The origin of this build is a commission I received for a massive Genestealer Ork Warboss.
I was immediately intrigued by the idea, and started by obtaining a Khornate Slaughterbrute
as a base. This may seem like an odd starting point considering it’s neither Tyrnaid nor Ork,
but the model has always had a vaguely Tyranid look to me,
and the musculature feels nicely strange and xeno even for an ork.
The genestealer models we have aren’t a platonic ideal of genestealer; they’re specifically human
based genestealers, and it made sense to me that an ork based genestealer wouldn’t be identical.
I started by snapping apart his legs into their separate pieces.
Since the Slaughterbrute’s original legs are digitigrade, I knew I’d need to cut them off at
the knee. I scored the line of muscle, then pulled it apart. For the shin I’m using the same Defiler
leg I have for several of my other huge ork builds. It has a really tough and powerful look,
and in this case is the right length. I used procreate to attach it below the knee,
glued on plates of plasticard to hide the hollow in the middle, then used a stompa toe as a foot.
With legs worked out, I attached the front chest portion of the Slaughterbrute.
The original Slaughterbrute chest is angled a lot lower and more forward, so procreate
was necessary to adjust it. I’m going to skip a lot of steps following this where I created
a scaffold of plastic and glued on the sides of a deff dread at an attempt at power armor… because I
ended up liking none of it. My original plan was to essentially copy the back of my mega armored
boss from a bit ago, but the problem is that this bosses chest is a lot broader, and there’s no good
connection point at the sides, so the sides of the deff dread armor just looks weirder.
I decided to start the chest portion over from scratch, this time with the back glued on. It’s
very cool looking, but the commissioner had specifically requested mega armor,
so a lot of it ended up covered later. The commissioner had specifically requested a
massive tyranid weapon, so I picked this one from the carnifex kit and used greenstuff to attach it
at the elbow to one of the slaughterbrute’s arms. I put it up against the warboss’s body
and realized the slaughterbrute’s upper arms were simply going to be too spindly.
Which was annoying, because I really liked their spiky designs. So instead of trying to source
arms from elsewhere, I simply molded and grew the arms into about twice their previous size.
This matched the torso better, but now the carnifex cannon was looking a bit slim,
so I buffed it up with a tyranid warrior gun on the side. I also switched it to the left arm for
some reason. To connect arm and gun I sculpted some tyranid looking shell edge as though the
canon had split flesh on the way out. For his power klaw, I originally had the
idea of using the arm from a morkonaut to circle the forearm of the slaughterbrute.
I thought that would look interesting with two metal talons, and the thumb talon organic.
It’s a cool idea, but as with many of those, in execution it just didn’t work. To replace it I
scratch built a complete monster of a replacement. I really love it, and actually cast a mold of
it so I can copy it in the future if I want. For armor, I bashed together a mantle composed
of a tyranid organic shell, morkonaut pauldrons, and the iron jaw from the ork mekshop kit.
I also switched the left foot to the original slaughterbrute’s so that it seemed like his body
was mutating messily and asymmetrically. The last piece of the genestealer ork
puzzle was his head. When this project started I genuinely wasn’t sure what I was going to do. The
technofreak heads I usually use for these massive builds wouldn’t work because of all their tech,
and growing other ork heads to the appropriate size would just look cartoonish. On top of that,
it needed to look tyranid-y in some way. The solution I found was this obscure plague
ogryn. His head looks really orkish to me, and in place of nurglely disease, the mutated
tusks and tongue and eyes could be painted to look tyranid-esque. The head was too small,
but I grew it into this. I glued it in place so he was looking off towards some target mid roar.
And with that, this commission was ready to go off and await the ravenous hunger of the stargods. I’m
really pleased with how he turned out, and I think he hits a nice balance between Ork and Tyranid,
an Ork with genestealer mutations bursting from him. He’s also the largest warboss I’ve crafted
so far, though that wasn’t really my goal. If you liked this video hit the like button,
subscribe, or check out some of my other conversions. Thanks for watching.