Raven Guard Captain

Here is my latest creation, a Raven Guard Captain.  Arguably he could also serve as a decent Chapter Master for the Raven Guard, and I'm thinking I might field him that way.

To make this guy I start with a pair of Mark VI Assault Marine legs.  The torso and shoulder pads come from Forgeworld's Raven Guard upgrade pack.  The lightning claws are bits from an Assault Terminator Sergeant.  The jump pack is from the Blood Angels Sanguinary Guard kit, and the jump pack wings are from Astorath the Grim.  

First I had to convert the Lightning Claws.  I chopped them off at the elbows and mated them to a pair of normal Space Marine arms, angling them to achieve the look I wanted.  I used green stuff to fix the joints and connect the power cords back to the power armor at the shoulders.  Mating Astorath's wings to the jump pack was pretty straightforward, and only required a little trimming and gap-filling.  I also had to trim the neck and back of the head--the final model was to have a very forward-leaning stance, and so I needed to adjust the head so he wasn't looking straight down.

After test fitting most of the parts, I thought something was missing, and so I decided I needed to add some tail feathers.  I whipped up something in greenstuff, but I'm still not that good in free-sculpting with greenstuff, so it's not perfect.  Painting it black will hide some of the imperfections though.

So here is the final result.  I had thought about painting the shoulder pads and helmet white, but I wanted to keep more of the pure "raven" aspect that I think looks more sinister that adding white bits.  If you see this dark thing swooping down from the sky at you...you know it's all over.

In deciding how to paint the wings, I looked for some actual raven photographs, and noted that in certain lighting conditions, raven wings can appear almost purplish due to iridescence.

So I wanted to see if I could achieve something similar.  I painted the wings and tail feathers black, and then gave multiple washes of Liche Purple, Leviathan Purple, and Storm Blue.  The result is subtle, but its there, and you can see it in bright light.

In this picture, slightly over-saturated, you can see the purple on the wings, but you can also see the light green highlights on the rock base--my attempt at painting lichen.