Ciaphas Cain

This Commissar Ciaphas Cain converted from a FW Death Korps Commissar. The brief for the conversion was to have him based off of the artwork on the book covers. The head was replaced with one from a Master of Ordinance mini from the Imperial Guard advisors box set. For this mini I tried out ‘Brown Stuff’ putty as apposed to the usual Green Stuff. I have to say that it’s definitely nicer to use than greenstuff. Too expensive to use on everything, but the reduced elasticity makes it ideal for small details.

The head-swap was the hardest part of this conversion. It took a good few hours to carefully remove the original head and trim the new one to fit, but eventually the result has turned out really nice. I was able to disguise the join between the two parts be sculpting a new collar on him. One of the other major features of this model is the ornate double edged chainsword. I couldn’t find an existing chainsword with the right dimensions of details, so I had to make one. I basically took the tooth edge off of two chainswords, glued them together. I then added a trimmed down motor bit from a Space Marine chainsword. The handle is from an catachan knife and is perfectly scaled to fit this model. The outer casing for the blade was filed off and then resculpted with brownstuff to make a clean finish

With large areas of black on this model I tried an different approach to painting him. All the black areas of his coat and clothes were painted in a mid grey, and then I added multiple layers of black and blue inks. I think the end result is quite subtle and these photos aren’t the best, but I’m happy with the it. For the boots I gave them a brushed on coat of gloss varnish, if nothing else to make them look different from all the other black elements on the model.