Swarmlord Part 1

While the primer was drying on the Tyranid Prime, I decided to stay in the swing of the pinning and get on with putting the Swarmlord together.  As most people do, I used a new Hive Tyrant model for the base.  I ordered the monster swords from Paulson Games as they're a really good fit for this kind of conversion.

There was a minimal amount of cleanup to do on the pieces, and I was very happy with the sizing.  I wouldn't like to say whether they're made specifically for this but I'm glad for the happy coincidence!

I'd looked around the net at a number of Swarmlord conversions, and I can see the main difficulty that people were having was the posing of the arms! There's only one bonesword arm in the metal kit (I used it for my Tyranid Prime tee hee), and unless you're a GW staffer who can go just grab four Hive Tyrant kits off the shelf like the chap in this posting, then you're not about to spend a whole bunch of mad cheddar on four Hive Tyrant kits. Other people have used four scything talon arms but they always look like a four armed pensioner doing the funky chicken. I was standing there, imagining myself in the pose when it occurred to me that a natural challenge pose would have the lower arms outstretched and the upper arms bent yet relaxed. 

For the lower arms, I took the scything talon arms from the sprue. And cut them to pieces.

 

Yes, I cut them to pieces.  You can see that I cut them at the bend in the arm.  My objective was to turn the arm around and make it straight.  The only thing was, when I turned it around, the "cuff" just before the wrist was wrong, and the hand/sword would not have been in a natural pose.  So I switched the forearms from side to side. 

 

You can see the left lower arm in the picture above right.  You can see that I then pinned the arm together after doing a rough measure on how long the arm would be if it were straightened. I then applied copious amounts of greenstuff to fill the gap and I somewhat smoothed it and shaped it.  I'm a mechanic, not a sculptor so I know it won't be my best, but at least it's not Venus de Milo!  I then pinned the cleaned up boneswords for a test fitting.  

 

I cut down the left arm for one of the shooty weapons and used that as the left upper arm.  Then I tried to cut down one of the right shooty arms to use as the right upper, but... they have two forearms for holding the weapon.  Poop.  I gave it a shot with some carving and greenstuffing and just wasn't happy with the result.  A friend of mine donated to me another sprue.  I cut down the same left arm from the second sprue, and cut it's shoulder joint off.  I cut off the shoulder joint of a right arm and pinned it to the left arm.  A little greenstuff to make it look right and it's awesome!  You can see it in the next picture.

 

What's left is to get the gaps filled.  I don't plan on gluing the arms in place until the rest of the work is completed on the body.  If you go and look in the Tyranid codex, or on the GW link I posted above you'll see that the Swarmlord has two prominent horns on it's head, mandibles from it's cheeks and a split tail.  As I don't plan on gluing the extra talons to the base, I will use them to make it's mandibles.  The second prominent horn will be made from a scything talon or something.  The tail will be more challenging.  Apocabitznow.com had a tail in stock, and it's on it's way to me right now (right, Tobin? lol).  I will be carefully filing, pinning and greenstuffing it in place.  I don't know what's gonna be more harrowing - drilling holes in it's face for the mandibles or doing the tail.  Until next time!