Artscale Master of the Forge

I’d wanted to do this particular conversion for a very long time. Ever since I named the original blog “Master of the Forge” I envisioned having a pic in the header of the home page of a Master of the Forge model, something suitably impressive.

I had a few sets of resin legs spare from my experimenting with resin casting (didn’t go too well). I figured I’d use a pair as the starting point and sculpt all the lovely Techmarine stylings over the top of any air bubbles in the cast. The top half of the model is from the Thunderfire cannon Techmarine.
The original concept of the model was to have it equipped with a Conversion Beamer, mounted on his backpack as a kind of shoulder mounted weapon, and carrying a Thunder Wrench in both hands, reminiscent of the Rogue Trader era Techmarines. The head is roughly based on the design of the Techmarine featured in Dawn of War 2. 

I had a hard time deciding how the final model would be equipped. I had plenty of techmarine bits, so I played around dry fitting bits until I found a combination I though worked. Even quite late in the build I went back and swapped some things around, eventually giving him a thunder hammer and a wrench. Although the original concept was to have him carrying a 2 handed thunder hammer/wrench it seemed a shame to obscure the sculpting on the model with a big weapon held out in front of him.

The conversion beamer itself was mostly made from an upside down lascannon with the tip of the weapon being cut from the Techmarine’s original servo-harness. Most of the cables were made from guitar string. For anyone wanting to replicate the layered armoured effect on the legs I posted a Mini-Tutorial here.