My most favourite aspect of this hobby comes down to one thing - conversions. Conversions can come in all shapes and sizes, and for the purpose of this article, a conversion is any modification made to a model that is not intended by its design for out of box assembly. So, from part swapping to cutting and reposing, and from green stuff to card stock, these are the kinds of conversions I'm talking about.
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| Farsight Enclaves Shas'Ui |
I've been collecting Warhammer 40K for more than 11 years. When I first started, there were almost no conversions in my army. I was still getting the basics down, such as how to actually paint these little guys. But once my collection started to grow, I began to desire to make my armies unique, so that no two guys were the same. You can imagine how hard that becomes when you have armies like Tyranids or Necrons, or now my Guard where you have a lot of the same unit (Guants, Necron Warriors, basic Guardsmen). But this is where I apply my favorite concept for conversions, small and simple.
Take for example my Tau Fire Warriors. I've got about 48 different Fire Warriors and no two are the same. But the ones I've just made more recently (within the past year) are the more ambitious conversions - where I'm cutting up arms and legs to re-position them to make more dynamic poses. Additionally, it helps add character to your army, creating in my opinion, a more authentic gaming and modelling experience. When I start a new squad of Fire Warriors, I first like to envision the entire squad in a battle scene. The scene I picture could be as simple as a group of Fire Warriors walking slowly through a desolated battlefield to a group in the midst of action poses, to as extreme (and awesome!) as a team looking down scopes, striking poses, and being overall badasses. This helps me to identify the elements I want to see in each model and how it will mesh as a squad.
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| EMP Commando Team |
Other times, I'm doing conversions to recreate a piece of artwork I've seen or an idea inspired by another piece I've seen online/in real play. Within my Tau Army (by far my most converted and largest army), I wanted to recreate the Crisis Suit from the Codex. The scene I referenced in my mind was where the battlesuits are descending from the Tau ship to the Kroot home world. It's hands down one of my favorite works of art in the Codex and I just love the imagery of the suits floating down to the surface. And thankfully, it wasn't hard to recreate the pose. A quick cut of the suit legs at the knees and re-gluing them gives you a nicely bent knee just like the suits in the artwork.
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| Tau Ethereal Made from the Body of an Eldar Farseer |
Other times, you honestly just want a badass looking model. A single character with lots of, well, character. I recently created a Necron Lord with battle scarring over one eye. I wanted it to seem like he'd taken a beating and kept on trucking along. The conversion I used was just a simple head swap. I cut off the Lord's head and replaced it with one of the damaged heads from the Ghost Ark kits' Warrior heads that I had left after making a Doomsday Ark. The head already had a scar over the right eye - all I had to do was glue it on.
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| Necron Lord with Scar |
The nice thing I've found with Games Workshops' newest kits is that there are tons of extra bits to help make your conversions and that lots of kits can be interchangeable with one another. The most obvious is the Space Marine range, where Tactical Squads, Assault Squads, Devastator Squads, both types of Veteran Squads, the Command Squad, and the Captain kits are easily transferable. But now, after the Tau 6th Edition launch, Pathfinder kits and Fire Warrior kits are also equally comparable. The first thing I did with the new Pathfinder kit was to give all my old Shas'Ui team leaders proper marker light bits from the kit to replace the old cut off carbine barrels I had been using for so long.
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| Salamanders Terminator made from Dark Angels Terminator kit |
At the end of the day, I find it's easiest to keep conversions simple in practice. Simple parts swapping or cutting and re-positioning of parts is really all you need. I find it definitely helps to keep the army unique and full of character.
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| Tau Fire Warrior team where every member is converted |
Czar Ziggy
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