Though the Space Mounties have been fighting valiantly to protect their country’s interests across the galaxy, they have found themselves outflanked by superior enemy firepower and discourteous sneakiness. In the face of this pressure, the NeoCanadian Courtesy Division has called in for the transfer of its most elite troops to reinforce the Canadian line.

Part 1: Arctic Space Ninja

The first to arrive was a representative of the deadliest regiment NeoCanada can muster: the Ijurujuq, an elite Inuit stealth corps that mercily stalk the snowbound lands of Space Nunavut.

The Inuit forces would be represented on the field by the Swiss Guard, also known as “the deadliest model in PanOceania”. The NeoTerra starter I picked up contained a Swiss Guard model that I’ve never liked, awkwardly one-handing a missile launcher while pointlessly brandishing a knife. Once I had the model in my hands, though, I realized that the torso and legs of this model are absolutely gorgeous in their design, detailing, and posing, and it was really only the arms that had always made me dislike the model. This ended up working perfectly– I had planned to perform a weapon swap anyway, so if I just sculpted him a new set of arms I could very easily jettison everything I didn’t like about the model and be left with an utterly badass pile of Arctic pewter and putty. 🙂

I drilled a pair of wires into his shoulders and then bent them around a Multi-Rifle from a weapon pack I had won at an ITS event.

Once I was happy with the length and pose of the wires, I first put a thin sheath of putty around each one (the right arm above); then, once that dried, I started applying bulk putty over top of it (the left arm above).

I used metal sculpting tools to segment the arm into panels, and then Clayshapers to clean the edges and smooth the surfaces.

Rinse, repeat.

After the arms dried, I started working on the huge Swiss shoulder pads. I made a mistake here by trying to build the shoulder pads all at once; I should’ve done the first layer and let that set, and then come back and added the second layer at the top and bottom of the pad; as it was, my efforts to get both levels looking correct led to both of them being a bit lumpy. :/

With the arms essentially finished, I added the only real modification from the stock Swiss Guard armor– a high fur collar to follow the shape of the helmet and give the model just a smidge of that distinctive Inuit feel. 🙂

And with that, he was done. A pretty quick conversion, all in all.

For the paintjob, I went with stark white nearly head to toe (P3 Morrow White blended down to Frostbite blended down to Coal Black), with the back and all moving joints done in “off-black” (P3 Coal Black blended down to Thamar Black, blended up to Trollblood Base, and finally highlighted lightly in white).

The unit designation and badge was a fun research project. I used the Nunavut Living Dictionary to find a translation for “Ghost”, which turned out to be “ᐃᔪᕈᔪᖅ” [phonetic “Ijurujuq“] . My Series 7 was starting to die on me, but I still managed to scrawl out a mostly-legible inscription on the lower plate (I think?). The unit logo is my attempt at a synthesis of the results of a Google Image Search for “Inuit Wolf Art“.

It looked pretty decent as a sketch, but trying to cram all of that into a shoulder pad was a bit beyond my freehanding capabilities. 🙁

It’s okay, though.

He’s still a total badass. >:)

Part 2: Gardiens de la Pureté

The second elite unit to join the NeoCanadian forces was a grudging recruit from the ranks Space Quebec’s ruthless language police, the OQLF. Unlike their mundane PanOceanian equivalents in the Aquila Guard who detect invisible enemies using optical sensors, The “Gardiens” employ powerful acoustic equipment to pinpoint anyone speaking l’Anglais within half a mile.

Unlike the badass-once-disarmed Swiss Guard, I don’t really like the look of the stock Aquila Guard miniatures (at least, the ones that existed when I started this conversion, which was before the incredible new redesign was previewed). Instead of using the dumb pirate, I opted to build my own Aquila out of another Heavy Infantry model I liked: the female ORC Trooper with HMG:

I can’t stand the pointless and shameful “sexy high heel strut” lower body pose, but I quite liked the mini from the waist up, so I sighed and resigned myself to completely re-working her legs.

The pose makes even less sense from the side.

>_<

Now, you’re about to watch me make a short-sighted mistake that ultimately kind of wrecks the model: instead of fully resculpting the legs, I tried to be lazy and just reposition them into a more reasonable pose. This seemed like a reasonable approach at the time, but that was because I didn’t realize that the original sculptor had given her extra-long legs to accomplish the dumb Supermodel Strut pose. So as you’ll see in a moment, once I straightened the legs out, the model ended up with REALLY bizarre proportions 🙁

Like, if they’d stayed this long, they’d probably look fine. But as you can see, I’ve opted here to entirely clip away the awful Combat Heels, so once I come back later and sculpt new boots, she’ll end up with a waist-to-foot section that makes up two thirds of her height, when it should actually be much closer to half. :/

Anyway, my basic process here, as you’ve seen in the two pictures above, was to chop the legs up into thigh and calf sections and then string them back together on a wire drilled into the model’s pelvis.

