Dreadnought surgery

In the previous post I mentioned the dread I'd done for my Eagle Knights. I think everyone will notice that it was actually the Hellbrute from DV, with minor modifications. But the question is how do you turn the DV Hellbrute in to a marine dreadnought? There are probably some people out there who will think that this is a simple easy thing and I really wish I was one of them! Granted I could probably have done a lotmore than I did, shaving off some more of the symbols and faces carved in to the body of the dread, green stuffing various parts to make it more angular and slab sided, as per the marine dreads.

Hellbrute and Marine dread

With them side by side its easier to see the differences, and there are quite a few of them. Apart from all the spiky bits, of which there are quite a lot, the whole thing is more rounded, less brick like. There is also a lot more detail to the torso, and especially the legs. While I would quite like to have a proper dread, I have an agreement with myself that I will always try to use what I have before buying anything else and while a dread with multimelta and powerfist, foot slogging across the board is pretty useless, its cheap and I've only got one because I have to (but thats a topic I've covered before).

So what did I do to try and De-chaos the dread, probably not as much as I could have. I went for the basics of cut all the spikey bits off and lost the chains and bits from the torso. I could have taken off the spikes/arrows from the torso and legs and possibly the face from the left leg but that was going to be a lot of time and effort, both of which are a bit lacking at the moment. I also like the face, and think that with the right paint job it might look quite good and not at all chaos like, its a long shot as everyone knows what the model is and instantly jumps to the 'oh your playing chaos' conclusion. There are a couple of things I would have liked to change, but a) don't have the bits or b) don't have the skill. These are the middle of the torso, as I would liked to have put a marine dread center section in, but I don't have one and I'm not paying ebay prices for one. I don't really like the face but I don't know what else to do with it, so it willnstay for the moment and ill see what its like painted. I would have liked to have changed the exhausts at the top for more mechanical looking ones, as the current ones are quite organic looking, but hopefully a metallic paint job will do something to mitigate that a bit. The big one though, is the back bone/spine structure up the back. Its obviously a back bone and doesn't fit with the machine that is the marine dread but I have no way of dealing with this. Not only don't I have a clue as to how to deal with it, I don't have the ability with green stuff, and the like, to remodel it.

In reality the who thing is a compromise and not a very good one at that but its what I have, so ill deal with it. The one thing I can say is that I actually quite like the pose, he does look like he's aboutto wreck something or someone. Ill see what he looks like when the paint job is finished, but for now its a waiting game.