The Conversion Corner - Easterlings & Khand

In this post, I'll be running through the bulk of the conversion work I did on my 'Men of the East' Easterling / Khand alliance.

The aim for this project was to unify both armies under the Easterling aesthetic as much as possible, as I'm a huge fan of it! I wanted the whole force to look like one seamless army.

For those interested in just the finished results - you can see them here.

Unfortunately I'm limited by the photos I took at the time, so I can't do a full illustrated tutorial for any of these models. There are, however, some new Easterling models in the pipeline which (in my opinion) could use a bit of work to match the Easterlings' visual style, so consider this post a little prelude to the full tutorial I'll be posting when those arrive through my letterbox.

Khand

First up, Khand! As I was trying for the Easterling look, most of the heavy conversion work was done on the Khandish models. Let's start with the model that inspired the army in the first place!

Khandish Charioteer, Chieftain on Chariot, King on Chariot

I think it's fair to say that the Chariots are the centrepiece of the army, so I really wanted these to pop. In fact, I made these chariots before I had decided to make a full Easterling / Khand alliance, and it was because of how well they turned out that I decided to expand upon the theme.

Fortunately, the chariots are fairly straightforward to convert, in that simply switching the rider and the horse for their Easterling variants gets you most of the way to 'Easterling Chariots'. I did decide to do a fair bit of extra work on them, but that's really all optional. 

For the riders, I used Easterling Warrior archers, as the pose is close to what I was looking for - a rider with the reins in one hand, and a polearm in the other. 

Before/after.

The conversion wasn't too tricky - I chopped off the bow, and then cut the model at both shoulders and wrists. The hands were easy to reattach at the correct angle with poly cement, and the arms were rotated and fixed in place with minimal green stuff. I also drilled 1mm holes through both hands. (Be VERY gentle when doing this! It's best to start with a tiny pilot hole and work your way up to 1mm slowly - the hands are easy to break.)

Here are the 4 riders after repositioning. I later removed the face masks of the bottom-right model and replaced it with a Kataphrakt mask, and this model would go on to become the Khandish King. 

I am really happy with the his pose, especially his bulky stance and the effortless way he holds his glaive - he looks very confident and threatening. This wasn't particularly intentional, as I was just working around the limitations of the model, but it worked out nicely. 

As Khandish Charioteers use hand-and-a-half axes, the logical weapon swap was an Easterling Glaive, the weapon used by Easterling Captains. I used blue stuff to press-mould the glaive's head, and fixed this on to 1mm brass rod with green stuff and superglue. 

Blue stuff mould of the glaive head.

As a side note, blue stuff is very easy to use, and I'd recommend that every hobbyist keeps a blob of it in their toolkit. This was my first time using it and it's very straightforward to pick up and start making parts. The glaive head was quite a fiddly shape to mould and involved quite a bit of clean up, but I managed to get 4 decent copies of it with a little bit of trial and error. 

Khandish King on chariot.

Here was the first 'proof of concept' assembled rider. I also stuck a Khandish flag to the back to tie them in to the Khand design a bit more. It also adds a nice dramatic vertical element to the model's silhouette.

Fortunately, I had a few unassembled Kataphrakts that I could test to see if I liked how they looked before committing to the idea (I did.) However, I needed a total of 8 horses - so I had to buy another pack of katas which I raided for their horses, making this quite a pricey conversion! (It all worked out in the end, as we'll see later).

Here are the four pre-assembled chariots. Getting everything to line up on the bases correctly was a bit of a pain and took some work! For the cobblestone base, I just used milliput and a green stuff rolling pin from Green Stuff World.

Everything base coated and ready for assembly. 

Assembling the reins was very fiddly, and unfortunately I don't have any good photos of the process. I took fishing line, painted it with an airbrush, and fed lengths of it through the gap in each horse's reins, just under the chin - so it looks like it attaches to the horse's bit. This was fixed in place with a tiny dot of green stuff, which I pressed tightly in to the crevice using a piece of brass rod as a tiny rolling pin. As the fishing line would be under tension, it needed to be really secure. This took a bit of back and forth to get right. 

