Classic Verminlord Deceiver; part 1 - Assembly

 Today I we're starting on the first Verminlord. This one is going to be a Deceiver.

Luckily the modern Verminlords pay strong homage to the classic. The pose is basically reversed, but the elements are mostly the same. The modern kit comes with options for 4 flavors of Verminlord.

There's a character option, Skreech Verminking, who is probably closest to the classic in appearance, sporting a glaive and half skull face. There's a caster variant called a Warpseer, who is still pretty similar carrying a glaive and a seeing stone. The Warbringer, which is melee option, and he's still got the glaive, but has bladed gauntlet on the other hand. Then, there is the Pestilens offering, the Corruptor, whose got a pair of reaping hooks. And finally the one I'm replicating here, the Verminlord Deceiver of Clan Eshin. This fellow is armed with a dagger and a throwing star and wears a mask.

Those three elements are what we're going to use to sell this classic as a Deceiver: dagger, throwing star, and mask. For the mask we'll sculpt something out of putty, but that part we'll deal with in a later installment. Today's work is going to focus on all the dry work - cleaning mold lines, cutting, fitting etc.

For the dagger and throwing star, most of the elements are already there. We'll modify the glaive into the dagger and we'll rotate the pointing hand and curl the finger inwards so we can have it grip a throwing star.

First thing's first though, we've gotta open up the model kit, check for any issues (missing or miscast parts, etc.), and clean mold lines of off every piece. Since this kit is long OOP, if there were any issues we'd be stuck fixing them or have to shell out the cash for a new one. Luckily everything is in good shape.

Once everything is cleaned up we're going to start on our dagger. (I totally cut first and cleaned second here and would not advise that, dealing with mold lines on the hand ended up unnecessarily difficult).

We need to make three cuts on glaive. I used my flat cutters here since it is so much quicker and I really only cared about preserving one side of the cuts. I clipped the haft of the weapon flush on either side of the hand, and just below the blade. This is what we're left with:

Since we'll be pinning this once we get to assembly, I went ahead and marked we're I'll be drilling. I like to mark with a fine point sharpie first, just eyeballing the center and then I'll use the tip of my exacto knife to gouge a small divot to guide the bit.

Next we need to work on the hand for the throwing star. First step I took here was to bend the finger inwards a bit. I used a pair of needle nose pliers for this. Put one side flat along the bottom of the thumb, and then use the other to grip the pointed finger in various locations, applying force gently to try to curl the finger in a fairly organic looking way. Once your happy with the hand, use your file to clean up any tool marks left behind.

Now, since the hand is turned with the fingers downward we're going to have to cut it off and reposition it. Looking at how the arm piece joins the torso, and how prominent the elbow is, I don't think there is another good way to sell a throwing motion. I used a hobby knife (and most of my patience) to carefully chop off the hand. This part sucked, and there probably is a better way to do it, but I've got a knife and a Dremel, and I was afraid the Dremel would be way too aggressive and we need both sides of the cut to be in good shape.

At this point a went ahead and marked all my pinning locations, pretty much gouging a little guide hole in the center of each joint. I'm pinning everything because I'd like to only have to assemble this guy once.

The only exception to the pinning in the center guidance is where the torso and legs meet. Here I plan to pin on the left side only. I'll explain. Most of the joints on the model are nice and tight. This one is not. And I want to twist him a bit toward his left and lean him a bit forward. This pose is fairly proud, chest out, arms up. But since this joint is so sloppy, I'm taking advantage of that to get a more skulking pose. I'll have a huge gap to fill, but I think it'll be worth it in the end.

Another minor modification I'm making is to rotate the tail clockwise about 90 degrees from its original orientation. This will put it curling down toward the right ankle. Again, this is help with the overall pose, Clan Eshin specializes in stealth after all, and this model needs to reflect that. This is pretty simple to achieve, we only need to file the base of the tail a bit and part of the right thigh, and this is just because the tail is broader along this axis, so a little filing saves us some gap filling later on.

Most of the modifications have been made at this point, so here are all the components ready for assembly

At this point, drill all the holes, then cut and insert pins. I like to use brass rod, mostly because it comes in standard sizes, so I can specifically pick drill bits to match. Don't glue anything yet, we're going to dry fit everything first. Since we're altering the pose a bit, we're going to put the whole model together with just the pins in to make sure we've got things right.

Here we are just pinned.

At this point we're going to bend things into place. We've left this part of the work until now, because it's at this stage were we can best get a feel for how it looks. We're going to file the, bend and trim the pin until we've got things in place.

We've got slightly over long pins in the left arm. The one in the wrist is especially important because, one we want to bend the hand in to help give the appearance he's throwing the star, and two because we lost some material when we chopped that hand off.


Moving up the arm to the elbow joint, we really want to look at the arm and pose in detail. I'm inclined to try to extend and bend this a bit, again to help sell the throwing motion. We've got to balance this, though, with keeping the arms proportional. Remember earlier, when I mentioned the prominence of the elbow? It becomes especially important here. My sculpting skills exist at the level of gap filling, so I'm not the guy to be making super extensive modifications. The real question here is, can we get away with bending the arm like this? And if so, do we need to remove material on the inside to keep the length believable?

Think about it like this. Go look in a mirror. Turn sideways and hold your arm at shoulder height so you're looking at your elbow in the mirror. Now bend you arm toward your chest. See how it looks like your elbow moved forward? Anatomically/physiologically motion works on a basis on expansion and contraction. Push and pull. One side of the muscle group stretches and the other compresses. And the "elbow" is part of the forearm. Its actually part of the ulna. So its physically rotating around the humerus and it really is moving forward, at least in that plain. The muscles on the inside of the arm are compressed in this motion, but the overall length of the arm isn't changing. So we'd remove material on that part of the arm piece to keep the nominal length of the arm roughly constant (and then we'll want to bulk it up a bit when we get our putty out). And it is anatomically correct for the elbow to go forward when compared to the straight armed stance.

We're going to do the same thing at the waist. We want to twist and bend to the left. I've only pinned on this side for ease, but we've got to be careful. Bending at the waist is far more complex than bending at the elbow. And one this for sure, we definitely don't pivot exclusively on our left. So, keep in mind, a small rotation has got some pretty significant impact, and we're going to have to gap fill it all. And because of all the muscles involved, believably modeling a big change of pose here is beyond my skill set. And frankly without other extensive modifications anything more than a bit of a hunch is not going to look believable. And despite planning it like that I've ended up with a pretty huge gap to fill in the waste.

Regardless, at this point our final pose is achieved:

Just go through and glue all the joints and the assembly is done. I wanted to leave the head separated for now, so it'll be easier to sculpt the hood, but the posing of the arm and size of the head didn't allow for that.

Well that's it for today. I hope this was enjoyable, or at least informative. I feel like it ended up incredibly wordy, but I wanted to make sure I explained why I was doing things and not just what I was doing. It's always been a challenge for me to observe someone's work and actually walk away having learned something other than how to simply duplicate the same project. My hope is that by explaining, step by step, and including my thought process, that anyone who reads this has the opportunity to pick up something they can apply to any project, not just hacking up a classic Verminlord.

Next time we're going to get into the gap filling and sculpting on this guy.