G'day all,
It's been awhile since my last post so I decided to do up my version of Alpharius and whack him into a series of WIP.
I'm reading the Legion novel at the moment(slowly) and love the idea that Alpharius could be any one of the marines, changing his name and identity at will. So I decided to convert him as just that, a 'regular' marine armed like any one of his comrades. I used the two following pictures as my main inspiration for the conversion. A quick disclaimer, I'm using these pictures in good will, and with no ulterior motive.
The first pic has fairly standard power armour, but is clearly an important fella, and the second one I like because of the flowing cape around him something I tried to emulate.
So to start with the materials I used are:
- A FW AL torso
- A FW AL head
- A set of Tartaros termi legs
- A left and right arm from the termi set along with left and right hands to go with them
- A left and right arm from the mk3 power armour set
- A bolter (Phobos I think)
- Greenstuff
- Sculpting tools (clay shapers, scalpel, pin)
- a junior hacksaw
- a little bit of 2mm plasticard
We'll start off with the legs. I sawed them off at the hip (as per my earlier tutorial on mk6 marines) and then pinned them back on reducing the cowboy like stance a little and adding about 2mm extra height to the upper thigh while I was at it. I made sure the stance was how I wanted it and started to greenstuff. The purpose of the greenstuff on this part of the leg was to heavily bulk out the thighs, which on humans are naturally a lot larger than the calves, something that's a little lost in translation on space marines (not the only anatomical anomaly). The end result is quite a change from normal marine legs:
But it's grown on me and I like the bulkiness of them. As you can see I also added a belt buckle and inserted a pin into the legs for the torso to attach to.
I then took a torso and cut it in half with the hacksaw, gluing a small 2mm spacer in between, making sure the front and back lined up before the glue dried:
I attached the torso like this to the pin on the legs and made sure to leave a few mils of space between the two:
I used a bit of greenstuff as gap filler, ensuring that it didn't protrude out past the body and let it dry to add a bit of structural support before I started the actual putty work.
Greenstuff was then used to add a bit more size to certain part of the armour that needed to enlrged to meet the new scale of the model.
The ribcage:
And the waist, a little bit of detail can be seen here, I didn't go overboard though, it'll all get covered up soon:
His arms are made from the upper section of mk3 and the forearm of tartaros joined at the elbow, a fairly easy changeover that allowed the 2 handed bolter hold utlising the angle of the mk3 arms:
As you can see the skinniness of the mk3 is covered up by the shoulder pads, making a nice natural pose:
His backpack is a combination of the mk3 chassis with mk4 vents, I love the mk3 backpack but wanted him to have newer equipment so went with the new vents. The pack on the left is the finished product:
His cape would be covering his arms partially so I had to glue them in place before continuing. I also attached the backpack. I wanted the cape to be a ragged one like in the source pic above so wasn't worried about keeping the putty smooth and consistent. I wet my fingers well (to stop the putty sticking to them) and took small balls of putty flattening them out between my fingers and pulling them into position on the mini. The cloak is meant to look like its blowing in the wind so I pulled the sheets of greenstuff out to the right a little. I also lapped the left hand side of the cloak around the front of him to create the wind effect. At this stage the cloak looks a little rough on the back but I fix it up later. After leaving it to dry for 20 minutes or so I took a pin and teased out a few edges on the cloak to make it look torn..
The next day after the putty has completely cured I added some waves in the cloak. I took sausages of putty and using photos of how material flows I laid the sausages on and smoothed them into the cloak with the clay shapers.
It took a little bit of trial and error but I eventually got a look I was happy with.
Finally I added some brand new fingers holding the bolter and gap filled any spaces left behind at joints like the wrists and shoulders
And there we have it my interpretation of Alpharius, father of all marines, for we are everywhere. I think he looks important while still maintaining that ambiguity of the XXth.
A scale shot:
And a little action shot:
Thanks for reading.
HYDRA DOMINATUS
-Ded
