I was recently commissioned to convert up not 1, not 2, but 3 Chaos miniatures. My client gave permission for me to share my methods of madness with my readers, so here we are. For those of you not familiar with the Typhus miniature, he comes from the Chaos Space Marine line from GW:
Typhus, Herald of Nurgle
Kind of a cool mini, and since the client is going with a Nurgle force the style is right up my alley. After some discussion, the specs are as follows:
- Convert to one-handed pose
- Go nuts
Pretty simple really. He sent some sample images from Cool Mini or Not of other Typhus conversions that he liked and they helped generate some ideas. Time to “go nuts.”
Parts is Parts
After cleaning up the parts, filing all mold lines, and washing thoroughly to remove any casting powder and pewter dust, I was left with this pile of metal. I was also shipped some Back 2 Base-ix resin bases to use on the pieces. The one for Typhus is the 40mm one. (The middle sized one.) Being white resin they’re impossible to photograph and show any detail. <_<
Not a whole lot to do with the body without some serious cutting and resculpting work, so I chose not to go that route. (As many of the other conversions I’ve seen have done as well.) If this were a one-off piece with a long time frame I might have gone for a leg reposition, but I have 3 pieces to do in 6 weeks. Not a lot of wiggle room time-wise.
The scythe has the second hand sculpted on, so that will have to be removed. Easy enough to do. I believe I’ll add something to the carapace, I just don’t know what just yet. First things first though, attach the body to the base.
Basing
Since I field questions pretty often on how to attach a mini to a resin/pre-made base, I thought I’d show a quick step-by-step of how I go about it. The first step is to drill a hole in each foot (if possible, if not, one will do) for a pin. Into the holes I insert brass rod that I use for pinning and clip it off fairly short. I use side-cutters to cut brass rod. One side of the cut is pretty flat, but the other makes a chisel point. I use this to my advantage and make sure the chisel side is pointing outwards.
These pins are NOT glued in, I use the points to mark the base where I need the pin holes to go. Once I have the feet where I want them on the base I press down firmly so the chisel points make an indentation in the base. With resin bases this works really well. Once I have my spots marked, I set the mini aside and drill holes in my base, usually all of the way through the bottom. (Since these bases are white, it’s impossible to show a pic of this so use your imagination.)
I’ll check to make sure the pins line up with the holes and then remove the short pins. They’ll get reused somewhere along the way I’m sure. Now I glue longer lengths of rod into the feet. I’m pretty good at eyeballing the length needed these days, but if you aren’t sure it’s always better to cut a pin long than short. You can always cut back, but you can’t add. 
I prefer to make sure that the glue is completely set before moving on, as the pins can get stuck in the base if the glue leaks. Many times you’ll need to make an adjustment and you don’t want to have your pins stuck where you don’t want them. In this case, my pins lined up just right.
After pressing the feet all the way down though, the texture on the base is keeping the feet raised up a bit so they appear to be “floating”. This is a common problem and one you should watch for. In this case it’s easy enough to remedy. I just pulled the mini back off and trimmed away the texture until the feet had a flat surface to contact.
Now the mini has a firm footing and I can build from there.
Don’t Fear the Reaper
On to the scythe. Easy enough to change, just cut on each side of the hand to remove the hand and rejoin the handle. It will need to be shorter anyway as it will be in a raised position and at its current length it will go well past the bottom of the base. Well… simple things are usually what bite me in the butt. Instead of using a jewelers saw, I just use a sharp X-acto knife to cut through handles like this. Unfortunately, I always forget the hold down the piece being cut away. The snap through the handle sends the bottom half flying across my workshop. I spent a good 15 minutes hunting high and low for it with no success. I went back and did the second cut, making sure to hang on to the hand so I didn’t lose it too.
Handles are easy to replicate so I went to Plan B for the handle. (I found the bit the next day of course, not more than 2 feet from my chair. Pewter parts on bare concrete floors in shadows are tough to spot.) I drilled into the upper half with a 1/16″ bit and glued a length of brass rod in, going a bit longer than I needed for safety.
Over this I slid a shorter length of aluminum tubing to add bulk. (Make sure you rough up the surface of the tubing with sandpaper or a file so that your putty with have something to stick to.) I didn’t glue this on yet as I wanted to wait until I had the arm in the final position to determine the actual length.
I drilled through the off hand and glued in a length of pewter “power cable” from Dragon Forge Design. The client mentioned that his main opponents field loyalist Space Marines, so the idea is to have Typhus holding a Space Marine head/helmet with a spine attached as if it’s just been torn from the body, a la Predator. 
With the pins in place I could start mocking up the position of the hands to get angles right and such. The scythe handle had to cut way back and I found that it looked better after I filed the angle for the join to be steeper so the scythe was raised a bit. (Not shown in these pics.)
Once I was satisfied with the progress on the arms I set the back on the body. The fit was horrible with hardly any surface contact to boot. Looks like heat distortion or something. It even hangs over the back edge. I’m not sure if that is intentional or not as the studio shots don’t show the back. Good thing Papa Nurgle is in charge here…
With the back in place I went back and fine-tuned the fit on the arms as well as added the head. As you can see from the studio model at the beginning, the head is intended to face this direction, but it’s posable any direction that you like. I wanted it to be staring directly at the fresh victim in his hand. I think it gets the point across.
Something More
Looking good so far, but I felt it needed something… more. While I mulled it over I decided to port out the stacks on his back. Then it struck me. They reminded me of the old school velocity stacks that you would see on hot rods and Indy cars in the 60′s and 70′s. I ran down an image on the web to show what I’m referring to.
Normally they would be in neat rows, but this image is from a McLaren racing engine and each stack was tuned to a specific angle. The look is perfect for this project. The added height on the back will give Typhus a bit more “presence” and make him more unique in the process. To start, I spent a good 30 minutes drilling down through 8 of the stacks into the body. Pins will do double duty by making sure the back doesn’t pop off and giving me a place to attach tubing extensions.
Using the same trick as the scythe, I cut random lengths of tubing and glued them on over the pins. Here’s a final mockup of Typhus, who is now ready to begin putty work.
