Night Lords Magnetic Aspiring Champion Painted (Mostly)

So, this week I've been mostly concentrating on getting the Magnetic Aspiring Champion I posted the guide for, painted.  As you can see from the photos, I've pretty much achieved this now.  I've not done all his arms or shoulder pads yet, and one thing you might notice in the image above is an unpainted combi-plasma gun that I've converted.  Here's a closer look:

 Essentially what I've done with this is to adapt the guide I found here for making a combi-plasma conversion.  The conversion is remarkably simple - if a little fiddly.  I used the following bitz to make it:

-Chaos Space Marine Bolter
-Space Marine Command Plasma Pistol
-Chaos Space Marine Combat Knife
-Chaos Space Marine Bolt Pistol Arm

You can probably see what I've done here, so I'm not going to go into too much detail.  I used a Space Marine Command Plasma Pistol, because I got a load of them cheap.  This did mean that I had to remove the text on the side of the pistol, and the scope from on top - which is where I got the idea to add the chaos combat knife as a bayonet.  This makes the gun look a lot more 'chaos-like'.  I'm pretty proud of how this conversion went together - a little green stuff and it should look perfect once it's been painted.

You might also notice that I've magnetised the trophy rack on this Aspiring Champion's backpack (complete with Dark Angels helmet).  Given that Night Lords are all about terrorising their victims, it was pretty much a given that this nasty little bastard would be carrying a trophy rack of some sort - but this also nearly doubles the height of the mini - which would make transporting it to games more difficult.  But a little drilling, glueing and green stuffing has made this completely removable - and also leaves the door open for me to add custom trophy racks for when I'm playing against other races (like Necrons, Owen).

Another little fluffy touch involves the eyes - which unfortunately you can't see too well here.  Night Lords are supposed to have completely black eyes so that they can see in the dark - but painting a minis eyes just black looks not good at best.  Then I stumbled across this idea (scroll down a little bit).  So my Night Lords are now getting Boltgun Metal eyes with a black outline, which looks pretty sweet and stays on the right side of the fluff.

 Another little detail that I'm quite pleased with on this model is the power sword.  I followed another guide for this, which can be found here.  Certainly, no one should be able to argue that they didn't know this was a power sword!

Annoyingly, the varnish that I've used to protect this model (Vallejo Satin Finish) doesn't work too well with flash photography.  I'll have to remember this in the future, and photograph my minis before I varnish them.  This can be a little difficult when they're magnetised though - removing arms and shoulder pads all the time does make the paint prone to chipping.

So now I'm free to get on with the rest of this guy's unit.  Hopefully the rest of them won't take me as long as this little fellow did!  There is still work to be done on this model too - I've got to paint his combi-plasma, make and paint bolt pistol and chainsword arms for him, do 'marked' shoulder pads (Slaanesh, Nurgle, etc), and decide what colour I want to do the heatsink on his plasma weapons (don't pretend you didn't notice)!  So it looks like I've got enough painting to keep me going for a while!