- part 1: the relief -
building a adequate vehicle for a wolflord
introduction:
up from the moment when the new plastic landraider came out quite many years ago, i always wanted to build the tank, this article will be all about: a very unique and special landraider-conversion for one of my space wolves’ greatest heroes. i wanted to create something that would really give the impression of being a very old and personalized verhicle with a crew that had served this verhicles owner in hundrets of battles.
so i decided to realize 2 major conversions:
- the first one would be to add some crew-members, by redesigning the turrets on top and crewing them with gunners.
- the second one was something that -as far as i know-, up to this moment, no one had done before. i wanted to add some personal history on the lanraiders sidearmor by adding some kind of relief there, showing the lord as a bloodclaw on the left and as a grey hunter on the right side.
additional to those two major issues i wanted to redesign the metal hurricanes as well, because of their poor casting-quality. so i replaced them by plastic stormbolters from the vehicle sprue. further i decided to add a dozerblade, which is also something that you’ll find on just a few landraiders out there. the reason is, that most players don’t want to loose their front ramp, just because of a dozerblade. i didn’t want to either! …- so i decided to develop a design allowing me to use the ramp, still. (but those conversion i’ll describe more detailes in one of the upcoming articles.)
than, with everything planed properly, i finaly started the build in august 2005:
i started with the relief. the first thing, that i had to decide was which miniatures to choose for embedding ?! one thing was clear to me: the more flat the posing of the mini was, the more realistc the relief could become. so i decided to choose a mini from a old command squad for the bloodclaw-theme and a space wolf mini for the greyhunter-theme. as i arranged both where i planed to install them, i saw , that there was still enough free space for something additional. to fill the space and to make it even more spacewolf-like, i simply added a single plastic wolf on both sides. here’s the first concept:
on the pics above you can also see, that in this stage the wholes needed were already cut out of the side-armor. so from now on, there was no way back. … so i glued the minis and the wolves in place by hardening the cloth with extra thin super glue. after a few moments i could continue to fill the szenery by adding stones on the ground, and also smaller stones framing the szene to give the relief a naturally looking border. than i filles thd wholes and background with the green sand, that you can see in the next pic. also this i glued and herdened using super glue.
so as you can see, this is a pretty easy, quick and efficient way to give your tanks a very impressive and unique look. or better said: now, of course it’s not unique any more …. …. and as i released the first pics almost 4 years ago in several comunities, i really felt honored as the feedback was enermous. even more i felt proud as the first people started to copy this techique or developed their own by just using mine as foundation. some of them send me their pics and really did a great job. i was also impressed by the effect on many other players, which before never really thought about, or in same cases would not even ever have dared to do a greater sort of conversion to one of their landraiders, now startet planing projects even crazier as mine. i think that about 4 years ago, when there was a time you suddenly found a relatively huge amount of heavily converted landraiders in some comunities, my own conversions and espacialy this one were somehow one of the factors that activated this movement. …
and this brings us to the end of this article. …. in further articles about this tank, you’ll find details about the gunners, mentioned above, the dozerblade and of course also the rest of the creation. so i’ll finish this article with 2 pics of the almost finished reliefs. ….
thanks for reading …. – comments welcome … BobPanda.
you ARE the best man
Amazing! Absolutely stunning! I am so glad I decided to make Space Wolves my loyalist army and I seriously cannot wait to get some money in the bank to start up my army, which I hope will one day rival yours. Kudos!
This is great man!!
How do you come to these ideas?
This really makes a wonderfull landraider.
Michael
Great stuff and tutorial. I think I might be able to pull this one off. Unfortunately I don’t think I’ll ever be able to make a remote controlled GW tank with functioning lights, rotating gunners, and a working cannon. But I am looking forward to your tutorial on the capes.
All I can say is : “I’m not worthy! I’m Not Worthy!! I’M NOT WORTHY!!!!!!”
This is such a great concept, I just hope my skillz are up to the task. The tutorial will definately help.
How did you create the “relief” paint effect(colors, etc.)?
great land raider keep up the work looking forward to seeing more
THAT IS THE BEST CONVERSION I HAVE EVER SEEN!!!!!!!!!!!!!
Where do you get ideas like these?
OMG!!!
Youre awesome man!!!!!!!!!!
Love your work!!
ancient egyptian god thoth,