A titanic conversion

Late last year I had the idea of getting a good friend the Tyranid Hierophant bio-titan for Christmas. I'd been very impressed with his Tyranid army, and thought it would be a nice gift. Now, obviously I wasn't going to get the Forgeworld one: it's too expensive, and of course with the poor materials and process Forgeworld utilises, there was no guarantee that it wouldn't be hopelessly distorted.

So, I decided to convert/kitbash one. Full disclosure: the recipe is not mine. I was googling for inspiration and found the instructions written by a gamer who goes by 'Damo R' online. Here's a link to Damo's instructions and original piece. There's no need for me to replicate the instructions. All yu really need is 2 Tyrannofex kits (£52.50 from most resellers, £70 even if you pay the GW premium).

Instead, I'd rather talk to you about the psychology of a piece like this. There are a lot of warnings floating around about how difficult this is. Now, you are going to need to be experienced with pinning and gap filling. Even if the instructions don't call for a pin, I would use one anyway. But if you take the project as several smaller projects (legs, boy etc) it really isn't that difficult.

Now, you will need to make a base for this, otherwise the ends of his legs might get snapped (they taper right down to claws). I decided that I should make a detachable base which he could be slotted into so that most of the time the claws would be braced. This gave me a chance to muck about with a nice base.

I cut a funky shaped based out of 2mm MDF, remembering to bevel the edges down so that it would fit with other GW bases. I decided that the base should have a river. To achieve this, I built banks up with the offcuts of my MDF sheet. I smoothed the banks off by filling the gaps. This created a nice channel for the river to run down. I used heavy grade sand to create a shingle beach. The rest of the base was built up with the usual method of sand, paint, drybrush and then add flora, this time in the form of forest floor scatter. I also put a nice piece of the fallen Aquila from the Battle for Macragge (showing my age) to stop it from being entirely idyllic.

I decided to use a single Deathwatch Space Marine and a couple of Hormagaunts to add flavour to the base, and in itself this necessitated a bit more thought. As soon as I'd come up with those models, I had the desire to make a sort of "Clever girl" moment . So I purchased some suitably fern-ish looking plants. If you search "HO OO gauge plants" on Ebay you'll find them. While I was about it I purchased some 28mm white metal giant mushrooms, which you can see in the shot above.  They added some great atmospherics to the piece, and helped create the illusion of the Hormagaunt bursting from the foliage. 

Now, you can't see it really (which was the point) but there's a hole drilled into the fallen Aquila which braces the claw stamping down into it. My friend has to be careful when slotting him down, but at the right angle he becomes very sturdy on the base.

This was such a rewarding project, and my friend was really happy with his gift. I'd recommend that any Tyranid collector who enjoys conversion have a go!