The Making of: Doors of Durin

In what has been a pretty mammoth project over the past couple of months, I decided to take on the challenge of making something that I'd wanted on my shelf for a long time. A scene that had stuck in my head since first seeing Fellowship of the Ring nearly twenty years ago - the Doors of Durin. For this Making Of I'll be going through the ups and downs of making this diorama, the techniques implemented and materials used (I'll be providing a full list at the end of the article) so buckle up, this is a big one.

Using a cutting of 3/4 inch thick MDF as the base, I set about using blocks of plant foam cut into various rough shapes to start building up the rough design of the piece. My main aim with the piece was to incorporate various aspects of the scene: Frodo and Gandalf in front of the doors, Sam saying goodbye to Bill, and the Hobbits throwing rocks into the water thus disturbing the Watcher in the Water. So for one, it needed to have enough space on both the bank and the water for all of these parts of the scene. All of these sections were hot glued together in the form of the steep cliff walls and the sloping bank into the water. This of course is a rough idea so far and going forward after checking the scale, I added some more height to the cliff walls and smoothed out the various right angles.

A quick test with miniatures helped to check if I had the scaling right before heading forward and also gave a good idea of the scene composition. One thing was certain however - The Watcher needed be set lower into bed and the tentacles bent downward as I wanted them to only just be breaking the surface of the water. During this moment of composition, I also started thinking about the three members of the Fellowship I hadn't primarily considered: Legolas, Gimli and Boromir, so I went back to the scene to do a little digging and figure out what they would be doing. The two former would be the tricky ones, and require the most converting, as they were happily just sat on tree trunks in their cloaks - but more on that later.

Next up was to create a more realistic rock face. For those who read my Making of: Rohan Valley you'll recognise the Woodland Scenic plaster rock moulds I used for for that on display here as well. The great part is, even if it's similar rock faces, the arrangement of all the different moulds, and even breaking them up into smaller sections and flipping them upside-down can leave you with a a varied surface. One thing that plant foam is great for is how easy it is to chip and sculpt so the space in between the moulds is rather simply filled with detail using sculpting tools to carve small sections. 

Now this looks odd for the time being, but next up we'll be giving it a coat of masonry paint on the base and external sides to seal the foam (it is rather thirsty stuff, so we don't want any paint to disappear into it - the masonry paint is thick enough to give a good seal). Once this is dried, the external sides will get a layer of polyfiller to cover up any gaps between the foam and the whole thing will get a base coat of grey spray paint and work can then begin on making the rock faces looking more realistic.

First up however, is working on the Door itself to slot in. My first idea was to try and make the design on balsa, but given the grain of the wood and how soft it is this didn't end up being very feasible. Another option was to sculpt it out with milliput, but this gave the problem of a lack of transparency in order to let my intended light set-up to shine through the door. In the end, I settled with a 3D lithoplane print of the door itself - designed originally for clear resin, but given the scale I would be printing would be thin enough to let a decent amount of light through when using grey resin. With one side blacked out, you can see how well the light came through when tested! All that was left was to sort out the lighting. I had originally intended to do my own wiring and setup using a a kit from GreenStuff World - turns out my wiring skills aren't great and I ended up going with a cheap set of battery powered LEDs from Amazon. These would be stuck behind the door in the slot seen above, with the switch and battery pack kept in a small hole I'd carved into the back for easy access. 

With that all good, it was time to make the rocks more realistic. As with the Rohan diorama I went with the following process:-

1. Base coat with a 1:1 mix of Eshin Grey and water
2. Dry brush liberally using Dawnstone (dry)
3. Lighter drybrush using Longbeard Grey, particularly on upward facing angles.
4. Wash using a 1:1 mix of Nuln Oil and Lahmian Medium
5. Dry brush Eshin Grey
6. Repeat steps 3 and 4. 

