Mage Hunting Storm Guardians

Hi folks, complex title, no? Well, its a relatively simple story. My corsair client included a box of Privateer Press Mage Hunters along with the Eldar and asked whether I could make them into storm guardians. I did my usual thing of saying "sure!" with the mental caveat of "...but I'm not sure how...", despite this, I was able to produce... this:

If you follow the link above you can see the base models I was working from, I also had the presence of mind to photograph the models in progress (I wanted to get client's OK that I was on the right track) so you can see what alterations were made:

Most of the work was carving away catapults from the hands of the "rifleman" poses. The donor models are from Warmachine and have the usual Privateer sculpting quirks (A rather anime feel to hair and features, odd straps and floating armour plates) but some are actually really nice, the cloak sculpt on the second row down first on the left is lovely. I tend to find this with Privateer Press. Some absolutely lovely sculpting amongst some fairly pedestrian stuff. The tendency to add detail for detail's sake (non-functional straps etc) is irksome but it fits their slightly anime style. Anyway! On to painting!

I was in a quandry about which colours to put where. I needed them to be reminiscent of the other corsair models despite clearly not being such. Initially I was musing on making the cloaks urban camoflauge as they seemed to have a "ranger-ey" feel to them. But this just looked awful. Seriously, just bad. At times like that you swallow the gaff and rethink! I decided that the main body would be the dark grey of the armour plates from other corsairs. The cloaks would need to be grey, but as I've mentioned before you can change the tone of a grey and thus differentiate between discrete areas of a model. In this case it was a shift from the neutral grey tone of Administratum Grey shaded with lots'o'black to Val German Grey. It has a blue-er tone that works nicely. Red accents and piping along with the metal-red-bronze gloves and the weird clips on the hoods provide an analogue to the face masks and gauntlets of the armoured models.

This is the model I'm happiest with in terms of the conversion. It was one of those that once I'd dry fitted some parts just fell together. He's a mage hunter commander and I think the Eldar componants actually work better than the kit parts. He's got a lovely pose and flow. Happy Jeff is happy.

Well, those are the last of the Eldar Infantry, it's vehicles all the way now to project completion. I'll be mixing them among the Imperial commissions I'm working through to spare my wrist too many of those hexes in one go. Until next time folks

TTFN