Artscale Kharn the Betrayer

Part 1

This particular project has had an insanely long delay period, but I finally got stuck in a few weeks ago. This model is my half of a trade I agreed to with Volomir where he would paint up one of my conversions to put up charity auction in exchange for this model.

At the moment this is realistically about 70% complete but the hardest part (the posing) is done so the final 30% shouldn’t take much longer.

Still left to do are the addition of a shoulder pad, some fine detailing and the toughest detail, the chains. At the moment the model is a little top heavy looking but I have a nice idea to add a certain amount of balance with the chains.

The helm was based off of a Fantasy Khorne Champion, stripped down and built up again. I did try a couple of alternative approaches with plastic helms and plasticard “horns” but they just weren’t going to cut it. The Chainaxe started out as an Inquisitor Game scale chainsword, stripped down to just the teeth. The rest of it was built up from Green Stuff, plasticard sheet and a few random bits.

Part 2

It always happens that my most recent conversion is my favourite to date, and Kharn the Betrayer is no exception.

I’m really pleased with the level of detail I’ve managed to get into this model, I really pushed myself to get everything as top notch as I could, and it’s nice to see a bit of improvement in my sculpting, hopefully that’s something that will increase over time.

When making this I had 5 different pieces of artwork as reference material, including the image of the existing GW model. They were all very consistent with the details so it was very easy knowing what details I had to include. The only thing I didn’t keep from the source material was the skulls on the chains hanging from his belt. In truth I would have preferred to have left the chains hanging from his belt off completely because I think it lessened the “flow” of the model by blocking the view of the long chain at the back.

Speaking of chains, I will have a tutorial soon on how to make them like this. The chains are without a doubt one of my favourite elements of the model.

The knee pads were especially tricky to sculpt, but once I had the right one finished I simply duplicated it with Blu-Stuff.

I have to say Chaos Space Marines (especially with the new models just released) are becoming a far more interesting, simply because of the extra levels of details that can be added that generally aren’t present on loyalist models.