The base of this build is a figure from the game Hate. All of its miniatures are incredibly
badass and any one of them would make an excellent chaos warrior or champion without any conversion.
As we all know though I’m more partial to ork conversions, and this miniature in particular
caught my eye as a good base for one. His musculature is strange without being cartoonish,
he’s appropriately huge for a Kitbosh ork, and all the horns and piercings and trophies
he’s festooned with immediately suggested to me the possibility of converting him into
a feral warboss, one that boils out from the hinterlands of a world years after a waaagh
to tear down all man has built. The first step was to snip off all the mutant
arms from my future warboss, and shave down the remaining stumps. While a lot of his ornaments
are cool, this crotchal skull shelf is a bit much. I snipped it off, though really what
I should’ve done is just saw or slice it off and moved it elsewhere.
With it off I carved into the bottom half of his paunch to make room for a loincloth.
I did the same with the primitive shorts he has going on in the back, and while I was
at it, scrapped off his back hair. Orks don’t have hair so it would have to be gone at some
point, and I’d cover the blank area later. I mixed some procreate, flattened it, then
gathered it around my warboss’s waist like it was an animal hide scraped clean into crude
leather. One odd thing about the miniature is how he’s
posed. He’s leaned really, really far back as though he’s swinging around. It doesn’t
look terrible, but… also not great. To fix it, I took a sheet of pvc and shaved it down
at an angle, then glued the warboss to the angled portion so it looks like he’s descending
down a rock or some rubble. It shows off the musculature of his chest a little less than
the original does, but feels more plausibly balanced.
I’d snipped it off before I started the video, but the original model comes with a
warhammer that’s tiny compared to his bulk. To replace it, I had two main options I liked.
First was the axe from the Age of Sigmar megaboss, and second a big two handed blade from the
brute kit. Both worked well, but I ended up going with the brute blade because to me it
had a bit more of a chipped stone or bone look to it.
Some interpretations of feral ork or Snakebite conversions I’ve seen kit them up with Age
of Sigmar Orruk armor, but to me that doesn’t feel quite right. There’s too much of an
industrial edge to it to me, more medieval than tribal. And for this warboss in specific,
I liked the idea of a feral ork leading his waaagh out of the hinterlands for the first
time to descend on the lands of men in a bloody, butchering tide.
While I like this skeleton strapped to his forearm, I snipped it off to make space for
this centurion bolter. While my feral boss was supposed to be largely tribal, I did like
the idea of the odd piece of looted imperial paraphernalia or tech, taken almost more as
trophies than anything else. To that end I scraped the plate on his forearm flat enough
that it would make a good bond when I glued the bolter to it.
I really, really dig the original face this sculpt comes with, but it’s unfortunately
pretty blatantly un-orky, so it would have to be replaced. I snipped off the head and
beard, then glued in place an ork head from the nobz kit, careful to keep the same angle
and general placement. A big inspiration for the head and shoulders
portion of this boss is this piece of concept art I’ve always really loved of a snakebite
ork. It’s savage and tough and cunning, and to mimic it I layered procreate to refill
some of the mass I’d taken off. I then dragged my knife through it in wavy lines to create
the texture of fur. Besides the wolf pelt, the other big element
of that piece of concept art are the tusks hanging around the boss’s face. I upended
my bag of horn and tusk bits, and looked through them until I’d found a few of the right
size and pressed them into the procreate hide to keep them in place.
This is a texture plate for fur. I’ve tried to use it before and found it really fiddly,
but for the rest of my boss’s cloak I figured I’d give it another chance. Which is lucky,
because it actually turned out pretty well. So well, that I decided to replace the portion
I’d already sculpted with it. It fit well, and I used my knife to make the edge ragged
and flow naturally into the tusks. The concept art has a ring of tusks coming
up from the shoulders of the warboss, but for one reason or another when I added them
to my warboss it didn’t look quite right. Sometimes things just don’t translate from
one medium to another, and especially in this case the end of the horns are actually cut
off in the picture. The original art also has a claw necklace,
but that was an element I didn’t try adding, as it just looked too busy when I dry fitted
it. With all his major elements in place, I moved
on to accessorizing my warboss. These are a trio of heads that I picked because they
all look like they’re kind of deadish from the right angle. I carved off a spot at his
right hip, and started gluing the back of the heads to him as though he’d strung them
together as recent trophies he’s reaped from the empire.
His left leg has always looked a little runty to me, so I decided to hide it by hanging
a trio of skulls from the belt there. Another idea I had for a trophy was a lasgun or guard
gun of some type hanging from his belt while still clutched by a torn off arm as though
he’d ripped it off and never bothered to clean it. To achieve that I snipped down the
arm of this Tempestus Scion pistol. It was unfortunately too long with the arm, and the
arm didn’t really look like it was dead, so I ended up snipping it down to just the
fingers and hand. I glued the hand in place, then mixed up procreate to hide the connection
points within the folds of his belt. And with that, my feral warboss was ready
for battle. On the whole I’m pleased with how he turned out, the strange but plausible
xeno morphology of him. The one aspect of the model I don’t love is his peg leg. I
didn’t go over it, but I replaced the original spike leg with a horn of a similar size that
could theoretically painted to look like ivory, but it still seems a little out of place.
If I ever remake this boss I’ll probably try and splicing on the foot from something
else. Besides the peg leg, I think he’s an appropriately intimidating looking feral
warboss, with a mix of tribal elements and looted imperial trophies. You can just imagine
him at the head of a waaagh boiling out from the hinterlands of some imperial world to
descend on its residents. Even his pose feels right for that narrative, holding his choppa
high to lead his waaagh into battle, a herald of the butchery to come.
If you liked this video hit the like button, subscribe, and check out some of the other
massive warboss’s I’ve converted. Thanks for watching