Storm of Magic - Fimir Balefiend (and a history lesson)

So, storm of magic has well and truely swept over me. I'm going to be running a storm of magic campaign at the club, revolving around returning to Albion. Albion is home to those pesky swamp loving Fimir, who have rules in the new storm of chaos book. So, I decided to have a go at making a fimir balefiend.

Now, here's a bit of background about the minis and the fimir in general, since this really makes the model special. The fimir were a warhammer race from the 80s, who made it into the boardgame "heroquest". There were three, single pose fimir made for this game. Games Workshop made more, in metal, for warhammer. But there was a foul up, and although they had infantry stats, they produced monstrous models (a good bit larger). They were quite unpopular and hardly used (why buy models who have crap stats?). And between this, and the background revolving around raping to reproduce (the only female fimir were the wizards, and they were infertile, so to reproduce they had to raid human villages and make away with their "maidens"), led to them being dropped from the game.

So, I acquired 3 of the old heroquest figures for about £5 (better than some of the current gw prices and they've been out of production 20 years...).  However, as a numpty, I didn't read through the rules thoroughly before my purchase. Fimir balefiends are monstrous infantry...these models are quite definately just bog standard (pun intended) infantry.

So, as well as converting this warrior into a mage, I needed to make him a suitable monster base. I decided to have him elevated on a arcane ruin, making him look like he's hovering above a bit of marshland (that's where the cheeky branch comes in!)

I attempted to make a swamp using a few layers of pva just left to dry. It came out ok, but unfortunatley it seemed to dry in the shape of top of  the base (lightly bobbled using a standard GW Base). After a few layers it formed ok though. I've not quite finished, I'm going to try and give it a gloss finish to look liquidy, as I read swamps looks quite wet somewhere on wikipedia.

The staff was made from a spawn eye and, weirdly, the end of a tyranid tentacle as the curvy top. I greenstuffed the rest of it, to make the look of a gnarled branch.

Apart from adding a scroll to his waist, there wasn't much else conversion to do. The paint job is gnarloc green foundation  (brilliant shade of green, I use it just on its own with a black wash), with dark angel green speckles. I did a dark wash around his back and tail of a 50/50 mix, just to try and break up the monotonous colour (no one creature is just one colour). The metal areas I painted silver and tin bitz - Albion is a place stuck in the stone age, I thought his armour would be quite old and made of cheap metals like bronze. It would put im at odds with my daemonettes and their golds, which isn't a bad thing.

Here's a few pictures of my newest creation.