Stormcast Basileans – really?

Stormcast make great additions to a Basilean army. With their large size, they make great palace guard and the flying ones make great (ur-)Elohi, if you like the aestetic. But, as I posted before, there’s something off about them.

I painted up a few before noticing why. Here’s the models:

The reason I don’t like the models is because of the heads. First, I painted them as masks (brass) which made them look like automatrons. Now I’ve painted them flesh-coloured, it still is not an improvement. They still look like fleshy golems.

Maybe, they look better with different heads? First of all, I was looking for decently sized ogre-sized heads online until I realised their head size is roughly the same as other GW heads. Here’s the comparison between a stormcasts’ head compared to an Empire Knight head -they are roughly the same size.

so, maybe they look better with normal human heads? Let’s try this!

Below is a new stormcast with an empire-knight head (still unpainted)

The head looks rather small compared to the rest of the body, but that’s the design of the space marine concept, ordinary humans with *very* bulky armour. Looking at the original models, this appears to be the concept.

Other than this, an unarmoured head makes this model far more human and -for me at least- far more likeable.

On the right is the painted version of the above miniature: (Actually, I painted the head and did a headswap on an already painted mini).

The head swap still needs a bit of green stuff (here still the original colour) underneath, but otherwise it’s very passable.

After this test subject, I decided to do a head-swap on all three pictured above:

And here they are based as large infantry:

Frankly said, these make very convincing super-human palace guard!

Elohi

Likewise, the stormcast flying dudes make decent elohi. I painted up a test model to use as a generic ur-elohim or as Samacris:

As the head is not masked, a head-swap isn’t needed. Other than that, there’s only a minor conversion to the original model.

The verdict

The Stormcast models (with head swaps) are much better than I expected and even fit quite well in the theme of my Basilean army.

That said, I’m still not sold on the stormcast aestetic. It’s that I need a horde of palace guard and an ur-elohim that I painted up these models. I’m going to finish the horde one day, but that’s probably about it.