Oh, by the way, because of the way the photo was take the sword looks bigger than it actualy is.
Conversions
Conversions aren't really difficult, only most people have trouble starting one. Therefor a complete discription on how to convert an orc warior.
It's a page without picture's but I hope to put some up soon, when that happenes, the conversion desribed will be changed to the one that goes with the pictures.
Deciding what you want to convert.
Beginning the actual conversion
crafts knife: For cutting pieces of the model
Jig saw: For cutting various parts of the model.
Milliput (or other epoxy-putty): this is a putty that consits of two seperate strips of material. These strips are the putty, and a hardener to make the putty attach itself to the surface of the model. It can be bought in a Games Workshop store or in some hardware stores, where it is sold to repare central-heating, kitchen sinks, and lots of other stuff. (Yes this is actually the same stuff).
Drill: To pin things into place.
Some flock or static grass(from model railroad stores) and perhaps some left over pieces of other miniatures to enhance the base.
What do really need for your army/ warband/ display/ battle scene. This is the first most important step. For this page I'll use the conversion of my warband leader. It's an Orc warband for Mordheim. So I need an extra big orc as a warband leader. Well, where do you get it, the only cool orcs Games Workshop has for sale in the Mordheim style, are the plastic regiment boxes. Those can of course be used for my 'normal' units, but I want something ehhmm. bigger for my leader. Well, I've looked through the Games Workshop cataloge, and the only thing that fits the bill are the Space ork nobs from Warhammer 40k. Well that's the base.
Problem: The 40k orc I bought (the biggest 1 there was) holds a poweraxe (?) and a big gun. So I need to replace them. What to replace them with? I haven't got a lot of money, so I can't buy a big creature just to have it's sword. so I'll have to be creative. I made my own sword, and because it was the first sword I ever made, I made it large, very large. Which suited, because the orc also was very large. But when trying to make something like in this case a sword, try to start with something large with little detail. then I needed a shield rougly the size of a Goblin. Again they could not be found. So I'll make that too.
Now that I've sort or less decided what I want, I'm gonna begin with the body. This is actually quite good for a mordheim orc, only problem was, he had some bullits in a chain around his neck. So I cut them off, and flattened down the remainders.
Then I got to his arms (head would remain unchanged). He had a big gun in his right arm, so I sawed it of. Problem: when you take of the gun, you can't get too close to his hand, so you'll be left with half a gun still stuck to his hand. So just take a crafts knife and cut it of, be sure to do this by cutting of lots of small pieces, instead of one big piece, this has two reasons, one in smal pieces, its faster, and when cutting of a big piece, you have to force the knife, probably causing you to accidentally damage your hand, or worse, your mini. When you've cut of as much as you can, scrape of some more. By "scrape" I mean put your knife in a 90º angle on the surface of the model, and scrape it to remove little pieces at a time. WARNING: this makes your knife blunt. Once you've done this, get some fine sandpaper and get of some more. By now the hand should look like its just a fist. If it doesn't look right, make a fist yourself, and model it like yours, I know that sound obvious, but it does help looking at things in real-life.
The left arm was holding an axe. the bottom of the axe looked good enough to be part of a sword, so I only cut of the Axe itself, and left the handle. This is another good rule, if something looks good, don't change it, unless you really want to.
Making the sword was easier than I thought. To begin with I took a plastic orc arm. It had a sword, but it looked very old and broken (like all swords on the new orcs). so I trimed it down until I had an orc arm holding a 0,5 cm / 1cm square. this would be the base for my new sword, the plastic orc arm would make it easier to hold, that's the only reason I used it. I drilled a hole into it at the top end, and glued in a length of tube with about 2 cm sticking out. Over this I modelled the basic form of the sword with some Milliput. Then I started filing away the pieces that didn't look like a sword. But as I was doing this my sword still looked like crap, I got all upset, and threw it aside. A few weeks later I pikked it up again, and started to file. It then really became a sword-like thing. All Idid so far, was make the basic form of the blade, nothing else. Then I inserted two pins in the form and place I wanted the hand-protection pieces(sorry don't know the correct word). I made these the same way as the blade. Then you have a basic sword. You can now make some gems or other decoration on it, but because mine was for an orc, I left it at this.
The shield was simple, I made it out of some pieces of wood. I just glued them together until they were about the right size. The shield then looked kinda dull, so I cut some pieces of cardboard to make a metal edge on the shield. I then glued on some heads of old clothing pins to look like rivets
The shield was now ready, but when I attached it to the arm (it's turned away from the body, so it won't get in the way during painting) I noticed it was pretty awkward having this orc holding a shield by grabbing a piece of air. So I modeled a handle for it. I did this by putting a rectangular piece of putty on the hand and bending it on the edges. I had also not cut of the axe handle below the hand, so this was now re-used as the ending of the handle of the shield.
Making a base is explained in the beginners painting section of my website. Some advanced bases can be made by creating some build-up on the base, like a rock or piece of wall, by using some modelling putty.
And now you can glue your miniature together. Don't glue on the shield or other parts that would make it difficult to paint, until you've painted everything. And any openings in the mini can be easily filled up with Milliput.
The result:
Oh, by the way, because of the way the photo was take the sword looks bigger than it actualy is.
Well that's it. So you see its not that difficult as you might think.
