Converting a Priest for the Casket of Souls

My casket of souls is coming along slowly but surely. The base and plinth done and, as every model in this army needs to be converted, I've put together a unique priest to oversee the casket.

 

 

The casket normally doesn't have a base, but (because I'm not a savage) I've put together a proper square base for it. 

 

 

The base is made from four 40mm bases, mounted on thin styrene card with the gaps filled in. The excess card was trimmed away and the edges were sanded smooth. After adding some extra bones and sand, it was ready for painting.

 

 

For the priest, I dug through my parts box and settled on Settra's body with the arms from the original casket priest. (That's the casket priest's body on the right; I'll use that for another liche priest or necrotect. I had considered giving him unique weapons, but the uniformity of the bird iconography on his blade and staff really grew on me, and it helps tie him into the casket itself and the birds on its lid.

 

 

Settra already had some substantial pegs on his feet, so I kept those, and just crimped them a little with my smooth needle-nose pliers. I drilled out two spots on the dais and added a little putty to fill in the divots for the original priest since Settra has a wider stance.

 

 

If you were following my posts about Dreadfleet a few years back, you may remember that I cut off the top of Settra's head to use on of the small auxiliary boats. I replaced it with a head from the new plastic Tomb King Monarchs kit. I also used a beard bit from the bone dragon's tomb king.

 

 

The part was cut just below the eyes, and I used some modeling putty to fill in the gap and fix the facial detail. On the top of his headdress, I had trimmed off the spikes, but it looked too plane, so I added some rivets made from bits of small styrene rod.

 

 

The real work on this guy went into his cape– I wanted a cape that would match the strips of cloth hanging from his arms, so I drew out a pattern on some .75mm styrene.

 

 

I cut out the strips, leaving hem longer than I needed so I could trim them later. (Better to make them too long and trim them down to size rather than make them too short and have to start over.)

 

 

Then, I used a heat gun to (carefully) soften the plastic and curl the strips. This step took a bit of trial and error. The five strips on the right curled perfectly, but the three on the left didn't turn out that well, so I remade them.

 

 

I took a break from the fumes of melting plastic (always work in a well ventilated area and wear a respirator, kids) to work on the arms. Surprisingly, they fit pretty well, and only needed a bit of putty to patch the gaps after pinning them in place. I also cut off his right hand and pinned it at the wrist so I could rotate the blade to a better angle.

 

 

One of the benefits of metal miniatures is that they can be reposed by bending them– I flexed the strips hanging from his arms to curl in front of him a little.

 

 

The base was painted pretty quickly since it's just sand and bones with the sandstone dais. You can see my process for painting my Tomb Kings bases in my Painting Desert Bases tutorial.

 

 

There was still a way to go, but I was starting to feel pretty confident about the pose and conversion.

 

 

Back to the cape– These were the final strips I went with. I attached them to a piece of double-sided tape to finalize their positions and mark where to trim the ends. Some of the strips were a little too wide, so I shaved down their sides to make them all a uniform width.

 

 

From there, I added a roll of Brown Stuff modeling putty and pressed the newly-trimmed tops into it. Once the putty had fully cured, I added a bit of super glue to secure the strips to the putty (taking care not to get any glue on the miniature so I could remove the cape later. I used Aves Apoxie Sculpt to sculpt some folds and impressions where the attachment rings would go.

 

 

One final bit of sculpting was to add a strip of missing trim on the edge of the collar. With all the sculpting finished, I carefully popped the putty off of the model. I added some super glue to the surface of the cape and dabbed it with a paper towel to add a bit of texture. This helped secure the Aves putty and the texture concealed what would have been an obvious seam between the end of the putty and the black plastic.

 

 

With the texture applied, and the bottoms of the cape strips trimmed and shaped, I reattached the putty with a tiny dab of glue. I drilled holes in the top of the cape and cut some lengths of 26 gauge wire.

 

 

The bits of wire were glued into the holes...

 

 

...and meticulously trimmed and bent so they looked like rings attaching the cape strips to the collar, similar to the rings around the priests arms from which the arm strips were hanging.

 

 

The cape was then removed for painting, and the whole miniature was finished up:

 

 

One of the more time-consuming parts of the painting was going around and picking out the scarabs crawling all over him.

 

 

I struggled a bit with the color– I originally painted the upper area of the collar and the back of the headdress blue-black, but felt that it made the model too busy. I repainted them red and gold and decided to limit the blue-black to the cape and sleeve strips, and the arches over his head and the skulls.

 

 

There still more work to do: I have to convert the "crew" models, which will be four tomb guardians with great weapons. And, I'm converting the casket itself to have spirits coming out of the box when the lid is removed. "Shut your eyes, Marion! Don't look at it, no matter what happens!"
 

'Til next time!