WH40K: Tau Auxiliary; Touren

Another oldie for you, and the source of my Avatar.

Around the release of the plastic stealth suits, at the time I was pretty much exclusively playing Warhammer 40k (Tau). I spotted those stealth suits and I immediately thought the legs would fit well on a beastman gor, so I set out to get me a set for that purpose (and some beastmen).

Once the sets arrived I started work.
I decided I wanted to make a noble looking beastman rather than a ferile looking one (after all the Tau already have the kroot). Because of that I didn't use the horns from the beastmen set, instead I used the helmeted Gor head (back then there was only one plastic helmeted head). I applied putty to the hole left after excluding the horns and smoothed it to become the back of the helmet.

Anyway, the important part are the photos so here you go:



The original Prototype Touren, the one that started it all

The guy above was used to create my Avatar, taking a digital photo of him and manipulating it in Photoshop. I always chose white as a predominate colour in my 40k paint schemes.... as someone who isn't very good at painting, this was not a good idea, but there you go it just appealed to me.

With the success of the first conversion I went on to produce 4 more.

I decided that I would use them as space marine scouts in games of Apocalypse (at the time I thought I might actually have more than one game of apoc), to that end I swapped out the carbine for a pulse pistol, much like the one below. 

I wasn't happy with the size of the pistols in the large beastman hands, but that's something I never resolved.

The unit's heavy support, in the form of a rocket launcher.

The unit was unfortunately never finished and languishes in disuse at the bottom of one of my army cases, part painted and mostly without guns.

Originally these conversions were posted on GreyDeath's "Work In Progress" forums (http://z11.invisionfree.com/Work_In_Progress/index.php), one of my favourite forums as there was always some new fantastic conversion to stare at everyday, it's unfortunately much quieter than it used to be but it's still got a lot to give and is updated quite regularly, masses of inspiration in it's archives that's for certain.

In particular conversions by member : "Typhoid_Garry" are something to marvel at (even if he frequently didn't finish his projects, much like me lol)