Iron Kingdoms RPG - 'Bosh' Skullsplitter Character Model

Peoples levels of immersion differ with RPG's but what's quite common across all of them is having a model that represents your character or in some cases a piece of artwork that does the same. For those of you with an interest in RPG's the background for our characters, mercenary company and write-ups of our missions can be found here.

When starting the Privateer Press RPG 'Iron Kingdoms' I somewhat arbitrarily selected an Ogrun and 'Man at Arms' seemed like an appropriate career...though his second career of 'Bounty Hunter' was in retrospect less than optimal...this is a role-playing game rather than a competitive war game so I went with it.

I purchased from a hobbyist friend a model that he had no intention of using to represent my character in game (Many people play out the in session combats with actual models and that's kinda how the system is designed but we don't...or haven't felt the need to yet at least). My own character was equipped differently from the model I acquired so I started a conversion project.

However his equipment quickly changed so I decided to wait till his weapon preferences stabilised a bit before finishing the model off. 'Bosh' carries a Nyss Claymore 'borrowed' from a dead Nyss who didn't need theirs any more by virtue of..well...being dead. However with the Nyss models that carry such weapons being fairly small an actual one of those weapons looked like a toothpick in his hand so I instead went with 'looks cool' rather than particularly accurate and just made him a sword scaled to the model to represent it. I also still wanted him to carry his other favoured weapon the Ogrun Warcleaver so with a bit of converting I took the pieces of the weapon that had been in his hand, reattached both ends and strapped it across his back together with another he'd 'acquired'.

His sword got fancier...looting is apparently just fine if your an RPG character...

I also decided to paint the skin sections as leather rather than flesh because he wears extremely heavy plate armour and that isn't well known for having gaps where weapons can stick in you through. I also added a lot of little pouches for his gear to go in rather than stick a load of extra items to him and clutter him up. The 'mask' is from a Games Workshop Chaos Defiler but I'm sure similar things are available if you look around a bit...

I'm not a brilliant painter so I won't bore you with an elaborate stage by stage painting guide as you can probably guess just by looking at the model but basically it was an army painter plate mail base colour, with the straps and 'skin' painted a light brown. The whole thing was then washed with Army Painter 'Dark Tone' and once dry everything was then highlighted in an appropriate colour. Some blood was added at the end as well. The result actually looks better in the real world as for some reason my camera has lost the ability to capture depth...

Of course he's recently acquired a different shield...so I may have to convert the conversion of the conversion now...

Thoughts and comments are (as usual) most welcome.