Tabletop Thursday: Knight Arachne (and WIP)

To any new readers out there, welcome to Tabletop Thursday! I am trying to post some of my progress at least weekly, so hopefully if you come back every Thursday you’ll have some new conversion or painting stuff to look at. By now you’ve seen most of Assuming Direct Control, my Armies on Parade entry for this year. (If you haven’t, you can see Part 1, Part 2 and Part 3 here). Some of you may want to know how I built some of my models, so I figured I’d end off my AOP posts with a WIP on the model that won me my Monsters and Machines pin; Knight Arachne.

Now, by the time I was building Arachne I had a general idea about what my Dark Mechanicus would be looking like; a lot of blanchitsu, a lot of Inq28 stuff. Obviously heretek and heretical, but nothing that would technically scream Chaos. After all, there’s a lot of creepy and technohorror in Ad Mech, but they’re technically Imperium, right? I mean, look at Belisarius Cawl! So that would be the way I wanted to take my Knight too.  Not ‘normal Mechanicus’, but not necessarily daemon either.

I got both the Knight Magaera kit from forgeworld, because I had an idea for the Knight hand. I thought I wanted to use the head too, but when I was fitting it together, it turns out that I didn’t like that look in the end. 

I tried the maulerfiend torsoplate as the belly armor, but it ended up looking worse and much to chaos-ey. And fat too. Plus the head was too… human (believe it or not). In the end I used the arm and some of the armor plates, but the rest were from the stock knight kit (even the main torso armor).

I knew I wanted the forgefiend tentacles intead of the Magaera claw but what I didn’t notice was that one of the Kataphron gun bits looked AMAZING fit inside the tentacle arm. Almost like a cuttlefish beak! That look inspired the rest of my Dark Mech Knight.

While the top half of the knight head was stock, I made the bottom as insectile as possible. Lots of chains, grabby bits and feeder tendrils. I don’t remember where a lot of the parts came from, but I know the Dark Eldar Talos helped a lot when I was making the face. I also used both the magma cutters from the forgefiend. I Imagined Knight Arachne’s tentacle arm picking up a hapless victim, then transferring it to the magmacutters for to hold in place and further dissection, to be assimilated by the feeder tendrils. After all, the Dark Mechanicus learns from everything, even the Tyranids. (This feeder tendril/nid affectation would be seen elsewhere in my minis too.) I also grafted on both the armor plates as well as the chimney stacks from the forgefiend.

Moving on to the right weapon arm. It couldn’t be stock, right? The melta cannon as well as the forgefiend gatling cannons both looked too small. So I decided to kitbash again.

I’m still not very confident of my airbrush skills, so I only airbrushed three colours (and their respective shades and highlights of course); the silver of the chassis, the white of the armor plates, and the red accent colour.

I didn’t even airbrush all of the silver. Too much fiddly detail work in between. Everything else, like the pink skin, the gold metals, the turquoise of weapons and lenses were all hand painted.

I guess cos it’s a large model, there’s a lot of fiddly work that needs to be completed. The rivets and blacklining drove me insane.

After that, I destroyed all of my nice clean airbrush gradients with weathering. The chipping and armor damage were all painted on. I decided to do that because there was a lot of empty space, and I felt like it needed to be filled up, and I felt like it didn’t make sense for a Dark Mech Knight to have free hand (doesn’t seem practical).

Also, I had to fix some mistakes in painting.

I did end up doing freehand on the chestplate, but I’m pretty sure no one even notices this when it was displayed during AOP. :'(

After that, I hit it up with some varnish, to do some oil weathering on my Knight Arachne.

Unfortunately, the Oil Wash (and varnish) ended up giving my Knight Arachne a bit of a satin finish. I never got around to hitting it up with another round of matte.

And there you have it: The Dark Mechanicus Knight Arachne. Stay tuned next week for another Tabletop Thursday!