This is a Guest Post by Modelling, Painting and Gaming
The step by step process for turning a regular Space Marine shoulderpad into a great looking psychic hood for a power armoured Librarian. I'm sharing this tutorial instead of what I'd planned to post today because I think this is some great work. All the pictures are from Modelling, Painting and Gaming as well.
I made an inquiry with Ron with regards to green stuff tubing. I sent him a picture of my results and he asked me how I made the psychic hood on my librarian there and so this tutorial was born.
When looking online, I couldn't find any tutorials for a psychic hood, so settled on the old tried and tested method of using a plain space marine shoulder pad. Here's how I did it.
You'll need:
A plain space marine shoulder pad
An X-Acto blade (use a new blade!)
A round file
Plastic clippers
Start off with a plain space marine shoulder pad:
Using your X-Acto blade, make four small 'guide' incisions in the shoulder pad which will mark the start of the cut. For ease, I have used the vacant space in the shoulder pads as a guide. This ensures consistency as the incisions should match up on both sides.
You can see in the side view picture how deep I go - it is only a few millimeters - too far and you will spoil the shape of the hood, not deep enough and it will be hard for you to do the next step. I will make a point here to say that you really need to be careful with this stage, as there is a lot of knife and a lot of finger in close proximity!
Once your incisions are made, and you have cut into the pad to your desired depth, take your plastic clippers and gently pull out the area that you will be removing from the hood, as shown below.
You can then go ahead and remove these pieces.
Be warned, the hood will be quite rough at this point.
Now you can start shaping the hood to your desire. Take your round file and file down the pad so that you get some nice smooth edges. I used my knife to trim away any excess, and ensured that the hood was symmetrical on both sides:
Once you are ready to go, you can either leave the pad as is, or add some greenstuff into the slots to give a more solid appearance.
When attaching the pad to your model, you will need to trim off the collar of a torso.
You will also have to trim away the small collar elements on the front half of your torso - the hood should sit nicely on top of the torso at this point. I've used a random torso for the example, but it should work for all the plastic space marine torsos.
Please let me know if you have any questions and I will be glad to answer them!
A big thanks to Modelling, Painting and Gaming for sharing this step by step tutorial. I know I'll be trying it out in the future when I get a chance to make another Librarian model.
If you've got something you think is worth posting on FTW, please email me and we can see about getting it posted here. While not everything I get is usable, there is certainly some amazing work out there I'd love to share with everyone.
