Has it ever happened to you, having a unit from your codex that you absolutely love but on the other hand you hate the model that is available for it? Well thats exactly what happened to me with the Helldrake unit from the latest Chaos dex, I totally despise the Helldrake model... I know its highly detailed and really awesome kit but I don't feel the connection with the whole feeling of a chaos army... at least not in my mind!

To make a long story short (hardly since I have already been mumbling geek stuff for the past paragrapgh :P ) I have decided long ago to make my own version of the Helldrake and since my love for Papa Nurgle is always strong, the image I had in my mind was already there...

...and then all of a sudden I saw this in GW's blog one day and it blew my mind! This was exactly what I had in mind for my own Helldrake... a giant fly... that flies... and now I have the model I need for my conversion!

Next thing I knew, I was ordering an Arachnarok giant spider! The conversion was pretty straightforward. I assembled the spiders body as in the instructions and repositioned its legs to look like they are just hanging.

That was the easy part, The hard part was the engines. I decided to create a turbine kind of propellant like the Blight Drone, totally from scratch.

The model now needed something to combine its organic nature to its mechanic parts. I needed cables and a lot of them. One great and really easy way to make various shapes and sizes of cabling is with some old combs and some greenstuff. The following picture gives u an idea, just make the greenstuff in the shape of a thin "worm" and roll the teeth of the comb over it until it gets the right shape.


The finished model looks like this, I used the flying base from Dragonforge (just the clear rod actually)





I created the scenic base in the same way as the bases of my Caestus and Stormtalon, using some dry clay chunks PVA and lots of gravel. I added some bits and pieces too to make something more scenic.




Messing with my mind and my inspiration tonight were the OM... I know, something is really wrong...