Kitbashing

Tactics are important but so is making your miniatures stand out.

You may have seen the fancy models people use out there in their warbands or wanted to personalise your miniatures to make them more unique from the rest of the crowd. Thankfully it’s not as difficult as you may have thought.

All Shadespire miniatures are plastic, which is a massive boon. It makes it easy to cut stuff off, glue on and pin as well as cross parts with other kits. The simplest form of this is kitbashing and requires almost no use of sculpting skills or greenstuff.

So, how do you go about it? Well as always it starts with imagination. Think of what you want the model in question to have. For starters, let’s look at Bonekutta:

Now that’s a nice model but I want to give it an even more Orruk touch. The things I want to change are his head and axe. The head is a simple enough change as it’s a separate piece. The axe is more difficult. With what I have in mind, I’ll look at my bitz box. As these guys are ‘Ardboyz, I have bitz from that kit to use with Ironskull’s Boyz.

I just simply take the axe head from one of the weapons and then an armoured Orruk head. For the axe, I cut them off at their bases with plastic clippers. Normally you could glue these on with plastic glue but I want something more secure. To do this I use a paperclip and a small 1mm hand drill to pin each piece together with the help of super glue. This makes the join much stronger and more resistant to damage. After all of that we glue on the head and Bonekutta now looks like so:

Much more Orruk-ier! It’s simple changes like this that can subtly change your miniatures to make them more unique. Sometimes the best conversions/kitbashes are those that look like the model was made that way to begin with.

With a lick of paint, our Orruk is complete and the joins are almost invisible to the untrained eye! It looks like he was always destined to have a helmet and choppy choppa.

One problem, however, can be the acquiring of bitz needed. I’m lucky that I’ve been in the hobby for 15 years now so I have a huge collection to pick from. Don’t fear, there are other ways too! You can always trade bitz with your wargaming mates, buy bitz individually online or buy the kits you need for parts. The great thing about the GW range is how interchangeable all the parts are, just look for familiar kits in the ‘family’ of your range (eg Ironjawz for Ironskull’s or Stormcast Eternals for Steelheart’s etc) unless you’re feeling more adventurous!

Here’s a brief set of pictures for some of my conversions/kitbashes:

That’s it for today then. Something short and sweet to relieve us from all that competitive stress 😉

Hopefully it helped to inspire you to customise and personalise your own Shadespire miniatures! The game may focus on winning but there’s still art at the core. Converted models also roll crits better.