Once it’s glued in, I apply some basic putty to fill in the sizeable gaps.

Here’s where I made the final bad call that clinched the model’s awkward proportions. I set up the forms for a new trenchcoat (the Aquila unit’s defining visual feature) with a wire frame that I covered in putty; but in addition to her legs being too long to begin with, I tapered the coat’s waist even higher due to simple inattention, and never really saw the problem until after she was painted and it was too late to corect. 🙁

(Sigh… is it obvious yet that I’m basically just a tangled wad of regret where this mini is concerned?)

Once the initial (very thin) foundational putty layer was set, I added a second layer for the final surface details and sculpted folds into the cloth. As with pretty much everything on this project, the folds are shaped with metal sculpting tools and then smoothed out with clayshapers.

When that was done, I went in and added pretty much random geometric shapes to the leather coat to give it some more texture. These were edged in with the flat end of a metal hoe tool, and then cleaned up with an Angle Chisel clayshaper.

I’d been mocking the model up with a stolen Magister Knight arm until now, but decided that for a truly authentic Québecois flair, the model really needed to be smoking a cigarette. The process was essentially the same here as for the Ijurujuq, first starting with a wire embedded in the shoulder…

…then receiving a foundation layer of putty…

…then basic forms…

…and then panels.

The new (and totally awesome) Aquila model was released right around this time, so I opted to steal as much of its armor design as I could for my model to keep them consistent.

Here’s a shot of the putty wad that soon became the hand.

I divided the wad into distinct fingers, then bent two of them underneath the palm while leaving the index and middle fingers partially extended so that they could be casually gripping her cancer stick.

1) I’m trying to convey a certain level of disdain in her pose. She has so little respect for her opponents that she’s just casually standing around having a smoke break while bullets fly around.

2) The thumb will be added later.

3) Also visible in this shot: my attempt to fill in the stock model’s pointless boob plates. I was going to flatten the chest entirely, but opted to compromise on a uniboob– still pointless, but at least less arbitrarily deadly– purely to maintain the “legibility” of the model as female.

Yeah, I know. Even a sanctimonious asshole like me tears up his principles for the sake of expediency from time to time. ;_;

Random elbow pad!

Shoulder Pad, Layer One!

I continued stealing from the new Aquila’s armor on the lower body, to bulk up the too-skinny stock legs and cover up some of my less-than-elegant repairs.

With the armor nearing completion, I started building the trenchcoat’s collar and lapels. Here I’ve drilled a short wire into her shoulder to provide a bit of support for the putty I’m about to drop in.

It’s hard to sculpt clean detail that close to her head, but I do my best.

Also really obvious in this shot: MOULD LINES! For those of you who are new to Spud’s Hobby Corner, your host has an almost pathologically random approach to detailing: I’ll spend weeks adding extra putty detail to a model, but as a general rule I don’t bother doing the most basic cleanup work of shaving off mould lines unless they happen to be blatantly gross.

I know they drive people nuts, but they barely register in my brain.

Apologies to the people who inevitably freak out over stuff like that. 😛

The lapel is done the same way as the collar, with a short wire at the top providing stability while the piece sets.

This isn’t the best angle I could have shot it from, but in this picture you can sort of see how the trenchcoat on the model’s right hip is held back behind her hip-mounted sidearm; I decided that this looked really strange, so I opted to clip it off and bring the coat further forward on that side.

Ta-da.

Once the lapels had set, I went back and added clips. They really help to complete her look. 🙂

Shoulder Pad Layer Two: Bougalou Électrique.

And with that, she was ready for paint. 🙂

The OQLF is essentially just painted with the colours and emblems of the Quebec provincial flag. I’m less thrilled with the Gardien’s paintjob than I am with the Ijurujuq’s; it’s an awful lot of plain blue on her body that could probably use some breaking up. When I do my second OQLF model (which will be a Multi-Rifle conversion of the new HMG model once it hits my store), I’m going to change the scheme up with some more Coal Black areas in the abdomen; if it looks good, I’ll come back to this one and paint her to match.

As has become my custom, here’s a turnaround video of the two models in Glorious HD:

These will be the last reinforcements for NeoCanada for a while, as I need to switch gears and finish prepping a story campaign that will be running at my store over the next few months. I’m hoping to find time to come back to them toward the end of the summer once things have calmed down.

I have some pretty neat stuff planned, so don’t wander too far. 😉

-Spud