Hello and a warm welcome back to this very cool series, looking at all the incredibly unique conversions within the miniature painting world. Converted work is perhaps some of the most exciting and inspirational pieces of art to grace your eyes upon, due to the rich imagination and skill that goes into creating them. I came across Lucas' by chance through Reddit whilst looking for something completely unrelated to miniature painting. He had created what seemed like a blend of the aerial nature of the Kharadron Overlords with the cheeky aethetic of everyone's favourite little grots. I knew from that moment, I needed to share this awesome work with the world, and who better to share his perspective and experience with conversions with you all, than the man himself!? So buckle in for some turbulent times; here's Lucas and his aptly named 'Sky-Gitz'.
The Sky-Gitz army came about from a cumulation of a lot of things that I enjoy in this hobby. Ever since Age of Sigmar came out I always loved the theme of the steampunk airships. Goblins have always been my favorite race. I just love a cute lil spastic minion creepin about doing their little gobliny things. This army is my third that I have race swapped to goblins. I also really like the aesthetic of a water base, it provides such a stunning backdrop to a large model when down well, and KO in particular with their boats lend themselves to the style better than any other army. This is my third army playing around with resin basing and in my opinion the best result I have had.
I started my goblin journey with a seraphon big dino army, swapping the skinks for goblins and giving the entire army a swamp theme with the big monsters wading through shallow water. I learned a lot while working on this army, incuding a lot of things not to do with resin.
My next project brought me to a Daughters of Khaine army featuring all of the witch elves swapped to goblins worshiping the snake things. This time I continued playing around with water bases, these a coastal theme. I specifically liked how the Gitz stabba/shoota models looked like little cultists in their robes, so leaned into that theme. A friend designed and 3d printed some sickles to give to my little goblin troops. I played around with rounding off the water bases for this army, something that I would not do again, as it is a lot more time cosuming and dangerous. I used a dremmel with various sanding/buffing drums to round off the resin and then used nail polish to bring it back up to a gloss finish. (Note- resin is TOXIC and sanding it like this was done using a respirator)
Finally I moved on to the army that had been living in my head for years. There is just something I love about a bunch of cute lil goblins that have taken over the airships and gear of some dwarves and are just flying around having the time of their lives. I had a couple of things that I knew I wanted to do with this army. First I wanted to continue to use resin basing. KO boats in particular have a lot of negative space, and I really like how they work with more intinsive bases. Second I knew that I wanted to have a big cool display board for this army. Third I wanted to use as much of the offical KO sculps as possible to make it an easy army to play against. I love conversions, but I always try and keep my models to be easily identifiable and using weapons that are consistant with the original ones. I latched onto the idea of a deep ocean vibe with a oil platform style display board and everything kind of took off from there.
The actual conversion for the goblins was pretty simple. I took the armor for the KO models, drilled and cut out the head/arm holes and added in the goblin bits. I used a variety of bits from different goblin models from GW and other manufacturers for the arms and legs. The flying goblins I found “rider legs” gave vibe of the goblins little legs kicking while they were held up by the armor. Almost all of the heads I used Gretchen from 40K, and used the actual Gretchen models for my basic unarmored troops. This worked out well as the Gretchen models have a perfect crazy oldschool goblin vibe and matched up weapons
with the troops I was going to use them as. I converted a few of the special weapons. The heroes were a lot of fun to work on, as they had a lot of little bits I had to cut and pose around the adition of the goblin limbs giving them a really cool vibe of little goblin in oversized armor. My Admiral I reposed the hammer to have the goblin carrying it over one shoulder, a little change that was quite challenging with how the original model was built, but I love the vibe the little guy has now. I aquired some acrylic rods and found out that they perfectly fit into the tops of vallejo paint bottles. I cut the tops off of some old bottles and glued the threaded part to the rods and the paint caps into the airships. This gave me the ability to make different bases for transport, play, and display.
