I’ll be spending the second half of the week at two conferences, so you beautiful readers will have to cotent yourselves with something (relatively) short and sweet this week. Never fear, however, as I do have a new finished model to share with you.
A couple of years ago, I would routinely sit down and create a new World Eaters conversion several times a week. It was just a neat way of widening my conversion horizons, and the World Eaters look and feel really clicked with me — and still does, at that.
However, I’ve ended up with a rather huge pile of converted models that way over the years, and while some have been painted in the interim, and some have been tweaked on and off for years at this point, there were also some candidates that just ended up lurking about on my desktop and in my cupboard of shame. Like this guy here:
Originally built as a Chosen champion of some kind, he was cool enough, but in the end he just didn’t come together as a character, so into the great plastic men Limbo he went 
Until I happened upon him during my first, hesitant Horus Heresy experiments, when he finally seemed like a pretty cool addition to my embryonic 30k World Eaters project. There were just so many things that made him eligible for a place in my fledgling 30k collection: His armour wasn’t too ornate, but rather had a workmanlike and cobbled-together look that really suits a 30k World Eater. He also had that larger than life look that is ideal for a 30k commander. So I made some further tweaks to the model and turned him into this:
As for the actual conversion, most of the model consists of a plain old vanilla Chaos Space Marine. I cut the legs apart and reposed them in order to make the pose more interesting and add some height to the model. Both arms came from a Finecast Champion of Khorne, still available from GW, albeit called an “Exalted Deathbringer” these days.
Several people gave me grief over the way the model is holding its shield, correctly pointing out that shields, or at least tower shields, normally don’t work that way. To that I say: Fair enough. I could make things easy for myself here and point out that the blame actually lies with GW’s sculptors. But to be perfectly honest, I rather like the shield arm, and I decided I would use the paintjob to show how this guy uses his shield more as a weapon than as an item of defense.
The part that really finished the model was a head from the Space Wolves Terminators, purchased on a whim when I was hunting around for interesting Astartes faces. I think it really turns the model into a character, and it’s also slightly less monstrous than something you would expect in a Khornate 40k army — it just works far better for a Heresy era offcier, if you ask me.
So yeah, he found a new – and, arguably, far more fitting, home with my 30k World Eaters. But that still didn’t mean he saw any paint. I did really want to see him finished, though, so I just took the opportunity and wedged him into my already existing vow for the “Loyalty and Treachery III” event over at The Bolter & Chainsword. And that certainly did the trick. Take a look:
Secutor Hamund
“The Mournful”, IVth assault company Delegatus, XII Legio Astartes
“You ask if this is what I wanted for myself, remembrancer? If this is what I dreamed of?
Who could ever dream of a life such as the one we lead and crave to do as we do?
No, I did not wish for this life. But it was this or the fleshmarket at Kalekka, and a choice like that is no choice at all.”
Secutor Hamund
So let’s take a closer look at Hamund, shall we?
So, a couple of notes on the model: I mainly stuck to my established World Eaters painting recipe. The most interesting area was the shield, because I wanted to make it look really grisly — and I also wanted to hint at the fact that Hamund probably uses it to give opponents a good beating or even slice open a jugular vein here and there, if push comes to shove. So making it look suitably battered and gruesome was a fun challenge alright!
However, to be perfectly honest with you, painting Hamund turned out to be a rather massive slog, all in all, both because the conversion was pretty messy, using some very beat-up parts, and because the arms came an fairly early Finecast model (i.e. lots of bubbles and warping). With those factors in mind, I am pretty happy with the finished model: His patched-together suit of mongrel-plate really gives him a suitably World Eater-ly look, and the smaller Khornate symbols scattered over the model could be seen as the War God’s influence slowly beginning to manifest during the latter stages of the Heresy.
As for his background, Hamund is one of Captain Lorimar’s “Secutorii”, an officer serving as a go-between between the Praetor and the officers at squad level. There are two more Secutorii in the 4th assault company (as of yet), Eigar and Khoron. Here are the three of them, when Hamund was still unpainted:
These guys are basically what company captains would be to a 40k Space Marine Chapter, I suppose, with Lorimar more like a modern-day Chapter Master, due to the sheer size of the Heresy era Legiones Astartes. Anyway, finishing the entire triumvirate at some point will be fun. And longtime readers of this blog should already know Khoron. Just sayin’…
For now, however, I am pretty happy with finally having finished Hamund! So here’s another round of family photos, to celebrate the occasion
Hamund with some of the Legionaries under his command:
And, once more, my slowly growing 30k World Eaters collection — slow and steady wins the race, eh?
So yeah, feel free to let me hear any feedback you might have! And, as always, thanks for looking and stay tuned for more!
Filed under: 30k, Conversions, Fluff, paintjob, World Eaters Tagged: 30k, background, conversion, delegatus, hamund, Horus Heresy, khorne's eternal hunt, kitbash, officer, paintjob, plastic, plastic heresy, praetor, secutor, world eaters
