Greetings fellow wargamers! Today I present to you ‘Ghost Rider,’ a converted Chaos lord on bike for a Nurgle 40k army.
I’ve always been a big fan of the look of the Ghost Rider, and thought it would make a welcome addition to a 40k warband. The trick was finding a way to convert the model using all GW bits and managing to coax flames out of my mediocre sculpting talents. So let’s get right down to brass tax.
The conversion itself was pretty cut and dry. The head for the biker is from the Vampire Counts Coven Throne/Mortis Engine kit. I used a spare hub cab to give a base for the skull to rest on in the neck socket. I used a heat gun to bend the tendril of smoke around the backpack and create a sense of forward motion to the figure. The axe is from a Chaos Dark Vengeance Chosen.
The flame are a combination of a Chaos Spawn tentacled head and several sets of spawn tentacles. The tentacles were glued to the wheels and arranged in a way that was aesthetically pleasing and created a sense of writhing flames. The flames were painted by brush using a basic blending technique, working from dark green to a light green until the final highlight is nearly pure white with the touch of light green.
Ordinarily I’d suggest using an airbrush to create some OSL from the flickering green flames, but my airbrush was out of commission and I didn’t feel I could do the model justice by hand. So I decided to leave the model as is and go back to touch the OSL back up when I had my airbrush in hand again.
Whilst flames in small areas aren’t terribly hard to sculpt, flames that writhe and snake out are very tricky. Using the tentacles saved precarious amount of time. And since this was a nurgle style chaos lord I felt like the tetacles for flames really worked with the style of the model. You can almost imagine the flames writhing with a life all their own.
Although the traditional Ghost Rider comic book super hero has flames surrounding every inch of the tire, I felt like localizing the flames to a few locations got my point across with going overboard.
My name is Caleb and I am the owner of White Metal Games, a full service miniature and conversion service in Raleigh, NC. Check us out here!
About the Author: Caleb Dillon
