The Eyes of the Medusa; concept and early progress

A few months ago, while reading one of the 40K novels, I had the idea of doing a chaos space marine army.

Now I already had a CSM army, known as the Legion of the Kraken, that one had been conceived and developed in more of a comic book style of villainy, in the Cobra/Hydra vein.

I was now inspired to really get down and dirty with the gods of chaos this time. I had also been on an Event Horizon kick at the time, so was in the right frame of mind to come up with some disturbing visuals.


Event Horizon is a film from the 90's that I believe comes closest to showing what the whole 40K concept of chaos and the warp would look like. It also borrows a lot from Hellraiser, which is another movie with very similar themes to Chaos, particularly Slaanesh.

What I wanted to do was a space marine chapter that had fallen and become corrupted fairly recently, rather than the archaic look of much of the csm model range. I wanted to create my own SM chapter, then have them go to the dark side.

I can't remember exactly how I came upon the name "Eyes of the Medusa" but I remember I liked it instantly and immediately started thinking of ideas to work it into the design, with early sketches of custom shoulder plates and a banner for the chapter.

I haven't done too much fleshing out with the fluff but the basic story is this:

The Eyes of the Medusa is a space marine chapter that was almost completely wiped out fighting necrons in deep space. The chapter's flagship attempted an emergency jump into the warp and disappeared, never to be seen again until over a dozen years later, when their flagship re-emerged in Imperium space and the Eyes of the Medusa begain butchering colonies.

The first thing I started working on was the defiler that was going to be the centerpiece of the army. I had four painted defilers for the Legion of the Kraken, since I had put that army together back when the CSM codex had rules for Iron Warriors, where you could swap out a fast attack slot for an extra heavy slot.

Since I don't really need to have more than three of the metal beasties now, I decided to give the fourth LotK defiler a makeover into my EotM defiler to save time and money.

I scoured every bitz box, bin, and plastic baggie and amassed a legion of little plastic dead people and the sharp and spikey plastic implements with which to impale them upon.

After about fifteen hours or so of chopping, shaving, filing, drilling, sculpting and gluing, the defiler was ready to be spray coated.

Also at this time, I started working on the chapter banner which was going to fly from the turret of the machine. I drew the banner out on art paper and then began to paint it (using the same citadel paints I do my minis in)

Then the painting on the defiler commenced. Over the course of a week and a half, I put in about 20 hours of painting time in. I had intended to enter it in the Ordo Ineptus painting competition held on April 9th, and stopped working on it when I ran out of time. I've since taken a little break from the painting, and started work on converting some of the other models for the army. The following pictures show what the defiler looked like at 30-35 hours of work. I've probably got another 4-5 hours of painting to do before I'll be done with it.

I made the defiler chock full of little vignettes of miniature plastic torture porn, many of them inspired by images from horror films like Hellraiser, Event Horizon, and probably a Friday the 13th film or two thrown in for good measure.

(and no, I don't know what's wrong with me either)

As I had said, for the look of the army, I wanted the armor and equipment to still look a lot like normal space marines, with gruesome and twisted affectations added on. To that end I scrounged together all of the space marine bitz I had and also picked up a tactical squad kit. I also cannibalized my khorne berserkers which I did a while before the LotK and haven't used at all in recent years. I've got eight of them done so far, and still have to do two more for a full ten man squad.

I used a head from an old WFB chaos sorcerer for the unit champ (on the left). The one in the middle is holding a severed head from the zombies kit with some green stuff hair. The one on teh right has a severed torso stuck up on a pike (with some green stuff entrails hanging down) and has an eye stuck on the point of his combat knife, which he is looking at intently with cocked head.

The one on the left in the second pic has his aquila gouged and is weilding a rather nasty looking serrated blade from the zombies kit. The one next to him is hefting an axe from the marauders kit.

In the third pic here, the one in the center is going to be holding up a bloody human spine (I think I'm going to use the tail of a plastic skeletal steed for this)

And the one on the right is posed kind of ominously, as he has just made a kill with his axe. I think I'm going to try using hot glue or green stuff to actually have blood dripping from the axe and maybe put a freshly severed head on the base at his feet.

For the unit of chosen, I'm went with lots of mutations. These are the guys who really made the chaos gods smile through their depravity and have been 'rewarded' for their efforts. They could be used as 'possessed' but for the list I'm putting together, I'd rather have them as 'chosen'. I used lots of bitz from the old chaos mutations sprue and the new chaos spawn kit, as well as some other stuff. I have eight of them built so far and want to make two more to bring the unit to ten. So far I've got a flamer and two plasma guns in there.

More sickness to come!