The Smell of Tharks in the Morning

Working up my native VSF force, a labor of 3 years now. Tracking down Mageknight Shyft Fiends to be my 4 Armed Tharks first was .... very trying in that I didn't want to sell my house to get everyone that I came across. Main problem for them is that besides being all in the same pose, they sport no radium rifles ... or projectile weapons of any sort. Time to improvise finally arrived along with a box of Kroot and a donated pile of Kroot, whose rifles were stripped of hook bits, carved one of the two hands off. Painting and adapting them came next.

Here are the rifles tacked down with tape for spray priming behind a couple of type typical "Tharks" The smaller guy on the right will form up my Milita quality units while the beefy fellow on the left will be the Guards and other higher quality troops. I matched the hands still cast on the rifles color to the figures which took a bit of experimentation.

So here is a set of 4 of the Guard Tharks in a row. All the same pose. First off I popped shields of a few off and hot glued them into other poses as well as moving them to another hand. Limited variety still but with some painting touches on the Shields, variety will be achieved. Sort of similar to Zulu Shields being all the same shape and size but the cow fur patterns lending the variety to them.

Have to click on the picture to enlarge it so you can see the added rifles to the 4 figures. I think they will be variable enough to not look cookie cut. I'm saving the various shields, swords and such that I am replacing with rifles for the Cavalry that I will be working on next. A shortage of Guards means I will use the mageknight shyft fiend caster to adapt to the cavalry. My thoughts are running along the lines that I will make a multi legged mount then model the waist down of the rider to the mount, and cast them up. Then clip the casters off at the waste, mount on mounts riders lower legs, adapt weapons and shields. Lots of bases to sand and pebble up for Mars......