Khorne Bloodthirster...the Rogue Trader way

Blood thirsters get a lot of attention these days and though the release of mine coincides with those of the latest edition by GW, there is absolutely no link between the 2...

Some time ago, I was having a friendly chat with Diego Serrate on the Oldhammer facebook page and he proposed me to trade some Bloodthister body from the realm of chaos era. The body was missing a left arm and right hand...

Kiss my shiny reddish ass...

After discussing with Diego the potential donors for new arms and hands, Diego kindly proposed me to sculpt a new arm to my liking !
You read that right, a professional sculptor, (and talented with that) offering to sculpt me a custom arm for a model of mine !

After some thoughts, I realised that the Bloodthirtser would most likely be going into my chaos renegades army for 40k, this meant I could try and tie this model a little more with something futuristic...

Good thing is, some talented folk had already thought about how to tie Khorne and technology before :

More about him in the associated post

Who better than Jes Goodwin as a mentor ! The mutated arm seemed like the best of plans to replace the left arm but I had to find something for the right one...
A quick look in the bits box got me to find just what I needed...

That's right, a big-ass axe and some chainswords to make a giant chain axe. The ork hand is slightly smaller than the original minotaur hand handling the axe as oversized hands can quickly lead someone into caricatural domains and I wanted to stay in Rogue trader and not in World of Warcraft.

Some precut on the axe to determine the right angle and here I was :

That's my first incarnation. The axe is huge and powerful and after many thoughts I've settled for a head :

On this picture you can notice the left arm and skull on the torso sculpted by Diego, those are awesome. Only thing was I was not entirely happy with the model as a whole so I asked around what people thought of it...

The head had been a hard decision as I had tried to use the head that came with the model at first :

This is the "alien" head that's available for the model but the sculpt is a little rough on this one and the casting made it even worse... I tried adding a couple of details to make it look like Balor by Simon Bisley but I lost all hope at some point :

Balor by Simon Bisley in Slaine

Too bad because Tony Hough had used this very head as an example for his Rogue trader Bloodthirster  :

But that was not OK so I opted for the converted head of a 2nd ed Hive tyrant to make it look like some big Bloodletter. The head sculpt though is nowhere near as good as the one on Tony's drawing.

The other concern was the size of the axe. Most people agreed on the axe being a little too big to fit the intended aesthetic. So I cut into the plastic and came up with a second version :

Weapon size reduction they said... I feel so empty...

That was much more pleasant... Time to paint then.
I knew the armour would mostly be black to fit in with my chaos renegades but I had to find a good colour for the skin. As the head was that of a bloodletter, that red fits so well with black and mainly because I'm a lazy bastard, I chose... guess what... RED.

Note the Khorne rune painted in fresh blood on the stone behind, probably the rune used for the summoning ritual...

I went for a very rich red for the skintone to emphasise the rage and inner fire meant to be in this big boy. The axe was built with a darker red with less highlights (since it was to be heavily weathered). One strange thing is that I used some reddish glazes on the top of the wing membrane and some bluish ones at the bottom to really give the impression he's massive (and break the monotony of a single colour over a large area) but the picture somehow manages to negate that completely... Same is for the skin which is treated in a pure zenithal approach to make the model a little more dramatic (and to learn a bit in the process).

One annoying part with mutipart models is that you may have to assemble them after painting most of it in order to be able to treat all the areas properly. That was the case here and I had to make new seals between the wings and body after painting most of them :

But I suppose the result is worth it :

You may have noticed I tried my hand at some OSL on the chain axe... Well I'm not really happy with it, I tried that some time ago with the other renegades and the result then was a lot better, I must have forgot how to do it right, I just don't really know how to fix it...

All in all I'm pretty satisfied with the result anyway and it was a real pleasure to paint this especially when knowing it was the combined effort with a really friendly and talented chap !

Now, my Bloodthister (I really should roll him a name...) will see how beautiful the world is and probably he will encounter some truly excellent friends like I do :

"- Hey YOU there, I saw you ! you were about to crush that guy's skull, don't you try to deny it !
- Me ? Nah never, I'd rather rip him in bits and drink his blood before, just like THAT !
- AAAAARAGHH"

"- Alright good buddy, did I ever tell you that story with the Space marines on this shitty planet full of apes ?
- Erm, like a thousand time yeah, why?
- Oh nevermind... let's find some killin'
- That's more like it.
- Last to 100 tells it to Khorne !"

While we were at it, I thought I could get all my (painted so far) renegades to have some group shot...

Now 2 things : 

1) I need a bigger photo set up...

2) Banners are still a big issue and I'm totally changing them when I have the right design.

Hope you like it people, next will be... well as often I dont truly know what will be next, probably some of the stuff that's half painted on my desk right now but who knows ?