Tabletop Thursday: Dark Mechanicus Kataphrons

With their treads and metal-flesh bodies, Kataphrons are pretty body horror already. However, I felt that the tank treads were too crude of a means of locomotion for my Dark Mechanicus. I want legs, skittering feet, or tentacles and tubes.

Cue more counts-as conversions.

Drawing inspiration from other Dark Mech conversions, and the ideas of possible Reaperized Hanar (from Mass Effect), I went with six Tyranid Meiotic spores from Forgeworld (not too pricey since they’re just single piece models).

Pardon the really bad picture (bad lighting and bad camera), but you’ll notice that I added random bits onto the spores. The idea is that these would be a Xenos or mutated species with floating/anti-grav properties that was just turned into a servitor to serve as a means of locomotion. The bits would be the neural locks and cybernetic controls. Simple enough that I decided to mod all 6 at the same time.

Next were the arms. I bought one Kataphron kit for the weapons, so I kitted out my Dark Mech Kataphrons with 3 grav-cannons and 3 plasma calivers. The other weapons were scrounged up bits from my box.

Then the base layer of paint. I airbrushed on the white (which is actually a base of off white, and a highlight of white), and the brown for the ground. The silver and red/orange was drybrushed on; I don’t trust my airbrush skills. Like all my other dark mech, the armor or chitin is white, with all the fleshy bits a gross, inflamed pink.

The skin was painted/washed on. I tried to keep my paints really thinned down. I was trying out a variant of the ink/glazing method, only letting the paint gather in the shadows and recesses. Between that and the carroburg crimson glazes, the skin was suitably creepy. My wife calls these models floating ball-sacs, so I think the flesh colour was a success.

Here they are with most of the paints laid down. You’d see that I kept the area with any metal and organic fusions that angry pink-red colour, while there would be the blue weapon and energy glows throughout the model as well.

And there you go. Floating ball-sac kataphrons fit for the Dark Mechanicus.

You can find my completed AOP posts here:

Part 1, 2, and 3. And my Knight.