Details

I've always loved the Praetorians, but was a bit disappointed at the limited number of poses, and flumoxed by my ineptitude with metal for conversions. So I wanted to have a go at a plastic conversion.

As you can tell it's based on a plastic cadian. I'm afraid I didn't get work in progress shots (it's my first attempt at this, second only with green stuff so I didn't know how it would turn out).

The legs are separate, the left is from a heavy weapons model, the right from a normal guard. The torso is standard as are the arms and head, though both arms have been cut and repositioned.

The body and hips area was shaved flat of all detail before I started sculpting to try and keep the size down (though he's still a little heavy-set compared to the weedy Mordian based models).

The helmet was great fun to do. I just shaved off the helmet from a normal cadian, then dumped a dollop (warning: technical terms abound) of green stuff on his head and smoothed it out with wet fingers. Then I added a thing band around the bottom before finally touching it off with peaks front and back.

I'm happy with the pose, though as has been discussed on the forums it might work better if the gun was under his chin more. I see this more as the "don't shoot until you see the green of their eyes, lads" pose rather than the mid-firefight one.

Painting wise I'm doing my best, but alas that isn't awesome. Perhaps it's finally time to admit I'll never get that golden demon? (No..never!). The legs and body were base coated before being ink washed then higlighted once in the base colour. The skin and helmet I've put more effort into with many layers to add depth. The eyes look good but I didn't manage to get a pic of them. None of the black parts have been done yet.

I finally got the model based and details and am quite happy with the result. Could do with a bit more depth in places, but I may come back to this at a later date.

Apparently this was the inspiration for the Phoenix Club's praetorian conversion project which is in the works. Which is rather awesome, since hopefully someone else will be doing the hard work for the rest of my squads!