Conversion: Parasite of Mortrex

This weekend, I was struck with the very sudden desire to convert and paint up the Parasite of Mortrex. Thankfully, I thought to grab the camera to catalog the conversion.

See those primed Thousand Sons in the background? Yeah, the Parasite basically just cut in line. I would feel sorry for them if they had souls...

Anyways, back to the Parasite. The description in the codex described it as an organism the size of a Tyranid Warrior with bat-like wings. With that, I clipped out a Tyranid Warrior body to start with.

My vision is based off of the picture in the book, where the tail has this stinger on the end, and curls underneath the body, so I glued the abdomen to the torso backwards.

I had ordered some Tyranid Warrior wings from Forgeworld some time ago and had a pair left. Awesome.

Tyranid Warrior head with tongue-spine.

The rules give the Parasite Rending Claws, Implant Attack, and wings. However, the picture shows a couple sets of scything talons...

I tried using the Tyranid Warrior scything talons, but they looked awkwardly large, to be honest ... especially since the unit doesn't actually have them in game. So, I opted for a set of genestealer scything talons. This would serve to keep the aesthetic, while making them a bit more subtle.

Next up, the Rending Claws...

This idea actually came from Suneokun over at Pathfinder, back when he did his Parasite conversion. I had struggled for a long time to find a meaningful conversion for the legs of a Tyranid Warrior in flight. I hated the answer shown in the above Forgeworld link (using scything arms, or even rending arms); They just looked awful. Suneokun's answer was to use the legs, but cut off the hoof and replace with a Rending hand. It was brilliant.

One little addition though:

Suneokun discarded the rending hand's thumb. I moved it to the back of the foot, to emulate a bird of prey's talon:

Kaw!

Ok, with the talons attached, I'm ready to move on to the tail implant.

The piece I ended up being drawn to was a genestealer head. The Acid Maw head, to be exact. Above, you can see a whole head of the type I'm talking about. The tongue looks like it would make a suitable stinger. I cut the lower jaw off to use on the tail, discarding the top of the head.

With a little filing and greenstuff, I had a cool looking stinger! There's even a poison sac! Bonus!

Checking out the codex's stats again, I found that the Parasite has a 3+ save, while a Tyranid Warrior has a 4+ save. I decided to grab some armour plates from the monstrous creature sprue:

The shield shaped one will go on the chest, the other on the back. Notice how the one for the back has been filed on the underside to fit better with the Warrior's back. The Warrior's back has a steep peak to it.

Here's the mostly finished product:

And here I'm testing height/placement on a flying stand. I want him to look like he's swooping down on his prey.
At the above point, I had asked my wife to grab me a guardman I could use for reference. She got the one model of mine that looks oblivious to his surroundings. LOL. It cracked me up so much, I used him in the final pics after I finished painting him:

The Flying base's stand was filed at an angle with a cylindrical file so it would cup the tail at the angle I wanted. This made it bond very well with super glue.

For the painting scheme, I used the exact same method as in the Step-By-Step Old One Eye with the small addition of some Thraka Green around the stinger's base.