This week I finished my Ork Warboss for my Death Skulls tribe. He is an Orruk Megaboss conversion with just a few minor conversions to bring him into the 40k universe. Here is the final showcase and some notes on the conversions themselves.

Ork Warboss

When the Orruk Megaboss was released, I knew I needed to convert one for my Ork Warband. Just over a year back, I posted my unboxing thoughts and ideas for the conversion. The work continued off and on for the last year in bursts.

But here he is at last, my Orruk Megaboss conversion into an Ork Warboss.

One of the final additions I made was the larger base, thanks to an indirect prompting from NafNaf. I had originally posed him on a 40mm base from Secret Weapon Miniatures. But felt it needed to be bigger and have more height.

The Tyranid skull was also a later addition that I had planned on doing once I glued the front bit into place. I had left it off to paint his face. After a bit of green stuff to fill the gaps, I added more putty to create the carapace ridges.

I used a Tyranid Warrior’s head as a reference and painted it to match my Behemoth army.

 

 

I feel like his skin is one of my best efforts to date. I spent a lot of time highlighting the green skin and adding red, brown and yellow glazes. I also wanted the texture to be softer on his skin so I used more blending and glazes as compared to the sharp highlights on the armor.

Even though much of his back is hidden from normal angles, I added a bunch of liver spots to break up the large, flat muscles.

The weapons were fairly straight forward conversions as the hands were already separate bits on the Megaboss. Because they aren’t the main focus of the mini, I didn’t want to make them too snazzy (leave that to those Bad Moons). So the majority is rusted metal with small panels of colors.

The buzzsaw was painted a bit brighter metal since it would be more active in the choppy action. I debated on adding blood splatter but decided against it for the time being as I figured it wouldn’t add much and distract from the other colors.

The Orruk Megaboss Conversion

For those interested in the actual conversion, here are some of the WIP pictures.

The Orruk Megaboss kit is an impressive feat of engineering and an abstract puzzle to put together. It took a lot of fiddling to get the different chest pieces to fit into place. I used sticky tack to piece together some ideas.

As you can see, some stayed, others removed. While the demon head is kind of cool, it looked out of place. So an Ork glyph was swapped in. The boss pole also didn’t make the cut. I’ve seen some with awesome back banners, but I thought it took away from his bulky frame.

The new additions to his face were bits removed from the custom combi-shotta, in turn from the Deff Dread kit. I also rotated the buzz saw as now emphasized his posture of shouting down his enemy.

When painting, I left the front piece of armor off. It would only leave a glue seam along the two shoulder pads. Unfortunate locations, but it could have been worse. By keeping it off, I was able to finish the face and arms without all the extra armor plates being in the way.

It was nerve wracking gluing the pieces back together and sculpting the new details. I kept thinking I was going to scratch the face or stick a big glob of putty into his mouth.

I used Milliput black as I had that available, but in hindsight, Green Stuff, or at least something not black, would have made it much easier. The black is hard to see while working with it.

As I mentioned up top, I had originally planted him on a simple resin base. But after all the effort to paint this guy, I knew he needed something more. The struggle was to provide the angle to match his stance. The original model has a chunk of rock under his left foot that I had removed.

So combining my tips from creating custom bases, and some new learnings from Andy’s scenic base tutorial, I got to work on this ruined walkway. I hacked apart some flooring pieces to fit the round base and propped them up with some cork. A couple of ruined tubes, obligatory skulls, and putty to fill in the gaps.

Wrap Up

Thanks for checking out my Warboss and Megaboss conversion. I would love to hear your feedback, thoughts, and criticism below in the comments. Especially if you think an area could use more work.