In previous experience doing this double layer of dry brushing, one before wash and one after, has lead to a more subtle and natural change in tone, especially when doing each rock face by standard wet layering would take an astronomical amount of time by comparison. This process can be repeated more  or less depending on what tone of rock face you're going for with whichever colours your choose as well.

As you can see in the image above the plaster moulds, foam and door have all been blended together to create as natural as a rock face you can have with a magical door slotted in in. What you'll also notice is that the base has now got more of a texture than just the foam and masonry paint. This was accomplished by using AK Interactive's Neutral Texture for Rough Terrain with a mix of Eshin Gray liberally applied to the entire top section of the base to later be covered by loose shale, slowly graduating into a mix of the AK Texture and Dryad Bark to represent the silt at the bottom of the lake.  Both sections were given a 1:1 mixed wash of Nuln Oil and Lahmian Medium and then dry brushed with Dawnstone and Sylvaneth Bark respectively. Whilst these sections won't be largely on display in the final piece, it's still good idea to have a decent base which matches your further plans so that nothing sticks out like a sore thumb later on.

With all the surfaces done it was now time to start populating the board and bringing it to life a little - the trees flanking the door and the Watcher shaped hole in the lake! The trees were another piece of resin printing, but the roots weren't quite as long as I needed. This was remedied by gluing lengths of wire and then covering with a layer of green stuff - in order to stick to the wire better fellow DC writer Dan gave me the trick to score the wire in order to help the green stuff stick easier. Once this was set, I added a thinner layer on top so as to better sculpt the texture of the roots without the whole thing shifting off the wire. As for painting them, they needed to look relatively dead and withered so I went with a base coat of Baneblade Brown treated with a wash of Agrax Earthshade. Once dry, a light coat of Dryad Bark was added on the more raised sections to allow small sections of the lighter brown to come through as small sections of exposed bark. This was topped off with a drybrush of Terminatus Stone to give the top layer of bark a more aged looked.

Now to add a little more texture - for the loose shale (in the movies it looks similar to small chunks of slate which populate the shoreline) I ended up using Element Games Basing Gravel scattered over a coat of Mod Podge, allowed to dry and then shaking the excess off. One issue of this however was that it had a slightly different aesthetic to the rest of the board - the  painted look. In order to bring the whole setting more in line I gave the gravel two coats of Testors Dullcote which darkened it up slightly, but also gave me a more solid surface to apply a light drybrush of Longbeard Grey to get things looking more consistent.

As you can see above, I had to go back and cut a big section of the lake bed out - turns out the Watcher miniature rises up a good amount. Despite me trimming a hefty amount of resin from the tail end, it still was rising up higher than the shoreline. I needed to get drastic so I started drilling sections from the MDF to help it sit lower, along with modifying the leg positions. Once at the right height, I used warm water on the tentacles (given the were made from GW resin) and bent them into the correct positions - I didn't want them all splashing out of the water!  Once set, the remaining space was filled with the AK Rough Terrain texture mixed with Dryad Bark. Next up would be the toughest part and the stage I was dreading most: the resin pour.

For the lake I went with a two part acrylic based epoxy resin - I'd used this on a previous build for a small stream and it came out very well for a my first attempt using the stuff so decided to run with it again only this time I needed to work on getting the Watcher more obscured. Before pouring however, I had to essentially turn my board into a fish tank to hold the resin. To do this I used a hot glue gun to attach sheets of acetate which had been trimmed down to size. These were then supported by a balsa wood framework made in order to try and keep the shape better. It's key here to make sure that there are no gaps for resin to escape when pouring, but don't panic if some does escape - just have your hot glue gun on standby to plug up any holes that you see. 

When mixing the resin in equal parts, and stirring very slowly as to reduce bubbles, I added in very small amounts of Kantor Blue and Dryad Bark to give the impression of deep dark murky water and by small I'm talking a ratio of 1 part paint to 100 parts resin. A key thing to remember is that even if your mix doesn't look dark, you need to take into account the colour of the base it's being applied to, and that any pigment will build up obscurity the deeper it gets. One other important thing to keep in mind is the working time of your resin, each brand can alter slightly but most you can stir for a good 5-10 minutes before pouring and still have time to work with.

