"Behold, the Daemon Prince comes and the time of woe is upon us."

The title of this post is part of a description first published (to my knowledge) in 1988's classic Slaves to Darkness and later reprinted in the 1997 volume Realm of Chaos. It's a pretty apocalyptic description. And it really doesn't fit some bloke standing in a very 1996 pose hold a sword at a funny angle (the plastic Daemon Prince). I have issues with the plastic Prince. He's not a bad model, but he's very... very... well... he's not very flexible, is he? I mean, he's good for a traditional 'devil' look, but I really couldn't see him being a Nurgle piece. Still, I picked one up for about a fiver on Ebay and after glaring at it angrily for some time, I decided what I needed to do. I knew that it would like a miserable amount of effort, but desperately hoped it would be worth it. I think it was:

Let's start with the easy parts: the model is so muscular that he looks like Brock Lesnar's angry big brother. Nurgle creatures are fiendishly strong but usually bloated and rotting. The solution was easy: I attached the body front of a Blight King to the torso, using poly cement to ensure a good bond. Obviously, it didn't fit exactly, so I filled in the gaps with a mix of tissue and PVA glue. This sounds crazy, but it hardens to be light and solid. Once that was complete, I painted liquid green stuff over the top to ensure the seal. 

Next up was the head. The one I got had a botched conversion of the head (hence why it was so cheap). I cut that off, smoothed the surface down and then added a spare Rot Fly head from the Plague Drones kit. This looked cool, but something was a wee bit off. So, I sawed the antlers off of a spare plaguebearer head and attached these on either side. It was a subtle change but added some needed bulk. 

Next up was the jump pack. Taking some inspiration from Maxime Pastourel's incredible Daemon Prince, I wanted him to have mechanical flying aids rather than wings. So I sawed the ends off of the heavily mutated backpack you get with the Prince and attached Bloat Drone engines to the ends. These didn't really need pinning, as the contact surfaces were large and flat. Obviously, I used poly cement here and wherever else I could. The tank on his back is a resin septic/water tank I found from a random model train company. It only cost about £2 and was pinned in several places onto his back. I then filled the gaps as described above so that it would appear as if he were fused with his pack. 

Then came the tricky bits. I had this idea that he should be flying. And that he should be holding a massive scythe. The model was not willing to co-operate on this. The arms are not designed to hold two weapons, and the legs certainly aren't in a flying pose. So, after many deep breaths, I sawed off his arms and legs are the knee and elbow joints. I then repositioned them into the pose I wanted, using superglue to tack the parts together and drilling long pins through both components involved in each positioning. These pins held, for example, the forearm and the upper arm together despite the huge gap and the minimal contact points. I then made sure to drop some ploy cement in so that the small contact point would at least fuse. Of course, this left me with the problem that the arms might be fragile and snap. To compensate, I chopped a sprue into lots of little cubes. With a liberal application of poly cement, I stacked these small lumps of plastic into the elbow and knee joints, and then waited for them to solify into a mass. Then I used the tissue/PVA/green stuff method detailed above to smooth off the joints and make them look natural. 

The feet were a nagging issue. I wanted hooves, not regular feet. So I removed his feet and pinned/cemented on hooves from one of the Varanguard, Archaon's ludicrously overpriced horsemen fellows. I'd managed to get one of the horse bodies for another conversion that didn't work out, and this seemed a good use for them. 

Which just left the scythe. Building the weapon was fairly easy. I can't even remember exactly what I used, because you could really use two or three 'spear' components from any kit, or just plain off a bit of sprue until it's round. I pinned a couple of such lengths together to form the haft. The head is from two kits: the mechanical parts are from a spare scythe you get in the Deathshroud kit. But the blade of that scythe looked a bit puny next to him, so I cut it off, being careful to maintain the mechanical bits. I then replaced it with Otto Glott's scythe. 

I wanted him to hover, so I attached the spare cabling from the multipart Bloat Drone to him. This had to be ruthlessly pinned to the base, and I had to be very careful to make sure that the heavy resin tank on his back was pushing directly downwards and reinforcing the strength of the pins rather than pulling against them. I left him upside down for over 24 hours to dry after that. 

One other thing of note: when he was painted, I added the thick, coarse hairs you see on a fly by glueing black static grass onto him with PVA. You can get this sort of black grass dead cheap from War World Scenics, Serious Play, anywhere like that. It helped give him a bestial, wild feel. 

And there we have it! One floating Daemon Prince. Now if only I could convince him to pass some Disgustingly Resilient rolls...