Alkonosts & Sirins - WIP

You can find those painted HERE.

This is a project I started back in May 2014 when I wanted some Fell Bats in my army. I didn't like the ones offered by GW or other companies so I decided to make my own - and I looked into Slavic mythology for some ideas. There are numerous versions of birds with female heads in it and I choose two kinds of them to serve as my Fell Bats - THIS picture was especially inspiring for me.

I bought two kinds of birds for this - Giant Eagles from Mirliton SG and Wood Elf Warhawks from GW - two of each. Sawing their heads away was much more difficult than I thought - it was the first time I had to do such a conversion on a metal model. This is the first rough sketch of my idea for them.

Then I thought - I can make this even more Slavic! Instead of mounting them on gravestones, statues or other kinds of rubble I decided to make some Slavic sculptures for them, wooden ones, depicting mostly old, pagan deities. To spare on greenstuff I made the first rough shape out of plasticine and then covered it with two separate layers of greenstuff. Nowadays I just use cheap milliput for the 'core' part.

This is how they looked after I sculpted real bodies on those birds - still before adding eyes and other details.

And this is the final version, with details, hair, decorations, mounted on beforementioned sculptures. It was the first time for me to sculpt whole heads and that amount of detail - and while they look a bit wonky it was still a very good experience.