This'll be my thread to document a planned conversion. It will be my first so instead of starting small I decided to man up and sculpt a Seraphon version of a hydra. It is based loosely off Archaon, and is still in concept form atm (and probably will be for a while) but feel free to chip in whenever if you think I've missed a cool idea or whatnot.
First up, the name. Q'arquaradon. I came up with it about 18 mins ago when creating the title for this thread. Is it a good name? I like it. It has backstory and Lord Q'arquaradon has a nice ring to it. It could symbolise the division between the Slann and the other races in the Seraphon - the repeated simple ripping noise of Carcharadon contrasted to the ornate spelling of Q'arquaradon. Also it could be taken as a repeated Car noise, linking both to the easy to use but environmentally damaging means of transport, but also to the caw sound made by ravens that are repetitively used to foreshadow change. But mostly I used it because I liked it 26 mins ago and now I can't get it out of my head.
Not sure yet, I'm going to work it out now. So a hydra needs multiple heads. The heads will be from dinosaurs because duh it's a Seraphon. If we go for a similar look to archaon that would be one scary predator head (for khorne) one huge pterodactl head (for tzeench), and one more blunted, rounded head (for nurgle). Scary predator dinosaur? Tyrannosaurus. Scary but huge pterodactly head? Google tells me that the biggest flying dinosaur is a Quetzalcoatlus, which looks kinda meh, but the photo next to it of a Ornithocheirus which has a cool aesthetic to it. I'm going to use that instead. Blunted dinosaur head? Why not a Pachycephalosaurus. It has lots of spikes, some small and awkwardly positioned, but I'm going to have to learn to do those at some point anyway. Body? It needs to be some kind of alpha jungle predator. The three main animals I'm going towards are some kind of panther, or an cassowary, or some ape/lizard thing. The panther has the advantages of being more original and adding a clear jungle emphasis, but also that it will be harder to sculpt and will need some severe modification to make it look normal with lizard heads on it. The cassowary has the advantages of being simpler and easier to sculpt, but the downside that it just isn't very lizardy. I guess I could change that though. The ape is quite original, relatively easy to sculpt and I like the idea, but I am unsure how it would fit with the aesthetic of the rest of my army. I also want it to be quite a lithe fast moving stealth hunter, which apes generally aren't. I'm thinking cassowary, but if anyone thinks otherwise just give us a shout and explain why.
OK so I did a muscle sketch of a cat and realised how complex a panther would be. I also did rough skull/muscle sketches of the three heads too. Body-wise I'm going with therapod legs for speed (also cats have therapod hind legs and so do cassowaries , so it's a compromise between the two). I did a preliminary sketch of what was meant to be a fuzzy cassowary with the three heads and it ended up with some kind of crystalline armoured upper torso. @Rikard is there any quick and easy way to sculpt crystal like in the pic below, or should I scrap (really I mean archive it) that idea and go with something else? Obviously the necks will be in more dynamic poses and the feet will be a fair bit smaller in proportion to the head in the actual model. I might also add in a tail and or a skink rider to counterbalance it so it can lean a bit further forward. So far it's looking good though.
Would you consider adding wings to this thing? I imagined it with more of a t-rex body myself, I am not sold on the bird-ish body I think mostly because it doesnt have a tail. Reminds me of that three-headed pokemon bird.
OK then, different body, but the same leg style? And still bipedal? I like the way it looks and I think that those kinds of legs give a real speed boost to animals. Wings are a maybe at this point but I think probably not. They just make the model too awkward to move around in a carry case. Hahaha bugger I kinda hoped no-one would notice that I did basically copy that design. Ok, a chimera then. Would that be an issue for you (or anyone else) using it in battles? I was hoping to use the dark elf hydra rules and points cost. What kind of body do you mean? I have a rough doodle of an ape-like body or a raptor skeleton I was going to include, both as seen below. Be warned that the ape thingy is VERY rough and not close to my other drawings mostly because I was getting really tired and had to get it out of my head before I could sleep. Extra note - I would like to be able to convert a skink rider onto this guy, so ideally we need standing/crouching space as well. Should I just go for the traditional chimera, one head in normal place, one on the back, one on the tail idea? I do like the accidental crystalline look of the stolen-pokemon-ideas-design despite it being a copywriter nightmare so armour ideas will be the next thing to be sorted after we nail the final body shape.
I did some expansion on the original concept art and added a Skink rider. Is this the look you're going for? (Ignore the eraser marks)
It was very similar yeah, if anything the back and tail was meant to be more horizontal but that's a good picture.
The body in this seems the most promising from my own point of view it'd give more support and sense to the three heads for balance etc.