A short update on my Undead horsemen today. At the end of this project I am hoping to have six completed riders. The simplest four of these will be largely based on the Citadel plastic skeleton horsemen (as found in the PBS5 Skeleton Army boxed set from the late eighties/early nineties), but it's the other two that have been keeping me busy this week.
The last two were based on models released in 1987 as part of the C21 Undead Cavalry range. The riders were Serratus the Reaper and Corpus the Fallen, mounted on horses that looked like the two from the 1986 release, shown here.
The problem was that these old metal models were tiny by comparison to any of the more modern cavalry models, and would have looked ridiculous next to their larger counterparts. Rather than simply throw these minuscule miniatures away, I decided I would try to scale them up. This involved cutting the horses in two in order to elongate their bodies, before swapping or extending each of their legs, then making any necessary adjustments to the riders, and trying to blend the whole thing together. Perhaps not quite as simple as it sounds.
I brought in an old plastic Chaos horse for parts, and you can see my results in the picture below (plus the all-plastic test model in the middle). Admittedly, at this stage, the results look a bit pony (geddit?), but I have high hopes for them once there's a little paint unifying all the conversion work.
Or at least – in keeping with the whole point of the exercise – I have average height hopes.
Hobby time is always quite difficult to find, but for the last few months that's become increasingly extreme. As a result I only have a few photos to share today, all of which are from my ongoing Undead project.
The first shows what little progress I've made on the two war mammoths I showed back here. They are undercoated, with little moments of completed detail (mainly on the tusks), but still generally have a long way to go.
The second and third photos are from the next squad in this process, and the penultimate one in the overall project. It's going to be a small unit of cavalry, but it's proving to be a great deal of work. Unfortunately for me, the few models I had in my collection were in two pretty incompatible scales. The smaller metal miniatures from the early to mid eighties looked tiny next to Games Workshop's first plastics from a few years later. Therefore just to get them to the stage below, where most of the horses are roughly the same size, has taken me hours of trimming, pinning, gluing and filling, not to mention cannibalising an old plastic armoured horse for its larger features.
I also discovered I didn't have enough tiny plastic skulls to complete the squad, so I had to find a few from other places. This has mainly been from the backs of chaos cloaks, or from totems on banners and the like. The one shown in the picture below was from the base of a plastic Ork.
But all this stuff still needs a lot of work, so this is really just a glimpse of the models midway through their development. Hopefully I'll have some time to finish them after Christmas. Until then, have a fantastic holiday.
