Flogging a dead horse

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.