Now the pour itself for me didn't going very successfully - remember my key point of 'don't panic if you see a small leak'? I forgot that point, proceeded to tip the board slightly to access the leak and covered an entire bank in resin. I won't lie - I was about to chuck the whole thing in the bin. After a few minutes feeling sorry for myself, I realised it was salvageable and continued with the pour to bring it up to level. One thing to make sure of is that the resin is reaching into all the nooks and crannies of the board and can easily be teased into these gaps using a pin. At this stage what you need to keep an eye out for is bubbles. You will no doubt have some at the surface, and the larger ones you can poke with a needle to burst and re-level, but there will also be a large amount of smaller ones just beneath the surface. Rather than acupuncturing your nice new water surface, simply breath on the surface as if you were trying to fog up a window and this will cause these smaller bubbles to disappear. Giving it time to cure, I covered the whole diorama to make sure no dust could settle and stick to the resin. after a few days (again this depends on the brand of resin you use) I removed the containing sides to see how it looked.

In the process, I did rip off some of the polyfiller so this would need to be filled back in. The sides would need to be sanded down again to remove the excess resin and was only a small extra step. When it came to sanding down, I first used a rough grit piece of sandpaper (make sure to wear a mask and do this in a well ventilated area!), gradually getting thinner the closer I got to the desired depth. This looks very rough and as though the hard work with the resin was all for nought but once cleaned off any residue, go over the sides with gloss Mod Podge and the detail comes back through. The gloss Mod Podge was also then used to create details on the waters surface to add a little bit of movement in the form of ripples, and also to create water dripping from the Watchers tentacles. Some of these details might not come through too clearly at first, but a very light drybrushing of Longbeard Grey brings out the little ridges your brush made with the Mod Podge earlier.

With the vast bulk of the work now done, all that was left was to work on the Fellowship, which took some time in itself as they were all sourced from various kits for the correct poses. The only ones I would be dramatically converting were Boromir and Gimli to be sitting on the tree roots. The others required either weapons being removed or small modifications. I ended up using:

Aragorn - Strider (Old metal Fellowship kit)
Legolas Greenleaf (Old metal Fellowship kit)

Gimli (Current GW plastic Fellowship kit)

Gandalf  the Grey (Gandalf on cart kit)
Boromir (Ambush at Amon Hen kit)

Frodo Baggins (Current GW plastic Fellowship kit)

Samwise Gamgee (Old metal Fellowship kit)
Meriadoc Brandybuck (Old metal Fellowship kit)
Peregrin Took (Current GW plastic Fellowship kit)
Bill the Pony (Personalities of Bree kit)

If anyone is interested in the conversions, I'll go into those in a future article. With them all converted and painted, it was time to assemble!

And there you have it, a long two months but well worth the build. If anyone has any questions about the build, please drop us a comment and we'll answer all we can!

Material List:

Citadel Paints - Eshin Grey, Dawnstone, Longbeard Grey, Nuln Oil, Lahmian Medium, Sylvaneth Bark, Terminatus Stone, Baneblade Brown, Agrax Earthshade, Dryad Bark, Kantor Blue
Floral Foam 

Multi-purpose filler (Most hardware stores)

Epoxy Resin 
Rock Moulds 
Mould Plaster 
Basing Gravel 

Mod Podge (Gloss and Matte) 
3D Files
Door of Durin 
Trees 

500 Under 50: Ents! (April Fool's article)

It's been a while since I wrote one of these, and with the fantaSTICK new Treebeard model having just been released I figured why not release a new 500 under 50 dedicated to Fangorn Forest?

Of course, the new Treebeard model will set you back £45 from Games Workshop directly, so as we normally do, we're going to suggest a much cheaper way to start the army.

We're going to tell you how you can get yourself a 500 point Fangorn list, with 3 Ents, Merry and Pippin for under £50! I kid you not.

