BoP: Ohthere Wyrdmake (Ahriman Conversion)

'Amlodhi came with a summons for your master, but I came for you. Your name is known to the Rune Priests of the Space Wolves, Ahzek Ahriman. You are star-cunning. Like me, you are a Son of the Storm, and I know of your affinity with the wyrd.' - Ohthere Wyrdmake, A Thousand Sons, Graham McNeill.

When I first looked at the Ahriman mini from Burning of Prospero, I wanted to make him into a Rune Priest. It's a great mini, lots of flowing lines, oodles of detail, but I have no need for a single non-wolfy sorceror. I also figured, if I botched the conversion completely (a real risk - I am not that good at conversions, and am really bad at green stuff sculpting) then I wasn't going to use the mini anyway, so what do I lose?

Much of the Thousands Sons detail was around the edges - the horns. the staff, the various little scarab ornamentation etc. So, easy to remove, or file off, or greenstuff over.

But the chest area, with the flowing robes covered in symbols was chock full of non-space wolfy detail. My initial plan was to carve this away and then rebuild the areas with green stuff, and to replace the scarab symbol in the center of his chest plate with a wolf head. After completely butchering it, I decided to completely slice away the chest plate, and replace it with the chest from another Mk3 torso - this was such a simpler solution.

After doing this, the groin plate stuck out a fair way from the groin and looked weird, so I added a fur loin cloth from a SW torso which filled the gap nicely. Then some green stuffing to close the gaps, and to cover the heretical symbols on the cloak and leg plates. Finally I greenstuffed the cloak into a fur cloak, and we were close. I ended up replacing the top of the backpack with a wolves backpack, as the stabilisers had some pointy arrow markings I didn't like. and the bit where I had filed away the thousand sons mark looked sad (due to the poor job of filing I had done). To add some height and focus to the face, I added a wolfy symbol from the SW Wolf Guard sprue.

I love the fact that my Ohthere Wyrdmake is based on the Ahriman mini - I never could understand why Ohthere denounced the Thousand Sons at the council of Nikkea for sorcery, yet insisted that he was different. He never offered any rationale for why his wyrd was OK, and Ahriman's was unclean sorcery.

For his right shoulder, I looked at the runes on the shoulder of the standard Rune Priest mini, and used the SW decal sheet to recreate them as much as I could.

For the face, I tried something different - it is the first time I have used the Vallejo Face Painting Set. I have ordered the Leman Russ miniature from FW as my xmas present, and really want to do the best job I can on the face, so I neded some practice. On such a small area I'm not sure that the end result is significantly different to my usual faces, but I think it worked - I like the additional shadows and shading it gives that I usually leave to the Ogryn Flesh wash.

I'm having alot of fun painting the Burning of Prospero set and am cracking through them. I've finished 9 mk3 marines and will post pics of those next week so that makes 20 figures from the set done (5 Sisters, 5 Custodes, 9 Mk3 Marines and 1 Rune Priest). Still, there are about 21 mk3 marines, 5 terminators, and Greigor not-bjorn fellhanded to go...