When I was originally in this hobby, back when I was a teenager in the 90’s, I was barely a painter, much less a model converter. In fairness, all of our minis then were metal unless it was a piece of shit Khorne berserker where ten identical miniatures came off the sprue. And, even then, doing head swaps wasn’t exactly common. Or it wasn’t in my group.
Flash forward to 2019 when I got back into the hobby through Blood Bowl. First I had to get my feet wet again with just painting. And, while it wasn’t exactly falling off a bicycle, it wasn’t nearly as onerous as I remembered. Also, it helped that every team only had two of each pose (again, see above, the Khorne berserkers…) and that they were, overall, more detailed then I remembered plastic miniatures being. Again, 90’s, plastic was for people who couldn’t afford metal and that, my friends, was where the real detail lay.
So I get back into building and painting and, yeah, playing. All good!
Then Necromunda: Ash Wastes comes out.
Well, fuck me, I love the idea. I played Necromunda as a kid. Now I can do gang warfare and re-enact Mad Max? Sign me up!
And this is the part of the story where I step back into the hobby for reals.
See… there’s a saying in Necromunda and it’s that every miniature is a Necromunda miniature. I don’t think I fully grasped that at the time but now I get it. In a world where you can cut bits off of one guy and glue the onto another and make a totally unique miniature that no one else has… Well… there you go.
Anyway… it’s 2024 and I get invited to a Necromunda event here in Hamburg and I get inspired. What if I do an enforcers squad but I proxy them as nomads because they’re stuck in the wastes… or… what if I do Bad Zone enforcers and…
And then I looked online and bought a box of nomads and a box of enforcers and my first conversion project had begun.
Turns out… I was accidentally building a bit of a bits box. I had spare heads and stuff left over from various Blood Bowl teams. I had stuff left over from Warhammer Quest: Cursed City, and somehow I had a whole bunch of bits from a chaos corrupted guard unit. Not sure where they came from but there they were. Plus a bunch of other odds and ends. So… as you can see above, I started cutting and gluing and filling spaces with green stuff when I had to.
It was literally the rule of cool. Did this piece work there? Yes. Was it thematic? Yes. Was it cool? Fuck yeah! Glue.
Then I came up with, for me, the master stroke. What if they all shared one element? What if that element was a beast they’d killed in the wastes, trying to get back to Hive Primus (because naturally, they were left for dead). I had a texture plate so I cut out paper in rough shapes to cover various areas and then used those shapes as templates to cut the green stuff into. Then I laid the green stuff over the minis.
Prime it up, paint it. And these were the results:
Once I had the whole thing built, I had to paint it in, for me, a record time of six weeks. Are they the best? Eh… if I’d had more time, I probably would’ve added more detail to the paint. But am I satisfied? You bet your sweet ass I am. I have a group of Bad Zone Enforcers like no one else and I built them myself.
Which has given me the confidence to do other stuff since. Don’t like the weapon on one arm, cut it off and glue it onto another. Done and done.
And that’s great because now I’m working on a new Escher gang that… when I’m done… should be even better!
