++++INLOADING DATAFILE 024++++ How to make a Chaos Heretic

Are you a devoted servant of the Dark Gods?  Do you wish that you could sacrifice legions of pathetic mortals on a whim?  Well now you can!!!  Hey everyone Jon from The Autoforge here with a big treat, a tutorial on how to convert Dawn of War 2 style Chaos Heretics.

This is actually the first in a series I'm going to do explaining how to convert a bunch of my stuff, and its also my first time writing for Belloflostsouls so please be gentle interwebs.  Now with no further toodoo....

How To Make A Chaos Heretic

Skill Level:  Medium (Some easy green stuffing and a lot of patience required.)

Time per guy: Approximately 1 hour

Materials: 1 Empire Flagellant, 1 set of Beastmen Ungor arms, 1 stamp mold (explained later), a paperclip, 3 spearheads, weapons.

Step 1: The Stamp Mold

First things first to make these guys you'll need to make a stamp mold for the waist glyphs.  A stamp mold is a really simple mold that you use to stamp out a particular shape to either get glued to a model later or to stamp it onto a model and simplify a conversion.  We are going to do the later here, and while in this case we're going for a evil face this method works just as well for Aquilas, Skulls, Chaos Stars, etc.

First we need a shape that we want to copy.  In this case as we want an evil skull I used the ammo feed on a chaos vehicle combi-bolter.  You probably have one of these lying around already if you play chaos.  Just take a wad of green stuff and smoosh it over the face part of the ammo feed, it helps to put a little petroleum jelly on first to help you remove the mold undamaged later.

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Once this has hardened fully peel it off and trim it down so that all you are left with is the imprint of the face itself.

The last step is to take a toothpick and glue it onto the back of the mold, thus turning it into a stamp.   And there you go, now you have your very own stamp mold!

              

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Step 2: The Torso

Alright now that that's done we can start on the actual model.  Now as I alluded before there is a decent amount of green stuffing involved in this conversion but its all simple straight forward stuff.

First we need to take a naked flagellant body and put some armor on him.  Take some green stuff and smooth it over the torso so that its evenly covered and then shape it so it only covers the upper torso, it should look something like this:

Once you have the shape down for an added detail you can make straps over the shoulders.  This is super easy to do, just take a flat edged tool and make a series of lines like so:

Step 3: The Mark of Chaos

Next up we have the single most "challenging" sculpting step: making the chaos star on the chest.  This is a quick and easy process with 5 simple steps.

Ready?  No?  Too bad...

1.  Make a ball of green stuff and stick it to the chest.
2.  Flatten out the ball into a smooth circle.
3.  Make a circular depression in the center of the circle.  The best tool for this is a taper point rubber clay shaper, just poke the center and widen it out till you have the right sized hole.
4.  Take an exacto knife and cut out 8 triangles from the circle to make the points of the star.
5.  Remove the excess green stuff and fix any mistakes.  It should look like this:

Step 4: The Gutplate

Ok now we get to use that stamp mold we made earlier.  This is so easy you should have it done in less than 5 minutes.  First take a ball of green stuff and stick it on the abdomen.  Then just take the stamp mold and press it in the middle of the ball and wah-lah, you have a face.  Now just fix the edges so that it's inside a circle and reshape the ammo link that's visible so that its a lower lip instead, super easy to do, should look like this:
                 

Step 5: The Arms

Now this is where you can start taking the easy way out if you wanted to.  My meaning is that if you were so inclined you could just use Cadian or Forgeworld Militia arms and those would work perfectly fine.  If you want to do that then just skip this step.

BUT if you consider yourself one of the "cool kids" then here's what you need to do.  Take out a set of Ungor arms that you think will look cool and cut off the furry part of the shoulder.  The shoulder's have more material these arms as the ungor model's have thinner torsos, its just a design quirk but you'll need to cut them for it to fit right.  Once you have try test fitting the arms till you have a cool pose and cut off whatever weapons were originally on them.  This is the pose I came up with using a spear right arm and a bow left arm.  It doesn't look like much yet but just wait...

   

Now you should replace the weapons with whatever weapons combo you want, in my case a Militia Laspistol and a Skeleton Sword.  The swords from skeletons work really well with these guys as they are all broken and decrepit looking.  Try adding in the head to finish out the pose and remember rule 1 of action posing: the most dramatic parts of any movement are the very beginning and the very end.  So with the head thrown in you can now see that he's starting to swing at something with all his might.

           

The next thing you need to do is fill in the gaps under the shoulders and  add in the shoulder pads.  Filling in the gaps is easy and you can use any left over material to make frayed ends of the robe jutting out from the armor, this ties the model together better but isn't necessary.  The shoulder pads are pretty easy too, just shape the putty into the right shape and position on the shoulder and it looks like those arms were built just for this kit!  Now you've got just 1 more step to tie it all together!

Step 6: The Trophy Rack

Alright lets put the green stuff aside for a bit as we don't need it for this step.  The first thing you need to do is to cut three 3/4" long pieces off of a paperclip.  After that cut a 3/4" long piece of plasticard scrap, I used a .5 mm thick piece for this guy.  Drill three holes wherever you like and then put the paperclip pieces into them.  Use some rapid cure to help you glue the bottoms together and then take some spear heads to make the spikes.  You can get these from anything that's the right size, empire state troops are the best source as they're the right size and no one takes spearmen anyways, meaning that just about any empire player has a crap ton of these lying around.  Just drill a hole in the bottom of each spear head and glue it to the rods so that it fits flush with the bar and you're almost done!

 

The last step is to attach the trophy rack to the guy's back.  Just glue it in place and then use some green stuff to cover up the join, I made a box with some extra techno-doodles on it.  Don't ask me what it does, it just makes it look cool.

 

The Finished Product

So here he is in all his lack of glory.  I added some skulls to the waist from the flagellant kit for extra details but that's all he needed.  Not bad for an hour long conversion eh?

So in parting here's a comparison shot between him and a guy the Dark Gods actually care about.  Stay tuned for more tutorials to come, and if you have any requests drop me a line at my blog.