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The Daughters of Malal
Malal is a Warhammer 40K chaos god dedicated to madness and Chaos against Chaos. Since it shouldn't follow the rules of chaos (yeah, I know, but its 40K), I figured I had more lattitude to interpret than with some other topics.
So the second thing I did (the first is in the following paragraphs) was make an "Aspect of Malal" figure. I can't use the word avatar anymore because of the movie. Meh. Anyway, if Malal is supposed to turn chaos against chaos, I figured him having a little CSM snack would be a good representation. For painting, I will try to make one of the four for each of the other chaos gods.
But before that, I made some CSM for Malal. I figured I could make
female figures, since Malal thumbs his nose at the rules of chaos.
(Yes, I know 40K doesn't have explicit rules for how chaos behaves,
but it does have some things that happen all the time ... so what
is that?) And, I just wanted some female space marines. I also
decided that they don't need the traditional spikey bits for a
philosophical reason - they are against the traditions of chaos,
and a practical one - I didn't have enoughn leftover CSM with spikey bits.
Moving forward, I made a couple of teams that could match up against
the other Space Hulk teams I made for my family for Christmas. To
make them the Daughters of Malal, you need to know they are female.
The GW way to do that is to give female characters skimpy armour that
makes the point. I just put female heads on them. Compared to a body,
that armour is so thick and bulky that you couldn't tell the shape
of what is in it.
I was informed on TMP that the color scheme on 1d4chan was notional at best and a longshot interpretation of a single reference item at worst. But I liked the idea of the contrasting colors and it turned out not to be too hard to paint. Beyond the stark b&w, the figures got a dark grey wash (which contrasts with both black and white) and silver highlights. They also got metallic red lipstick because I like doing that. It is very hard to consciously discern at arms length, but I think there is enough in it to make the lips stand out as female.
OK, back to the big guy. He got the same paint scheme as the DOM, and
each of his snacks got a color scheme that matches one of the other chaos
gods. I especially like how the right knee came out, as I had to do some
extensive modding to get it in that position. Instead of modding the arms,
I just tried to figure out what I could do with them the way they were.
I had always intended to have one in his mouth being chewed on, because I had a broken CSM figure. I covered not having enough arms by putting an arm sans armour dangling down and making the other a bloody stump. All in all, I think that part came out all right.
The guy under the arm was not in the first plan. My first idea was to impale one on his horns. But the dino skeleton I got the head from didn't have enough horns in the right places. As it is I had to carve the spikey crown out of a solid plate. So I had to come up with an alternative. The spot under the arm seemed to provide some balance to the whole scene. As a bonus, since I had cut up another dino skeleton for a different project, between the parts left over from both, I was able to assemble a whole different dino skeleton.
Below is the whole crew. All in all, a good look and the special figure is big enough to be imposing on the table, but not so big as to be unwieldy. You could actually write rules that allow it to move around and affect different parts of the board. I suppose it could also fill in for a giant combat monster, but physical manifestations of chaos are probably better left to more exotic purposes than running around killing everything.
