Mephiston: Lord of Death. Conversion finished and painted.

Hi Guys,

Later than promised but here is the Blood Angel character conversion I've been working on this past month. I had hoped Mephiston would get a new model with the codex release and had made a pact with myself to sell my old metal model and convert one if he didn't get a release. My starting point was a piece of second edition artwork which has always been the iconic Mephiston art in my mind:

When compared to the mephi model, this chap is obviously much more dynamic, with the cloak flowing, head repositioned, right arm sans pistol and raised and left sword arm lowered. I had oriinally thought about using astorath as a basis for the conversion, but then along came the sanguinary priest model and I knew I had to use that as the basis for the conversion.

So, effectively what I did was chop mephis head off, removed the right arm at the shoulder and painstakingly cut out the entire of mephis legs while leaving the cloak intact. The head was replaced with one of the new fanged sergeant heads, and guitar wire used to attach the psychic hood cables to his head. In the case of the right side I replaced the entirity of the cable with guitar wire, the left only the part inside the hood. I later GS sculpted some hair to flow in the direction of the wind blowing the cloak. I also decided that as well as a BA backpack he needed a banner to later have his heraldry displayed on.

As for the cloak, I heated the finecast in warm water and made it appear to be flowing more towards the right as if blown in the wind. Between removing the legs and heating the cloak it did split a bit so I had to fill the gaps with GS. The legs were replaced with a painstakingly shaved down set of legs from the priest model. I was tempted to try and seal up the gap at the front and make it more like the original image, but decided I quite liked it with the parting and so saved myself a job. The left arm was repositioned using a bit of generic space marine elbow and greenstuff. Likewise, pretty much the same was done for the right, with the hand modified to look like mephi is about to lick the blood (to be added later using technical paints) from his fingertip, with the plasma pistol presumably holstered. 

 As for painting, I went with a similar colour scheme to the Mephiston model in the new codex, with dark red robes/gauntlets and a black cape. I'm very pleased with the conversion (which stands slightly taller than a Space Marine) and although it's not my greatest paint job it still does the model a decent amount of justice. Cheers.