How to Harrow a Chaos Knight

I’m working on a Chaos Knight conversion. 

This is a project that sat on my hobby desk, barely started, for over a year… and then more recently, after several fits and false starts, lurched into motion… and now, after a few weeks, of gathering momentum, is beginning to cohere:

At this point I have gained enough confidence in my progress to start sharing the project here.

So, let me take you through the process so far….

I started with a Knight kit and a rummage through my bits boxes, looking for inspiration…

This was what I laid out at first. Just some vague notions, really, with no firm picture or blueprint for what I wanted to do.

As things have turned out, I did not end up using all or even most of this stuff, and found many other components that are not shown. So far, the project has pieced together components from the Nurgle Maggoth Lord kit, along with odds and ends from the Chaos Warshrine, a Forgefiend, a Soul Grinder … (The project turned out to be ridiculously expensive from a source model point of view! Though I have a lot of tasty bits to apply to other projects…)

So, to work. First I assembled several basic Knight components, including the legs and torso…

Then, I added horns and tusks to the head plate:

Alright, that was a start. It’s chaos, right? So, the model needs horns and skulls and eight-arrowed circles and whatnot.

But then for the “head” of the creature I wanted something more dramatic. I wanted this project to create something more than simply a Knight festooned with skulls and spikes and chaos graffiti. What I envision is a daemon engine. An ancient beast. A nightmare, a violation, a desecration. A possession that is ripping its host apart and flooding it with the ruination of cHaOsssss itself. I wanted to spawn an unholy amalgam of machine spirit and sacrificial gore and eldritch energy and sheer, raw malevolence. In short and in sum, I wanted to Harrow this host.

Accordingly, what was wanted at the helm of this creature, I decided, was not a face or a helmet, but a ravening maw, blind and snouting and drooling and devouring.

Something like this, to start with:

Then, because I wanted the daemon to also have (in unholy union) a distinctly Dark Mechanicus dimension, I applied a mane of cabling…

… then worked in some greenstuff blending to graft on a daemonic skin

I also worked in few rounds of greenstuff sculpting on the plate, trying to create the look of the daemon’s horns violently ripping their way through the Knight’s once-sacred, once-inviolate armor:

And

And

I tried for a similar effect along the back of the plate, trying to suggest something like a spine:

And I worked up a few chaos touches for the back of the torso:

So, I’m starting to get the overall mood and look of the effect I wanted:

Link to Dakka Dakka gallery, for full sized pictures

I have a long way to go. But I’m getting excited about this one.