First off we have the list:

Treebeard with Merry and Pippin
Quickbeam
Beachbone

A pretty simple list for sure, but one that will certainly pack a punch. 3 big trees all with Might points, you'll certainly be no slouch in combat!

Okay, so how are we going to put this list together? How are we going to get all of our three of our Ents for under £50? Normally, we'd tell you to go to your local game store, support your club and buy them from them with the usual 10-15% discount you normally find in those store, but today we're going to suggest you venture somewhere that may be unfamiliar to us gaming folk. The great outdoors!

Simply take a short walk to your local park and look for any twigs and sticks that have fallen from trees, careful not to break any off the trees that are still alive, else feel the wrath of the mighty Ents yourself.

Once you've collected up enough sticks, about 5 per Ent, make sure to grab a handful or two of grass and leaves too, they'll come in very handy later! Make sure you make a small offering to nature too, and simply throw some crisp five pound notes to the wind, letting nature take them as a thank you for providing you with such a bounty of building materials.

When you get back home, make sure not to dry the sticks out in the oven or anything like that, a lot of websites and guides will tell you to do this to avoid letting the sticks get mouldy and rotten over time, but if anything, this will add to the sheer realism of your army and details will effortlessly add themselves to your model over time, at no extra effort to you! 

Of course, you're going to need a few essentials, some glue and some blue tac will go a long way to aide in the construction of these mighty tree herders. You're also going to need a base, Ents come on 60mm round bases, and these aren't to expensive online, but if you really wanted to set these models in stone as being a legal Games Workshop model, you'll need a Games Workshop box, like the afore mentioned Treebeard. Simply cut up the box of the new Treebeard model into 3 bases and throw the weird plastic frames away that come inside it... You wont be needing those anymore!

When you have your bases it's time to start constructing the Ents.

For all of them we're going to stick to of the shorter sticks onto a small ball of blue tack to form their legs. Add a long stick to the top of the blue tac to for the torso, then simply stick the other sticks to either side of their torso to form thearms. Depending on how many sticks you collected, you may want to add joints into some arms to give them more realistic posing. This is entirely optional however.

This is the basic construction of all 3 Ents, there are just some details we need to do to really sell them as being each of the characters.

Treebeard, known for his impressive facial hair is easy. We're going to add a big dollop of PVA to his face, then stick a big handful of the grass to it. This gives Treebeard his mighty beard! Our list included Merry and Pippin to, you'll need to source these models yourself, eBay is full of them. You don't need any special models or anything, just a ball of blue tac under their bases and stick them to his shoulders. Easy!

Quickbeam, the fastest of all Ents will require a bit more modelling prowess. You'll need to make a pair of trainers from blue tac and stick these to the base of his legs... You can't run fast without running shoes! A classic Nike style tick will really sell these as “run faster shoes”, so your opponents will be able to recognise him instantly!

Beachbone needs to live up to his name however so slap on some of that good PVA and give him the trip to the beach that he's always wanted. (Are we sure we've got his name right here? Just want to double check so we're not called out on this - Slob)

Once your models have dried and are all glued together, stick them to their bases, plenty of glue should help here, but if you're having trouble a small ball of blue tac or green stuff will help.

When you have the models stuck to their bases, use the rest of the grass you collected to cover each base for a really natural realistic forest look. Feel free to raid your spice rack too, dried herbs and spices make for excellent basing materials! We've used a little Paprika (smoked, of couse!) to give the impression of flowers on Treebeards base... As well as a delicious smell!

Don't forget to paint the rims of your bases too, we've opted for black for that classy, Golden Demon winners look.

And with that your models are done..... Wait a minute... they look pretty dead and lifeless, not a problem at all! We're going to add some googly eyes! Why spend ages trying to perfect painting eyes? Simply glue two eyes to each model. Perfection!

And with that, your 500 points of Fangorn is complete! Be sure to let them models age to really get that natural look to them before you get them on the table!

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!