea here was to to channel Jes Goodwin’s classic metal Plague Marine (and the sketch that model was originally based on):

After getting the basic assembly right, it was time for a bit of gap filling — I also used some GS cables on the Jes Goodwin-inspired model to bring it even further in line with the model that inspired it:

At the same time, those cables also have the added advantage of replacing those weird, cartoony tentacles that were part of the stock model. Meanwhile, the model on the right is simply an attempt at combining leftover parts with yet another cheap snapfit Plague Marine — in fact, I really like how two of those models were mostly made using leftover bitz!

One more little project before we call it quits for today: My eventual – inevitable – second squad of modernised World Eaters will have need of an icon bearer, of course, so I made a quick mockup:

And here’s the model after I have put in a bit more work:

The bolt pistol was replaced with an axe because, frankly, you can never, ever have enough axes on a Khornate model 😉 And while this only occured to me in hindsight, the helmet on this guy actually feels pleasantly reminiscent of the helmet designs of the first plastic World Eaters:

This makes for another pretty cool shout out to one of the classic designs — just perfect for this project!

So yeah, that’s it for today. Like I said, it’s not much, but I would still very much like to hear any thoughts you may have, so drop me a comment!

As always, thanks for looking and stay tuned for more!