Custom Keeper of Secrets

Last January I'd just finished painting a plastic Daemon Prince for a painting competition, & found I had a lot of nice bits left over. I was trying to figure out how to build something with the remaining pieces so I drew up a little concept sketch for a Daemon Prince/Chronos Pain Engine kitbash, here:

The concept was simple: Toss a few Talos/Chronos tentacles around the upper body of the Daemon Prince, and you'd have a unique looking combination. Plus by using the tentacles for the lower body it meant you didn't need an extra pair of legs, which are one of the limiting bits of the Daemon Prince Box.

I bartered online for a few Talos sprues, and got to see how well they actually worked together.

Turns out some parts fit better than others.

The heads & helmets were just right. They looked fine right off the sprue. As a whole the tentacles were too small. The pair I had drawn growing from the back looked puny, and the tentacle cluster I was going to use in lieu of legs wouldn't come close to filling the role without using an extra set.

Instead of the shoulder tentacles I decided to attach a pair of Daemon Prince tails to the back. They fit better size-wise, and they nicely mirrored the bony spines on its back. I took the tentacles and placed them on his ribcage to tie in the upper body and lower body.

Here's how it looked once I had a second pair of tentacle clusters:

A little later on I came up with an idea for an alternate head. The faceless "gimp" look was great, but it lacked a carnal, sadistic quality I'd expect out of a Greater Daemon of Slaanesh.  By cutting up another Talos head, and a Prince head I was able to make something far more violently unhinged looking:

This uses two Prince heads (the lower face of one, and the horns of another) and one Talos head. The Talos head is backwards and upside down compared to how it would normally be.

Work stopped around March due to other projects & my own personal ADD, but I've picked it up again. Here's how he looked two days ago:

 I decided to make a few changes:
* I no longer like the shoulder spike. The mini had enough jutting spiky bits, it didn't need two more to distract attention. I fashioned jewels for the brackets of the shoulder guards instead
* One of the big selling points of the mini is how it hovers above the base. To give it a little elevation I tipped over some imperial bastion terrain and attached the flying base to that instead.
* Once they were in place, the tentacle clusters made the torso look too small, so I added a pair of hip plates from parts on the Talos sprues. This will also help when it comes to painting to be able to pull colors from the upper body to the lower body as well, hopefully giving it a more uniform look.

Since then I've been working on the base, using greenstuff to add elevation & extra detail bits.

The last thing I'm waiting on before getting into painting is a spear. I decided that the Prince axe, while burly and violent, doesn't really fit with the aesthetic. Slaaneshi daemons should be impaling enemies, not chopping them (subtle, I know). Instead I'm going to do a weapon swap with a spear from the Tomb Kings Necropolis Knights box. I don't know if it'll fit just right, but I should have the bit in the next few days, and we'll see then.

Either way, the mini has come a long long way, and I'll be excited to get it to the next stage.

~Muninn