The Comm Guild Maelstrom's Edge

- by Iain Wilson

‘Nobody knows what the hell they’re even made of, never mind what they’re thinking.’
- - Gladius Belaru, survivor of the Angel attack on Morningstar Station, Thusia system

The fully mature Angel is a truly terrifying creature to encounter in the flesh, and their otherworldly scream is a harbinger of nightmares across the Spiral Arm. Dwarfing even the tallest of humans, the Angel is a tapering mass of writhing tentacles, gelatinous membranes, and bristled claws, smelling of sulphur and ozone.

The plastic Mature Angel kit allows players to build angels in their combat form, which is one of the three common forms favoured by these bizarre creatures. While there is no particular need to model the angel's other forms, where would we be if we just went around assembling kits to spec? So this week, I'm building a Mature Angel in its flying form.



I started out with a length of wire glued into a hole drilled up into the bottom of the angel's torso. This was curved around to the front, with a spike cut from one of the angel's claws glued onto the other end.



Over the wire, I sculpted a tail from 'green stuff' putty, and added some tentacles down the side to make it a little more visually striking and to help represent the angel's fluid nature.



Wings can be sculpted over a similar wire armature, but to save a little time and effort here, I decided to purloin some from another model instead. The donor was a fire demon from Reaper's Bones range.



I cut the wings at the elbows, trimmed off the 'fingers' and glued the wings in place in the angel's arm sockets. A little more green stuff filled in the gaps.









Painting - I kept the colour-scheme fairly simple, as angels are basically just black. Visually, just going with plain black isn't very interesting, though, so I tried to represent the angel's internal cybel energy by adding some purple highlights wherever seemed appropriate. The eyes and mouth were similarly painted purple, but highlighted up closer to white, to help them to stand out.









'Family' shot, with some minnows for company:



If you would like to build your own hideous flying spectre of doom, you can pick up the Mature Angel kit from the Maelstrom's Edge webstore here. As always, feel free to share your creations on the Comm Guild Facebook page!

For other Maelstrom's Edge modeling articles, including tutorials and walkthroughs of a wide range of different building and miniature projects, check out the article roundup here.