I’m venturing through the Breach, into Terra Wyrdia!
More specifically, I’ve found myself drawn to the Neverborn. The idea of playing a horror/gothic skirmish game has been one of the big draws, luring me not only into Malifaux but also, irresistibly, into the dangerous embrace of Lilith and her brood…
I’m a Warhammer 40k refuge, and a compulsive converter. But I’m coming to appreciate that converting Wyrd minuatures will be very different than converting space soldiers or space tanks or space daemons. Malifaux models are graceful, elegant, lethal and sinister. Limbs are lithe. And compositions are beautiful, figure by figure. I don’t want to mess them up. Many of the techniques and much of the aesthetic I cultivated for my Warhammer work (which was chaotic and over-the-top daemonic) won’t work here.
Still, there are things I want to tinker with: aspects I want to draw out of the figures.
Take Lilith. She’s a gorgeous miniature, super-model posed and supremely poised. Cosmetically and compositionally, she’s already exquisitely imagined. Radical amputation could only end badly. There’s little I could lop off or replace with anything that would look “better,” given my limited sculpting skills
And yet, parts of the model do seem bland to me. That cape hangs so flatly. That face doesn’t strike quite the right note. And more generally, the figure seems a bit too humanoid to my eye, too tame, too still.
She is Mother of Monsters, after all, Master of Malifaux. What is wanted is not just Barbi, but something more barby. The very terrain of this extra-terrestrial place is hers to command: its vines and thorns, its thickets and jungles. Her figure should evoke some of this sinister possibility. The wildness she is capable of leashing and unleashing should be couching at her feet and cloaking her person, coiled, at her call.
So I tried grafting some viney/thorny life onto her.
(Sorry about the blurry pic.)
My original idea was that in place of the plain, smooth cape that comes with the model, she’d be wearing a cape of vines, and that they’d curl around her, weaving according to her whim and mood.
As I set in with greenstuff, I realized that weaving a completely smooth, “clean” cape of vines into the figure would take more craft than I have. My version looked pretty crude.
Still, I kind of liked the contrast. From the front, Lilith appears as a strikingly beautiful human creature, while seen from behind, she becomes something more elemental, something wilder and wyrder –thoroughly unhuman and horrific.
Along the same lines, I decided to replace her (very human-looking) head with a more sinister, daemonic visage:
This looked a bit rough, but a great learning exercise as I figure out how to work with these figures.
Further work took me to here:
I liked that well enough. I was particularly pleased with the composition of the model and base, which seemed to me to convey the whole "Mother and master of Malifaux" theme.
Until one of my gaming buddies pointed out that she doesn’t have any neck. Doh!
So I pried the first head out of its cowIed socket and worked in a replacement.
I did rip up her cowl a bit, extracting that first head. But I’ll fix that somehow.
Thanks for looking. I’ll post up more as it takes form.