Lictor conversion

[gunnersabottank]

Wasn't too happy with the Lictor I made yrs ago, so decided to make use of the leftover Venomthrope bits with a Warrior to make a new one. imgur.com/gallery/plwe9Xl

[yoritomo]

Why are you going about this the hard way? The venomthrope heads are fine the way they are, they don't need the warrior crest to look like lictor heads. Merging the top of the warrior head to the venomthrope head leads to a gap that needs to be filled. All in all it's just more hassle than it's worth.

Look at this venomthrope head on a warrior body and tell me it doesn't look fine.



And on a full body:

[niiai]

I did something similar or mine. But I ended up gluing the arms to the back. It loosk great.

[gunnersabottank]

Jan 19, 2021 3:50:31 GMT yoritomo said:

Why are you going about this the hard way? The venomthrope heads are fine the way they are, they don't need the warrior crest to look like lictor heads. Merging the top of the warrior head to the venomthrope head leads to a gap that needs to be filled. All in all it's just more hassle than it's worth.

Look at this venomthrope head on a warrior body and tell me it doesn't look fine.



And on a full body:

You say more work, I say more fun. Yes, it requires some greenstuff, but I enjoy the modeling part of this hobby.

[yoritomo]

So there's pushing green stuff just to push green stuff, and there's pushing green stuff in an attempt to make something great. Ask yourself which one are you doing?


A while back I had to make walking venomthroes because nothing in my army floats (that's how old my models are). Here is the result:

I think there's enough work on that model that you would have enjoyed making it. What I'd like to focus on is the head, since that's what you've posted. Here's a closer look:

This is a full warrior head, 3rd edition warrior kit. The obvious thing I did was replace the mouth with tentacles. I did this by leaving the mouthpiece off and gluing green stuff tentacles directly to the upper pallet. On a current warrior kit the face is one piece, so you'd have to cut the lower jaw off. No big deal.

The less obvious thing is that with the added carnifex back plate the head crest was too large for the body. That's fine as I didn't want a large headpiece anyway. If you look closely you can see where I cut back the headpiece, it's quite angular.

At the time I liked the gap in the mouth and the blocky headplate, but looking back at it I think I would have added another tentacle and rounded out the headplate. That's what you get for looking back at old models.


Now let's look at your lictor head. Well, I can't because your link is busted so I'm going from memory. You've head off of the warrior head (let that sink in for a minute) and the head plate off of a venomthrope head. It's not exactly easy to join to large, flat surfaces like that. You can see the gap that results in your picture. The problem is that no matter what you do to fix it you're not going to do better than what the original piece looked like.

What you're doing is capping your abilities. If the venomthrope head is fine then use it. If you really like the headpiece then there's plenty of room to make the warrior head shine.

Look, there are going to be plenty of opportunities to put work into your lictor conversion. I can tell you some problems I had with mine. For example, both the venomthrope head and warrior torso have necks. I cut off the neck from the torso, but that made me do a re-sculpt on the collar bone. Still not sure that was the best option, the venomthrope neck is more material but less sculpting. The hive tyrant arms I used are also too big for the torso. The warrior carapace hides it well, but if I had to do it again I would cut the talons off the arms and find smaller arms to attach them to.


There are plenty of opportunities to work on your lictor conversion. Spend your time working on things that will make the model look good, don't spend time working on things that will make it look adequate.