A Pirate's Life for me!

Avast me matey's. Over the last few days I've been working on a conversion for Games Workshop Wellington's upcoming Pirate conversion competition.  This has been by far and away the most complex conversion I've attempted in many years.  There is more greenstuff on the model, the paint scheme is realatively complex and the posing is difficult,  but the end result (I hope) will be a very cool little model and thus, worth the effort.  Coinciding with the conversion competition is a costume competition, for which I already have something in mind, so in a fit of ill advised enthusiasm I decided to make a conversion of myself as a Pirate Captin


I wanted to have a modeled base for this project so I decided to start there.  I got a cople of broken pieces of sprue and hacked them up to look like broken timber which I arranged in a frame pattern the likes of which you would expect to find if you were to rip up your floor boards.







  On top of these I stuck a base I'd cut them rims off.  I roughed up the edges to give the impression of the board edges.  I then put a thin layer of Greenstuff down on top of that and sculpted in the wood grain and board edges.  I also did some nail holes to really push the idea of there being boards nailed to the frame.
 






I started with pieces from the Empire Militia boxed set.  There are simply heaps of Piratey bits in this box, more than enough for an entire crew, let alone a single model.  I used the long coat torso and cut out his chest so I could give him a doublet like mine.
I also clipped the coat a bit shorter.






I ballooned out his pants to give the impression of Trunk hose.  I built up the top of his head and made a thin ribbon to do the brim.  Sticking this on was a royal pain, but there was no special trick, just a lot of perseverance and quiet swearing. I put a ridge around his ankles to give the impression of shoes rather than the hose he was wearing.







I wanted to get some more nautical terrain on the base so I decided to go with a mast.  To make this I got a couple of flying base stalks and pinned them together.  To hide the join I wrapped some greenstuff around it and put some lines in it to make it look more like rope.  I wanted him to be grasping the mast as if to steady himself, so I searched through the bits box for an appropriate hand and came up empty.  So I had to take to it with the greenstuff once more.  I've never sculpted a hand before, and I think I did ok, considering the prevalence of mutation in the Old World :P

The painting turned out to be considerably easier than the conversion.  I decided to stick with block colour for the moment leaving the complicated stuff for the doublet and stuff.  I'll post images of that when he's 100% finished.

Cheers folks.

Ben