I feel like one post in five on this website involves me acknowledging that I’ve not been writing much, but I guess a gap of around 10 months does warrant some response. And, well, my working life saw me shift into a new role around this time last year, and it’s been really tough, and I’ve had very little energy to put into writing, hobbying or even my social life. Things are, at last, getting a little better. And I’ve been keeping a personal journal which I’ve gotten surprisingly regular at updating, which is nice. So it’s not all bad.
Anyway! It’s October, and that means it’s ORKTOBER! Last year I entered a Midwinter Minis painting competition on the community Discord, and my retro 90s Snakebite Squighog Boy (plus period-appropriate cactus) caught enough attention to snag me a runner-up prize. With that in mind, how could I resist entering again this year?
This time around the challenge was to convert any ork model, to at least some degree, and paint it. Nice and simple, very open. I’ve not really done much converting before – in the 1990s as a child I cut the arm off a Van Saar gang leader and glued on an Eldar power fist, and I once glued a cocktail stick to a 2nd edition plastic Goff’s back for a banner – so this was a bit of a challenge. But in for a penny, in for a pound, right?
For whatever reason, the image that first popped into my head was this bit of period-appropriate CGI from 90s comedy The Mask. (I promise I am not defined by 90s nostalgia. It just appears to be a theme in these posts. Honest! Unrelatedly, have you heard Dookie Demastered yet???)
I have a variety of ork models but nothing that really fit what I needed here, and so I dutifully headed off to Kromlech’s Bits of War website. I’ve never ordered from them before but I knew they had a ton of orky models and bits, and I quickly found a bunch of gun sprues and an ork character – Mech-Boss Dredsmasha – whose pose I thought I could work with. The one ‘problem’ here is that Kromlech’s products are all resin, and I’ve never worked with resin. And, honestly, it scares me a bit given the risks around inhaling resin dust. But I had a filter mask from when I used to spray prime on a glazed balcony in our old apartment, and a dedicated room I could close the door to so as to protect our pets, so let’s go for it!
I’ll skip toward the end here, as I don’t have any WIP photographs before the almost-final conversion. I’ll just note that almost everything I used was a Kromlech part, with one exception being an incomplete plastic cylinder that I think may have been a protective cover on some aerosol product. I collect all sorts of trash these days, provided it has an interesting shape, on the off chance it might be useful for some daft purpose like this. Anyway, here’s what Dredsmasha looks like right now, with the working title Da MOST Kustom Shoota.
Essentially, I sawed the arm and grip off a ork freeboota heavy weapon, sawed the scope, barrel and magazine off Dredsmasha’s original pistol, and the twain did meet. The clip went back on the top of the pistol because why not? I sawed the back of the stock and any sights and other gubbins off the top of six assorted ‘bullet spitters’ and shotguns, sanded them flat-ish on the top, and glued them in an array around the cylinder with the clips pointing outwards, and then attached the cylinder to the heavy weapon. A couple of rokkits were tidied until they could be slid inside the cylinder, beneath the heavy weapon. A robotic arm was tweaked until it could sit on top of the heavy weapon, with another rokkit mounted to the front of that. And I added a handle to the side, because maybe sometimes Dredsmasha is feeling unwell, and decides to hold this monstrosity with both hands.
I still need to do some sort of basing for this model, and I also have a harpoon that I plan to mount into his power claw and embed into the ground, since all this crap is so heavy he obviously needs to brace himself to fire it. But otherwise the building and converting is pretty much done, and I’ll today be priming him and starting to get more paint on the model! There are 11 days until the end of the month, so let’s see what I manage in that time…
