Iron Snakes: Chapter Master Seydon Build Complete

Hi folks,

When I was planning this conversion I had another flick through Brothers of the Snake to try and build a picture of Seydon in my head. The two passages that stood out for me were:

"Chapter Master Seydon was just a shadow: robed, mysterious and towering. His cloak was made of broken, polished, wyrm-horn pieces, linked together like a jigsaw puzzle by gold wire. Slow respiration throbbed form the exchanger tanks under his cloak... He was a good meter taller taller than Priad".

Later on, after a battle against the Orks, there was this:

"His jigsaw cloak of polished wyrm-hide pieces had been ripped and torn, and loose fragments dangled from unravelling golden threads. His great lance, Tiborus, lay across his knees."

I also thought it would be fun to try and pay homage to the cover art of the book as well, because I have always loved it:

To give the model that extra height, I chose to base it on the Primaris Captain. I used an old resin True Scale Space Marine backpack, to which I added some regular vents (just visible in the picture). The head is from the Space Marine Captain kit; I thought the rebreather reflected the description of his laboured respiration well. I found an Imperial laurel piece, trimmed it down and added it behind Seydon's head. The base is a Spartan 40 mm base from Scibor, which I will attach after painting.

I chose the Stalked pattern bolter to match the picture and added a small Spartan shield from Scibor.

To match the text, I cobbled together a lance to represent Tiborus. The hand was too small to work on separately, so I left one large piece of sprue attached. The shaft was from a Dark Elf spear, which I cut into two pieces and drilled out for pinning. I cut the blade of the sword out then drilled out the hand. The two halves of the lance shaft were pinned to each other, through the hand. The lance head itself is a sword from a Wood Elf kit; it's patterns are very similar to the ones on my Techmarine's lance. After the pieces were secure, I cut away the last piece of sprue.

At the moment I am leaving both arms off so that I can paint the details on the body easier. I also needed to paint the shoulder pads separately, because I couldn't imagine free-handing the Iron Snakes symbol any other way. They still have some weathering to go, but here is a quick WIP.

 

The timeline for painting Seydon is "sometime before February". Because February is Squaduary and I am going to be all over that like three Thunderfires on a backfield blob.


See you across the table,

Marc