40K Hobby: Heresy-era Demon Prince
One of the dilemmas I faced when building my Heresy Sons of Horus, was what to use to represent my Demon Prince. I had used Bigred’s Mortarion for a while, including at both Adepticon and Alamo, but I needed one of my own. Here’s what I did:
What I was looking for was basically an over-sized space marine, in the early days of his demon-hood. I considered a few options, the inquisitor scale space marine from GW, one of the statues that are meant to be terrain pieces, but decided that a slightly de-chaos-ized GW Nurgle Demon Prince.
I spent at least 3 or 4 hours with my dremel and a grinder bit taking the mutation parts off while trying to keep it reasonably smooth. I made sure to pin all of the pieces securely, setting the wings (from a lord of change) at the correct angle. Once I had all the grinding finished, I used green stuff in various places to fill in the holes and smooth everything out.
The last and most annoying bit was the helmet. I knew from the very start I wanted to use a marine wearing a helmet. The price I paid was having to sculpt it from scratch. I did it in three steps, starting with a small ball of green stuff and building the parts out from that. The basic shell of the helmet, then the crest on the top. I used some left over leather cord I’d gotten for the counts as greater demon to form the parts around the side.
As for painting, I also knew he would be wearing the Luna Wolf colors, having been lost to the warp before the name and color change. I used mostly the lighter grey foundation paint for the base colors, bringing it up with lighter greys and white. I used the standard grey primer/badab black to create the darker parts of the armor. I used brown tones for the wings, highlighting with bone and white. His eye both ties him into the rest of the army and grants him brief visions of the future (Warptime).
I’m quite happy with the way he came out and he played a major role in my scoring the highest paint score for a local painting competition, though I didn’t place due to a very hefty weight being placed on model count. He is one of the favorite parts of the army and he fills in Mortarion’s former role nicely.
~Check out Bushido 40k for more photos including all of the pre-primer photos showing the areas I used green stuff and the grinder. As always, questions and comments are welcome.
