Converted Treekin

Recently, I have been commission painting some High Elves in an Avelorn theme. It made me think back to my own elf army, started a couple of years back. At that time I had put it on hold because I was unsure how the army would play under 8th edition, but now I have a much clearer idea of the direction to take. One thing that I would like to include are treekin, but the official models are not the best sculpts, so I want to convert and build my own versions. Thinking back to my converted treeman, I decided to have a go at a similar project for the treekin. Time to break out the tools and bits box.

This is the basis of the conversion. These are old metal dryads from 4th or 5th edition, which I picked up on ebay for a couple of pounds apiece. I had to strip off the paint, but that's easy enough on metal figures. The other bits required are mostly plastic spares from current dryads, a few bits of sprue and any other bits I could find that were tree-ish. 

Stage 1. I cut off the feet and hands, to remove any human like appearance. Then I added some support to the legs, to raise the height and to make it easy to fix the chopped off legs to the bases. I used bits of plastic sprue, old metal bits from a treeman model and even some wood elf dryad plastic bits. It looks rough now, but most of this will be covered in the next step. The important thing at this stage is the height and stability of the model. It must be rock solidly attached, so I left them overnight to allow the glue to set hard.

Stage 2. I added some roots, taken from the plastic dryad sprues. Mostly these were just branches, though I did also use a couple of trimmed dryad heads.

Stage 3. This was the stage I was dreading, I added some grey stuff to the bases of the legs and sculpted in some basic bark textures. This turned out to be much easier than I had anticipated. I rolled out the grey stuff into a sausage, then chopped it into little bits, then squashed  it into the gaps. When I had done all three in this way, I went back to the first to add the texture. The little pause in between applying and sculpting the grey stuff made it much easier, my top tip of the day!

Stage 4. The final stage is to add limbs and branches, again using mainly dryad bits. I have tried to build each model in a certain style. The figure on the right is slender, with whip-like branches and long spikes. The figure in the middle is more stocky, with heavy "arms" and stubby branches. That on the left is, well I don't know what his theme is, that's trees for you. The mish mash appearance of the metal and plastic bits is a bit jarring at the moment, and I may smooth over a few joins with some grey stuff, but once the paint is applied I am confident these will look good. Another three to build and then I will slap on some colours.

More woodland action to come in the next few weeks, not just from these treekin, but from a very exciting project I mentioned on Leap Day. More on that next time.