Building our first resin cast true-scale Space Marine

Thought begets Heresy. Heresy begets Retribution.

A large portion of my hobby time this year has been spent building a more anatomically correct true-scale marine, and then learning how to make two part silicone molds. Today I am quite pleased to reveal the fusion of both of these projects by showing you the first True-scale Space Marine that I created using silicone molds created. Not wanting the model to look too much like the original, which is still going to be turned into an Elder One for Iron Sleet’s Thorn Moon’s crusade, I decided to build an Astartes from Black Templar Chapter.

The marine’s size is such that it was easy to add all manner of pouches and gear.

I intentionally made the molds of the original sculpt before adding wargear and equipment (aside from the thigh mounted pistol) to make it easy modify the model’s equipment based on each marine’s role. For the Black Templar, I decided to keep this simple and practical with a collection of pouches and a combat dagger. Due to the size of the marine and all the free space on his armor, I could also imagine adding additional equipment to to his other thigh and even his breast plate. To give across a crusading knightly feeling to the marine, I sculpted a few parchments and purity seals on his armor, in addition to giving him a MKIII style helmet.

At first I thought that I would need to increase the size of the marine’s backpack, but the normal ones are so large that I think they fit quite well.

I also wanted to begin experimenting with creating a bolt pistol variant. I always felt the bolt pistol’s design was pretty weird, with the magazine situated in front of the trigger. This placement dramatically reduces the barrel length of the weapon, but despite this the firearm is still huge. As it is, half of the pistol is useless space, which from an engineering standpoint does not make too much sense. Most modern pistols address this by having the magazine feed into the pistol’s grip. For the Templar’s bolt pistol, I wanted to use a similar strategy, and modified the lower portion of the pistol’s grip to have a visible baseplate to the loaded magazine. Otherwise, the conversion was pretty simple, with me replacing the front of the barrel and creating front and rear sights for the pistol. While I am reasonably satisfied with the result, in the future I would like to do a more substantial modification where I removed a lot of the wasted space (particularly in front of the trigger where the magazine used to be seated).

When next to an assassin and an ork model, it is apparent just how large the Templar is.

Although it has been a long road up to this point, I am pretty thrilled to finally have a Space Marine completely built from my True-scale work. I hope to be able to paint him in short order so that I can move onto more pressing issues, like completing the original sculpt by turning him into an Elder One for the Thorn Moon Crusade. Some of you may be wondering about the details of how the actual casting process went for the Marine, but, worry not, there should be a post coming along shortly that details the process, as I have upgraded my casting setup since my first attempt. Let me know what you think of the marine!

- Adam Wier