The Warforge Miniature Modelling and Conversion

Waaagh! from above

Stormboyz are 3 things: Shock troops, orderly, and disciplined.
I scratched my head a bit about what I wanted to do with these models and came up with a few rough ideas:

- They should be flying, or at least some of them. The 'just touching down' look is fine, but I wish they hadn't cast the base terrain into all of their feet. That aside, their body poses are still pretty dynamic, and they can easily be made to look like they're 'suspended' in the air.

- Gas mask helmets. Once hortwerth made his Death-Korps-ish helmets available for sale (here from The Warstore for those in the US, and here for those in Europe). Gives the stormboyz a somewhat intimidating, uniform appearance.

- Similar weapons. Here, I think I've decided to give the whole mob of 20 chain-bladed weapons, meaning chainswords, chain-axes, that sort of thing. A buzzsaw or two may make an appearance if I end up cannibalizing one of the new nob choppas into something smaller. I thought that might help with the 'shock' part of shock troops, since a mob of orks blasting towards you with revving weaponry is probably enough to force a morale check on it's own.

So I started off with this guy:

 

The stormboy was hacked free from his molded-on plastic base detail. The choppa arm is the one swinging the chain from the warbike set, with the chain hacked off. A 2nd edition ork choppa was added in it's place. The slugga arm's from AoBR, and just reposed a bit with some greenstuff and pinning. The head's straight from Micro Art Studio.

I have some 14-gauge galvanized utility wire that I used to suspend him in the air above the base. I decided on this stuff instead of the normal flying base because although I have about 40 of Games Workshop's clear flying bases, there is not a single one that doesn't have ridiculous air bubbles in the stems. I've also read stories about how easily same stems can snap, and being a klutz, I figure galvanized wire will be better to work with.

A washer was added underneath the base to help with balance issues, even though the miniature could still stand without it:

I'm going to get some 2-part plumbing epoxy later and just cover the whole base over so the stem will hold a bit firmer into the base.

I figure the stem can be hidden at least to a tiny degree by the addition of either flames or smoke. Sculpting flames would be fine, but I'm sort've giving smoke more thought right now because a bit of steel wool would probably be easy to add, and it's certainly much easier to paint than fire.

Anyway, I made two more stormboyz after this guy as a start on my mob of 20, so here they are:

 

Yeah, I see the mold lines, don't worry.

I'm going to try and limit the number of identical weapons I have in the full group of 20 to maybe 5 max, so I don't end up with too much redundancy in the chainswords. I really like the 2nd ed chainsword on my first stormboy, but a lot of input I'm getting about these suggests they might be too weedy in comparison to the current-edition chunky chainblades ork boyz have. I'm not sure if I want to change the weapon or not, honestly.

Anyway, that's a start.