Taking a Rest as the World Burns

Six weeks ago a new challenge was launched over at the Oldhammer Facebook group, celebrating the brilliant illustrations of Tony Hough. Tony's artwork was ever present in GW's output of the late 1980s, gracing the pages of Rogue Trader, Realm of Chaos books and White Dwarf. He also single-handedly drew most of the claustrophobic illustrations for Space Fleet. I'm lucky enough to own a couple of Tony's originals, and he ranks as one of my favourite GW artists. 

Here are the rules of the challenge:

The aim will be to recreate one of Tony Hough's incredible and evocative scenes into miniature form, sculpting, painting or even better, both, and this time you have 6 weeks to complete the task so right until the 30the of June on midnight!

I knew instantly that I wanted to evoke the brilliant illustration that features as a two-page spread on p126-127 of the Rogue Trader rulebook. The artwork shows a mercenary, or perhaps an Imperial Guardsman relaxing on an access ramp, tending to his weapon. In the back ground, a second character is guiding in an insectoid spaceship. The whole scene is set in a cavernous hangar of some kind.

My starting point was to try and source some figures that had similar details to the artwork. The seated figure is very close to one of the Rogue Trader pirates, whilst the helmet is identical to that worn by Worldburner from the Mercenaries range.

With the two key models sourced, I started thinking about the wider scene. Initially I planned to create the whole scene, with both characters and the spacecraft.

However, doing this placed the seated mercenary (we'll call him Worldburner from now on) on the fringes of the scene rather than being the focal point. I decided to lose the hangar, the second mercenary and the ship. Worldburner taking a break would be the focus of my model.

I constructed a small diorama base from a floor from a GW tank and a piece of landing gear.

Then I started generating the parts for my model. Most of the space pirate was used, with the right leg and head removed for repositioning. I had to remove the pirate's eye-patch too! The gun is built from a range of Rogue Trader gun bits, plus a part from a Tau pulse rifle.

Here Worldburner is largely positioned, but lacks forearms and hands. You can see I've removed the helmet from the actual Worldburner miniature.

Resculpting the head.

At this point, the head is pretty much sorted, and I made a first attempt on sculpting new hands. They were massive and frog-like, so had to go!

Better hands second time round!

I took a break of a week or so to make sure I was happy with the conversion. It's not a 100% match to the illustration, but hopefully it looks like it could be another frame in the same scene!

Painting-wise, I decided to go for a weathered white and grey on the diorama base, and bright orange and flesh to stand out (orange seemed fitting for someone named Worldburner). I'll let the pictures speak for themselves!

All in all, I'm pretty happy with how he turned out. He even works nicely if you try and fill in the scene around him!