Conversion Crypt - Slaanesh Beastlord
/
Welcome to the Conversion Crypt! In the dank bowels of these unholy catacombs, a bearded goblin sits hunched over a glue-spattered sarcophagus, toiling away on blasphemous constructs of grey plastic for your macabre amusement. That goblin’s name is Jamie, and today he presents his latest creation.
Well hello there crypt-delvers!
Just over three whole years ago I started work on a Slaanesh beastlord conversion and, in my typically timely fashion, last night I finally finished painting it. Perhaps you’d like to see?
When I’m starting a new conversion, I usually have a rough idea in my head, and the rest comes together by playing around with different combinations of bits. The picture you see here is my Slaaneshi beastlord in its earliest incarnation, when I was toying with a number of ideas that would eventually get dropped.
The basic idea is there though - a snake-like body and a face that leans more into horror than beauty (even beauty of the corrupted Slaanesh kind).
At this stage I was happy with the basic idea, so I started giving the main body of the conversion its final shape. You can see that, compared to the previous image, the head, neck and torso are more upright. In the earlier pose it looked like the beastlord was shouting across the battlefield, whereas here it looks more like it’s screaming out in agony (or ecstasy - Slaanesh cares not which!).
I filed down the pieces where necessary and filled in the gaps with green stuff, then used even more green stuff to smooth out the form of the body. This helped to better tie the very different parts together and make them look like they truly all belong to the same creature, whilst also giving the body a more lithe and serpentine look.
At this stage in the conversion process, the Slaanesh beastlord is beginning to take on its final, disturbing form. Disturbing is really what I was going for here. The idea of adding hoofed limbs to the front of the torso (and the tentacled mane that you’ll see in the next image) came to me quit late, and is an homage to a H. P. Lovecraft creation - ‘the black goat of the woods with a thousand young’, which is often portrayed by artists as a writhing mass of awkwardly positioned hooves and tentacles.
The hoofed limbs make the creature look like its rearing up and gives it some sense of movement. The antlers, unlike those in my earlier test fit, are asymmetrical and much more gnarled, adding to the beastlord’s chaotic and menacing appearance.
Here we have the conversion in its final form before being painted. The clawed hand makes the beastlord look even more mutated by the twisting energies of chaos, as well as marking the model out as unmistakably Slaaneshi.
I also replaced my original idea of an incredibly long tongue with something slightly more modest, as the longer tongue was over-complicating an already pretty busy silhouette, and distracting from more interesting aspects of the model’s appearance. You can see that the tongue still has a slender, writhing quality to it though, tying it in with the beastlord’s tail and mane.
And here she is, fully painted at long last! My objective with the paint scheme was to honour Slaanesh by making the model look as fleshy and clammy as possible using pale pinks, whilst using brighter pinks and reds towards the extremities to make them look raw and tender.
From the initial conception of this conversion through to the final painting, my aim was to create something that was both beautiful and horrifying at the same time - something that evoked all of the most extreme carnal imagery of Slaanesh without featuring anything overtly sexualised. To put it another way - I want to make you feel like you’re looking at something obscene without being able to explain exactly why!
Click any of the painted images to see a larger version.
What do you think? Did I succeed in honouring the Prince of Excess with my bizarre creation? Is there anything you think I could have done better? What would you like to see my convert next? Comment below!
