This is excellent, thanks for the tutorial.
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Lovely conversions, green work, and color schemes going here! The mourn-fang conversion has given me an idea, so I may have to borrow some of that concept. Keep up the great work!
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This is a really great tip. Sometimes I’ll do straps with a weirdly poor feathering technique and leave some of it purposely rough. at the edges and drag lighter “scratches” across the leather. Like edge highlighting but messier on purpose. Not sure if that makes sense, but it’s basically tactical laziness.
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Got to love a bit of tactical laziness 
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100% for sure. Without it I’d have maybe 20 painted models…
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Speaking of tactical laziness I am currently taking a break from tidy painting and working on some Turnip28 stuff.
Either the Chaosified Irondrakes or some Hobgrot Slittaz are next on the workbench, depending on whether I feel like building or painting next.
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No pictures today but I clipped my hobgrots from the sprues today and they are a deeply terrible sprue.
I HATE the new direction GW is going in where you need specific pieces and the instructions to be able to assemble anything. Looking for the little numbers on the sprues is going to ruin my eyes even faster.
That is all.
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Yeah @EvilFuzzyDoom its a modern disease for sure. And hobgrots are far from the worst offenders. Casual converting is becoming a thing of the past with gw kits . You either build as intended or you gotta get that hobby knife out.
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At least they give you lots of spare parts. Can make 2 more easily and then all the heads
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The only recent GW models I have put together were given me, and as you state they were terrible, and conversion would require significant greenstuff work due to the unusual way the parts fit. I get that it allows for injection molding with some really dynamic posing and detail, but the convertablity is very poor.
I miss the days where you could order any separate bits that GW made and cobble together whatever you could think of.
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True @Zoddtheimmortal like I say these are far from the worst offenders
A couple of ways to make each guy and nobody is leaping off of a rock
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I noticed that too, and I don’t like it either. It actually reminds me of modern LEGO sets. When I was a child, even specified sets like the spaceship or medieval castle pieces were generic enough to be used for almost any building or vehicle. All the user needed was imagination. Around the late 2000s, LEGO sets had all these super specific, weirdly shaped pieces which could only be used to make one thing. They lost the generic blocky look, but they removed the ability for children to create.
I hope that you’re able to put those sneaky gits together without too much trouble. They do look pretty nice once they’re assembled.
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Nice conversions there! Lovely going with the army so far.
The trade-off between pre-posed models and multipart kits allowing maximum creative freedom when building goes back a long way, longer than most here have been into the hobby. More in detail here, but the short version is that preposed models as seen with classic metal miniatures allow the sculptors greater creative freedom, whilst multipart plastics with dodgy naturalistic posing but great varieties on hand to build them however you like (as exemplified by early 2000s plastics in particular) allow the hobbyist greater creative freedom.
The move back to preposed miniatures in plastic is all about recapturing some of the quality and better poses lost when previously transitioning from metal to multipart plastic. This swing of the pendulum comes at the expense of Lego-like customizability, and a loss of fun when building kits.
Both opposing ends of the spectrum have strong virtues going for them. It remains to be seen if a perfect balance between freewheeling convertibility and quality posing can ever be reached for future plastic kits.
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Yeah, I understand the logic behind it and I’m not going to say I miss the days of 2nd edition when the options were teacup hand plastic space marines or mono pose metals.
I just wish I could clip everything off the sprue in one go without worrying about losing track of which parts went with which!
Also thank you for the praise 
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After what feels like months of having them on or near my painting station, I put brush to model on the Chaos Irondrakes today.
I started working on the first five including the command group, but about halfway through I decided that I wanted to just finish one model today so I instead focussed on the unit champion.
Here it is:
I’m quite happy with the overall look, but as usual I feel like the process to get here was a bit more involved than I’d like. I’ll refine the process over the rest of the unit and see if I can speed it up a little.
The big thing I’m happy with is using Fulgurite Copper as the midtone on the brass, rather than having to blend Balthasar Gold and Mithril Silver like I was doing on the Warriors.
I’m not totally sure about the orange runes but I was finding that the model looked very plain without them. I might paint up the whole rest of the unit without the orange, and then decide at that point whether to give them to the whole unit or just keep them on the champion.
To finish up for today, here’s a comparison shot of the two unit champions so far:
I think the colour scheme is enough to make them look like they’re part of the same force, despite the different generations of their base models.
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Yeah they absolutely mesh beautifully! Would you consider doing a tutorial for the zine?
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Absolutely love these, what a fantastic scheme!!
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I’m working on it!
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These are absolutely fantastic, love it.
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Hero!
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