I let the green stuff set for a couple of days and applied a dot of superglue to each side before touching the fishing line again. The fishing line was then fed through the hole drilled in the rider's fist, pulled tight, and superglued in to place. 

Author's note: I actually would not recommend using fishing line, and if I made these again I'd use something else. The fishing line is not optimal for a couple of reasons - firstly, it is quite springy and resistant to being bent, making it awkward to work with. Secondly, the shiny surface makes it incredibly difficult to glue in to place, and superglue takes forever to grab it - and even when it does it's not a strong bond. I'd heartily recommend using something else, such as model rigging, to anybody looking to use this method. 

I carried on tinkering with these models for quite a while, and made a few changes which included:

- Replacing the King's flag with the larger flag from the Khandish Chieftain, for a bit more drama.

- Adding magnetised Easterling 'crests' to the top of the flag poles so that I could run them as Chieftains, or remove the crests to make them regular charioteers. I used tiny 1x1mm magnets for this.

- Adding a 3d printed drake skull to the front of the King's chariot - both for a bit of flair, and so it could be more easily identified on the table. 

The finished articles!

Khandish Horsemen

The Horsemen were a bit of a happy accident. After I decided to bulk out the Khandish charioteers in to a full Khand contingent, the Khandish Horsemen had just been added back to the GW webstore, and I was wondering how I was going to convert them to look more Easterling-y. But when talking with a fellow hobbyist, I realised that I had some Khandish horses left over from the chariot conversion, and also the horse riders from the Kataphrakt kit which were languishing in my bits box!

I almost literally just needed to put 2 and 2 together.

This worked out quite nicely, as the Khand Cav needed to be visually distinct from the Easterling Kataphrakts I planned to run in the same list, and the unarmoured horses Khandish horses are instantly identifiable as the 'light cavalry' I wanted. We'll just have to ignore the fact that they're wearing full suits of armour despite only being D4!

There are a few in-between photos missing here I'm afraid, but here is the proof of concept for the Khandish Horsemen. 

As the chariot horses were never meant to stand independently, I had to secure them to the base with brass rod, but I don't dislike how it looks - it's not too noticeable when painted black. The horses themselves have lovely dynamic poses. 

The Kata riders are also quite flexible, which gave a nice range of posing options with the axes. My favourite is the guy that has his axe casually slung over his shoulder (top right of the below image). 

I knew I'd need to add bows, and creating dynamic 'archery poses' was beyond my conversion skill level - but I'm happy with these arrows and quivers which I ordered from Unreleased Miniatures. The quiver sticking out over the shoulder gives them a unique silhouette so they can be identified at a glance. 

I didn't like the look of the Easterling glaives on the horsemen - a bit too visually dominant as well as very impractical looking - so I press-moulded some Khandish axe heads and fixed these to 1mm brass rod and slotted them in to holes I'd drilled in the hands.

Here's the warband. I'm happy with the range of poses I achieved. In a perfect world, I'd have attached Khandish flags to their backs, but with the bows on there this really wasn't doable. 

Painted and ready for assembly. 

Annoyingly, I realised at this point that the Kata riders don't fit neatly on to the 'chariot' horses, as their thigh gap is too narrow. There are a few small gaps between the saddle and the rider. I thought about filing these down to fit better, but didn't in the end - it's not too noticeable on the finished models. But if I'd noticed the gap before painting, I'd have fixed it.

Painted up and ready for the table. (They're still waiting for the table... Thanks, covid!)

Khandish Warriors

I don't really foresee using these much in games, but I needed dismounts! Ideally, these would have matched the horse and chariot riders better - i.e., they'd have full armour. But I couldn't think of a way of making this work such that they'd be distinguishable from Easterling Warriors at a glance. I don't think an Easterling Warrior with a weapon swap would have cut it, so I decided to just use Khandish Warriors instead.

It's perhaps a little immersion breaking when a horse or chariot rider has to dismount and suddenly loses all his armour, but the tradeoff is that the Khandish warrior models are gorgeous and the robes add a distinct visual element to the army. Rule of cool wins out.