Since almost the beginning I have wanted to use the idea of the over inflated “Balloon Squig” as the balloons in the airships, but I was not confident in my ability to greenstuff sculp them. I give it an attempt but was not happy with the result. I ended up deciding to try my hand at 3d modeling. I took every possible shortcut and way that I could cheat during this process, as my sculpting ability is mediocre at best and quite time consuming. I started with some free squig sculpts I found on thingverse (credit to warmill) and cut the bits I was not confident in my ability to sculpt off of them (face & legs) them I sculpted my overinflated balloons around those areas. I made a ton of mistakes, and even my finished products had all kinds of issues that anyone familiar with blender would have been able to fix easily but was beyond my ability to find a solution for. I had a friend print them out at specific sizes and them pinned them onto the airships in as many places as possible.
For the paintjob of this army I knew I wanted a heavily weathered look, and while there are tons of ways to paint rust and weathering I went with a process that while time consuming I liked the end result of. IMO choosing the correct colors is just as if not more important than how well the painting is. I have a three part process when working on an army. I try and aim for three different viewing distances. 10' or across the room, 3' at the same table, and 1' close visual inspection. In this case I aimed for different things based on the different ranges. I knew I wanted to use yellow as the main color for the ships, as after some testing that was the color that looks the best when weathered/rusted. I picked red for the squigs so that it had a Red > Yellow > Blue progression and the Big conversion aspects and water were very visible from across the room. I leaned into the rusting and destruction so that at the 3' range you started to notice all of the weathering and the Yellow/Brown dicotemy would draw more attention and the green of the goblins would become more visible against the contrasting yellows and drab browns. At 1' I focused on adding in as many details of the conversions, and the more techincal aspects of the pain scheme so that each detail popped out the closer somone looked.
For the weathering on the boats I went with a method using pigment powders. I airbrushed on the yellow, and then used a brown to chip it with small bits of sponge. I focused on the edges and raised areas where paint would naturally chip. I then went back in and manually painted in and connected the chipping to make it naturally push all the way to the edges, and added metalic to the unpainted metalic spots. I used a combination of a red pigment brushed over the metal regions, and then a orange stippleded on and then fixed for the rust. I used a black oil pinwash and then streaking grime to dirty up the result and then added edge highlights with the same metalic paint. IMO this last edge highlighting is the most important part. It works with most types of rust paint schemes and makes it look more convincingly like metal.
The water bases was a challenge. I knew that I wanted a pretty deep base to try and give the look of big waves on it, and ended up with the idea to make a mold for it. I took pink insulation foam and made a little stand to hold a foamcutter perfectly straight on a table and then glued the original bases for the boats on the the foam and cut around it to make a perfectly sized starting point with smooth sides (the sides of resin are the easiest place to see any imperfections, so I wanted as smooth a starting spot as possible). I then roughly cut out the waves and then used a dremmel to carve it out, and then added a spot to put in the acrylic rod. I used this foam to make a mold negative with silicone and then cast the bases in epoxy resin. I used tabletop resin (Epodex- with a 2” cure depth) for this as it is non toxic and can be cast indoors and has way less issue with bubbles. there are pros and cons for every type of resin, but I pretty much use tabletop resin now as the fact its non-toxic is really nice.
I look forwards to taking the Sky Gits to many more tournaments in the future to assert dominace over all of the other Inferior “Non-Goblin” races...
I think it goes without saying that we are all looking forward to seeing these Sky-Gitz in action; it would be quite the unique spectacle at a tournament for sure. Here's a few more shots of some of Lucas' awesome work in creating something so special and original.
This really is fantastic work, from the skill utilised in the building and converting itself, to the awesome paint jobs. I think we all owe Lucas a massive round of applause for his work and an even bigger thanks for his time and effort in sharing his processes with us all, to help us in our future conversion work. I believe this is the importance of sharing our work and processes with eachother, so we can create this collective pool of knowledge and experience to aid everyone, from the humble beginner, to the exacto knife scarred veterans. And hey, isn't it nice that none of it is locked behind a paywall or subscription? I think so too. So once again, a huge thank you to Lucas for providing all of this for free for you! I hope you have taken something away from it all, and make sure you go and check out his page over at @3_goblins_ina_coat to keep up to date with his work. He doesn't use it much or post all of his fantastic work there, but maybe you can inspire him to as repayment for the inspiration he has given you here!
If you've got some cool, original and unique converted work you'd like to show off, or a hefty knowledge on the process of doing so, and would like to be a real hero and share it with the community, please get in touch via right here, plasticpreacher@gmail.com or @plasticpreacher via Instagram.
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