Imperial statue terrain piece

This piece was inspired by a picture in the 40k 7th edition rulebook. If you have seen the picture, you probably recognised it as soon as you saw the photos. It's not a perfect copy, obviously; the eagle warrior thingy in the rulebook is clearly moving and shouting (screeching?). I did consider sculpting the eagle's mouth open, but decided it would be too fiddly and would limit my posing options later on.

 Finding the right set of legs proved a challenge. At first, I was going to just use a standard Space Marine's legs, but those tend to have too wide stances and would have made the model look more static. Running legs were an option, but there are rarely any of those to spare when your main army is Ragnar Blackmane's Great Company. In the end, I ended up just sculpting an approximation of the legs and covering them with cloth.

 The bolter is the ornamental one from the Command Squad set. There are few uses for a vanilla marine ornamented bolter with Space Wolves, and I decided this would be the best use for it.

I use wine bottle corks to hold my sculpts while I'm working on them, so the pedestal was easy enough to find. I decided to add some sprue rubble (small bits cut from a sprue) and a resin skull to the plasticard base and glued a litany scroll I had lying around to the pedestal.

Painting this should be simple, as I see the main figure to be a single piece of bronze and the pedestal being stone. The only part that takes any accuracy really will be the litany scroll with the purity seal.