However, I did still want to tie them in to the Easterling aesthetic, so I decided on a simple head swap - which again, resulted in another box of Easterling models to raid for parts. In for a penny, in for a pound! (Or 26 pounds, to be exact. At least I got 4 more pikemen out of it...!)

Proof of concept for the Khand warriors. Snipping and filing down the heads to fit the masks was very time consuming on metal models - as well as being heart-breaking because of how nice those faces are!

Some of the helmets were quite tricky to fit - in particular, on the models where the face is partially obscured by the model's arm. These involved a lot of careful filing, trimming the bottom of the face mask to the required size, as well as a fair bit of green stuff gap filling - but I got there eventually.

The helmet fitting neatly over the collar at the back of the head was a really cool detail, and a complete fluke, but I am very happy with how it looks. 

All assembled and ready for paint. 

And with that, my Khand forces are done... for now!

Easterlings

I also added a few converted models to my Easterling forces. These were a lot less in-depth, but I'll add them here just so everything is in one place.

Dragon Knight

I wanted to run some Amdur and Double Dragon lists, but I wasn't a fan of using 2 identical DK sculpts in the same list. I noticed that the DK's arms were positioned in a way that would make them fairly easy to line up and insert a brass rod, and decided to make the second DK carry a polearm to fit this pose.

This isn't really in keeping with the rules, as they can't take 2-handed weapons. But again, rule of cool has to come first, so I went ahead. 

This was the proof of concept. I was actually very happy with how it looked, considering how easy it was to do. 

The right arm was chopped at the shoulder and repositioned, using green stuff to fill the gaps. Then both hands were chopped at the wrists and rotated. I'd recommend drilling out the hands before reattaching them! I gently inserted my rod, trying not to break off the hands in the process. 

I'm still really happy with this pose, for so little work - it really did feel like the model designed itself. Another happy accident! The upwards-swinging momentum of the horse and rider looks really natural, and I daresay I prefer it to the sword variant. 

For the blade, I simply used an Easterling Warrior sword with the handle chopped off. Sometimes the simplest answer is the best! I fixed it using a small 'doughnut' of green stuff and it seems secure enough - no mishaps yet, anyway.

After painting, I realised I wanted a bit more drama to the model, so I added some streaming cloth that I found in my bits box. I think these are from an Eldar Shadow Spectres kit from my dark 40k days! You never know what'll come in handy. 

Another little happy accident is the way that the streamers flick up at the end, matching the billow of the DK's coat tails. 

Finished model - happy with this one. 

Khamul the Easterling

I'm not massive on the Khamul foot model - I find the pose a bit boring and goofy. I decided to use the Dol Guldur model for the dismount, which meant I needed to do a head swap on the mounted version, and a weapon swap on the dismount. 

Nothing too tricky here - the hardest part was getting a decent press mould for the helmet, which is quite an awkward shape and had to be cast in 3 parts (the head and the two horns separately). It took a few tries, and the end result isn't perfect, but it beats buying 3 Dol Guldur sets (I will eventually be using the same method to convert a Fell Beast rider.)

Press-moulded Khamul head.

The mounted Khamul's original head was snipped and filed away, and the new head green-stuffed in to place. It took a of time bit to get the position correct on the model, but I'm happy enough with it. 

Finished and painted. 

And I think that about does it! I really enjoyed converting up this army, and for the most part it was very easy. There was no demanding sculpting involved, and all I really needed was a sharp hobby knife, green stuff and a bit of patience. I hadn't really done much conversion work before, so this was a great project to introduce me to it - I've certainly caught the bug, and will be looking to include conversion work in as many of my SBG projects as possible in the future!

Bonus Conversion - Easterling Banner Bearer

When adding a second banner to my army, I really wasn't a fan of the old metal bannermen - not without their charm but really showing their age - but I didn't want to buy a second Easterling Commanders set. I had inherited a couple of older metal banner bearers from a friend, so I snipped the banner and head off, and used a banner and a helmet from the Kataphrakts kit to spruce it up a little bit. I drilled a 1mm hole down in to the fist to make sure the banner had a secure attachment point. 

Very easy to do, and really brings the model up to date in my opinion. 

Okay, that's all! See you next time, when I'll be looking at a somewhat controversial new addition to the Easterling roster!