has a painting service do Space Marines.
In my glacial way, I've begun to put together a 40K Chaos Space Marines force to oppose my Grey Knights. (Now, my Grey Knights are barely begun, but I figure I can alternate painting items from the two forces and avoid the dreaded "painter boredom" syndrome.)
Digging through my storage, I found some old Chaos Space Marines that I could work with, but no figure to represent the leader. I didn't like the looks or the prices of the current Games Workshop Chaos Lord choices, So I went to eBay and risked a low bid on a rather blurry picture of something the seller called a "Chaos Lord conversion."
To my surprise, I won the auction - $5 USD for the figure, $1.64 USD for shipping! - and I eagerly awaited the mail to see what exactly I'd bought. (At this price, I'd have been glad just to have salvageable bits!)
Well, he arrived in pieces... but was actually well painted, except for some odd spots where the grey primer was showing (left side of the chest, for instance). I have no idea what model this is built from, but I like it better than any Chaos Lord in the current catalog.
I did very little to this model, besides repairing it, adding a steel disk to the bottom, painting the missing red areas, washing some black ink into the exhausts, and minor touch-ups. Here's how he turned out:
As you can see in the photo below, I've painted the missing red areas. I can't imagine any reason why the original painter would have left that area in primer grey, except human error (or maybe he found it hard to reach after attaching the arm?).
When I was working on the base, I removed a coin that had originally been glued inside (apparently as a weight). It quickly went into my wife's coin collection, but I believe it was a Polish coin. So, this Chaos Lord may have originated in Poland, though I bought it from a U.S.-based seller.
For now, I'm just counting the 'big spike' as a useful way to distinguish which model is the Chaos Lord... but eventually, I might want to recognize it as a 'Mark of Chaos' (and perhaps add something more to it).
So I'm rather happy with how this turned out.
I'm going back to work on my Grey Knights next, and then I'll build up a Chaos Space Marines squad on the cheap...