By Titus Villanueva
It’s a common gripe that Space Marines are the poster-boys of the 40k franchise. They always get new models, and amazingly designed kits. The leaders of their faction, the primarchs, would be these towering models that were sometimes even set on bases that had so much character in them, they could basically be models on their own. It takes a master painter to paint one of these things. Naturally, a lot of the winning submissions for Everchosen, the global painting competition held in each hobby store, were one of these. The model that won at my store was this amazingly crafted Robute Guilliman.
I had… A magus. That’s my faction leader. The model comes as a tiny bald sorceress in a dress and high heels. It’s not even a named character. It’s a generic leader character for my faction.
On her own, she wouldn’t stand a chance against the intricately designed giants other competitive people would submit. So I made her one.
I made a special base that I could place her on to make it look like she was just as important as the other faction leaders. That’s because she was. I bought my first cultists early in my relationship with my girlfriend of three years and even modeled their leader after her. Their personalities were similar, small in stature but hearts that could move mountains. Her status as a human woman in a world full of super-powered spacemen, futuristic aliens and chaos gods made her small, but that doesn’t stop her. She will one day liberate her planet from the clutches of the tyrannical Imperium despite all that.
So I got to work, sculpting the base, replacing parts, giving her tentacles, a crown, a destroyed city to walk over and even a victim to show how intimidating she was (of course it was a Space Marine). When I was finished, I didn’t even care about winning. She could stand next to Abbadon or Guilliman and still look like she was just as important.
And second place isn’t really so bad.
When working on my miniatures, every single model is as important as I want them to be. It doesn’t matter what they look like on the box compared to the others. They’re my models and that will always make them special.
