Inquisitor Eisenhorn

Here I present an Inquisitor Eisenhorn based on book cover artwork. When I started this commission I wasn’t entirely sure how to start or what to base the model on. At first I was looking at the leader from the Cadian Command box set as I had seen that used on a very nice version of the older Eisenhorn, but after a bit of searching choose the Genestealer Primus from the Overkill game, as I liked the cloak/coat shape on it. I’d been eyeing this model for my own Inquisitor for a while.

My goal was to capture as much detail from the book artwork, but alter the pose slightly. As I usually do I started with the legs, stripped back as much of the Primus model as I could, chopping his torso off and replacing with a basic Imperial Guard torso, this gave me a solid frame on which to build up the layers.

You can see in the artwork that Eisenhorn wears three layers of cloth over his clothes, so I had to plan the order in which to approach the build. I normally dislike sculpting cloth immensely but I think this conversion helped me make some strides in getting over that. In this case I took a sheet of plastic (from a freezer bag) and taped it over my cutting matt. I applied the smallest smear of vaseline to this to keep my greenstuff from sticking to it. I didn’t use water because I mix Magic Sculp with my Greenstuff and that breaks down in water.

I then just spread a ball of Greenstuff over this plastic with a large clay shaper (also with a little vaseline) and left it to cure for 1 hour. After it had a chance to firm up a bit I removed it from the plastic and wrapped around the figure in the way I wanted. At this point its soft enough to shape but firm enough not to get too damaged by moving it about. There’s no need to trim excess off the edges at this stage. Once it had cured I removed it from the model and trimmed edges to my liking, not gluing until I was absolutely sure.

I wanted the weapons to be pretty accurate to the art. His sword is based off of a description of a straight edged blade. The pistol is made from five separate bits to make it’s structure look correct. The client asked for a rough gilded gold look you sometimes see on ornate bolters. The staff was made from a Grey Knight Halberd handle, servo skull for the halo and a regular skull from… er, something else. The sword was reworked a few times. The first build just felt a little too fragile for my liking as a blade like this is too thin to pin. I like to build all my models as gaming pieces, so I pin everything I can. The sword on this is ok, but it’s definitely the weak point. I took the blade itself from the Zombie Dragon Vampire Lord that had already snapped in half, but luckily was just the right size for this. Nice happy accident.

Finally the head. I had been saving a head from the Chaos Marauder Horsemen box set for a long time, for a future special project. I found the grimacing expression to be a good fit for Eisenhorn but some of his features needed altering. I removed the models existing mohawk and sculpted on his new hairline, adding texture by pushing on the soft greenstuff with a piece of foam (like you used to find in blister packs). The nose and scowl were added by carefully pushing soft greenstuff about with my smallest softest clayshaper. I’m especially pleased with the result, although it is often difficult to see how the finished thing will look because the difference in grey and green colour is very distracting to the eye.

My photography and video editing is slowly improving, although I did leave in a little glitch.

I hope you like it, I really enjoyed working on this miniature; it was nice to try and put a lot of detail into a normal human sized model as a lot of what I do is based on larger minis. When I get the chance to make another Inquisitor for myself I will use this as a guideline, though mine will be of my own creation and not Eisenhorn himself.