Wednesday, March 11, 2015

Project brief: King Ghidorah HelDrake

As I said in the post about the Nurgle Mecha-fly, I truely dislike the HelDrake model. And like the Nurgle Mecha-fly I discovered a bit of inspiration for a new HelDrake conversion, though this bit of inspiration did come from a... somewhat different source then the last one. This source of inspiration... well was Godzilla. Yeah I'm a Godzilla fan, but seriously is anyone even remotely surprised by that? So am I going to build a Godzilla style HelDrake? Well.. not exactly. Rather, I'm looking at this guy:

King Ghidorah
So for the Kaiju fans out there, yes this is King Ghidorah. Arguably Godzilla's archenemy. His origin has varied from series to series, ranging from being a Space Dragon under the control of Aliens, to being the deliberate development of time travels to being an immature Tiamat Dragon. Origins aside, I like the three headed Dragon and I want to build a HelDrake inspired by him.

So what am I planning on doing? Well obviously I'm going to need 3 heads and necks. The larger wings without a question. The tail... that one I'm a little less certain about. In order to accommodate the scale and size, think I'm going to use the the body from a Forge Fiend. In order to get the curved necks into it, I will have to completely scrap the neck from the kit itself and build a series of 3 new ones. But I think I know how I'm going to do that.

It all starts with a length of wire coat hanger that's been built into the approximation of the curve of the neck in question (how often is it I have to take about more then 1 neck?). Anyway, starting with a length of wire coat hanger that's been cut to the desired length. I can then attack wooden/plastic balls of the appropriate diameter to one end of each section. This will give me a foundational armature to build up the rest of the neck around. I can then build up the details of the neck by laying in lengths of cable and wires and the like. Once I have the wires and such down and secured, I can come back with either stripes of kneadite or maybe strips of styrene and afix them around the wires and cables. With those in place, I think I can fashion a series of armor plates from styrene and then affix those over the back of the neck. With the plates in place I can cap off the entire neck with a second ball of the needed size.

Actually, this might make more sense. It is a little animation I put together showing what I am talking about.

1 comment:

  1. As a kaiju fan and someone not terribly impressed with the last Chaos codex/models, I'm very interested to see where you go with this...

    ReplyDelete