Hate the Official Sculpt?
Conversions & Kitbashing
Here's How to Kitbash a Better One
A deleted unit, a donor kit from the wrong game, and a fistful of putty. Here's the repeatable method for building the model the manufacturer won't sell you.
Every hobbyist hits this wall eventually. Your army needs a unit, but the official model for that unit is ugly, overpriced, out of print, a single static pose, or all four at once. You want the squad on the table, but you can't stand the thing the manufacturer wants you to buy to get it there.
Most people respond by hunting for an exact replacement. They go looking for "a model that looks like a Grotesque." For the uninitiated, a Grotesque is a hulking, surgically-rebuilt brute from the Dark Eldar range, a shock-trooper stitched together by mad flesh-sculptors. Same silhouette, same role, same everything as the official one, just from a different box.
And in 2026, plenty of those exist. There's a whole world of gorgeous third-party proxies out there if you go looking. The trouble is what happens next. The moment a stand-in gets popular enough to notice, certain extremely litigious companies tend to make it disappear, never mind that it wasn't their sculpt to begin with. That proxy you fell in love with on Instagram last month is a dead link today. This is where scratch-building and conversion stop being a fallback and start being the smart play. Nobody can issue a takedown on the thing you built yourself.
Sometimes it goes further than the model, too. And the company drops the whole unit. Grotesques are a perfect example. Current 10th edition Drukhari codex cut them entirely, shipping them off to Legends along with Beast Packs, the Court of the Archon, and Urien Rakarth himself. No current kit, no main-line rules, nothing. And here's the kicker for anyone who plays Dark Eldar. The official range was already showing its age, a beautiful army trapped in a lot of dated sculpts and resin headaches. None of that is a knock on the faction. Drukhari are one of my all-time favorites and a genuine fan favorite across the hobby, which is exactly why it stings to watch good units quietly vanish from the book.
There's hope on the horizon, mind you. The rumor mill is fairly loud that 11th Edition will finally be the big plastic refresh the Dark Eldar have been begging for, with new Grotesques, fresh Kabalite Warriors, and more in the mix. Our friends over at Spikey Bits have been tracking those rumors closely if you want to chase the latest. But notice that none of it changes the math for the person who wants Grotesques on the table today. The rumors are rumors. A refresh could be a year or more out. You'll pay whatever GW decides to charge when it lands. And you might take one look at the new sculpt and hate it anyway, which puts you right back here, reading this. So let's build them.
When you're sizing up a kit to convert, you're checking four things, in roughly this order.
Armor Style
This is the big one, and it's what most exact-replacement hunters skip entirely. Does the kit's armor, clothing, and surface detail read the same as the rest of your army? Not identical, but related. Plates, rivets, cloth, overall silhouette language. If a stranger glanced at it next to your existing unit, would they assume the two came from the same world? If yes, you're most of the way there. Everything else is fixable. A fundamental style clash is not.
Building this coven, I didn't search for "Grotesque alternative." I asked what the unit actually needed to look like to belong, and the Wracks already on my table gave me the answer. Pale flesh, exposed muscle, black gothic armor with that cruel surgical edge, bone and blade. Once I had that nailed down I went looking for a kit that already spoke the same vocabulary, and found it in a completely unrelated fantasy range whose heavy infantry happened to wear armor with exactly that character. Wrong game. Rival faction. Right vocabulary.
Scale & Proportions
The model has to be the right size for the job and the right build. Grotesques were ogre-sized bruisers, hulking and broad, taller than a rank-and-file trooper but not cartoonishly so. (Past tense on purpose, since GW has since cut them from the army, which is half the reason this build is worth showing.) I needed bodies with that kind of mass. Get this right and the unit reads correctly at a glance. Get it wrong and no amount of detail work saves it. A too-small or too-lanky body will always just look like the wrong model.
Compatible Bits
This is where the build either gets easy or gets miserable, and you often can't tell which until you start. Sometimes you get lucky. On two of these figures, the donor kit's arms turned out to be nearly identical in width at the bicep to the faction bits I wanted to attach, which meant the official weapon arms dropped straight on with almost no fuss. That kind of happy accident is more common than you'd think once you've already matched style and scale, because parts built to similar proportions tend to play nicely together. Before you commit to a kit, dry-fit a few of the bits you know you'll need. If the joins are close, the build will be a pleasure.
Sculpt to Blend, Not to Build
Here's the part that scares people off, and it shouldn't. You are not sculpting a model from scratch. You're using putty to bridge, marrying the donor body to the faction bits and smoothing the transition so the whole thing reads as one creature instead of something obviously Frankensteined together. Which, to be clear, it is. We're just not letting it look that way. On these I sculpted the heads and the spinal growths first to give each figure its character, then added the plastic bits afterward to make every one unique. The sculpting is connective tissue, nothing more. That's a far lower bar than learning to sculpt a whole miniature, and it's the one skill that turns kitbashing from gluing-stuff-together into actual conversion.
If you're newer to the hobby, green stuff is the putty most of us blend conversions with, and it's worth knowing what it actually is before you go shopping. It was never anybody's proprietary miracle product. It's a two-part epoxy putty properly called Kneadatite, made for decades in one Pennsylvania factory and then rebranded and marked up by everyone who resold it. Games Workshop did it. Green Stuff World built a whole identity around doing it. None of them manufactured the stuff. They bought it, repackaged it, and charged you more.
That Pennsylvania plant closed in 2025, so the classic green stuff is drying up across the entire hobby right now, including from the companies whose branding implies they make it. If you've got a project lined up, grab some while it's around. If you can't, you've got good options. Milliput is cheap, sets hard, handles armor and crisp edges well, and stretches your supply if you blend the two. Apoxie Sculpt is excellent for organic, fleshy work, which is exactly the kind of sculpting in these photos. Any of the other epoxy putties will do in a pinch, and a UK-made replacement for the original is reportedly on the way. Whatever you reach for, the lesson holds. The material is a commodity. The technique is what matters.
Run those four checks and you end up with a unit that looks purpose-built for your army, because in every way that counts, it was. Here's the squad finished and painted. Pale flesh, black plate, bone and blade, sitting comfortably alongside the rest of the coven exactly as intended. Nobody looking at these asks what box they came from.
Here's exactly what went into these. The bodies started as Blighted Ogrun Warspears from Privateer Press's Hordes line, back when Legion of Everblight was its own thing. The arms, weapons, and assorted nasty bits came from the Dark Eldar Talos kit. A little context on availability, since it matters to the point. When Privateer Press rolled everything into Warmachine Mk4, the old Hordes factions got moved to "Legends" status, meaning the Warspears aren't in regular production anymore, though they're easy enough to track down secondhand if you go looking. The Talos, on the other hand, is still a current kit you can buy today. So even my own parts list is a mixed bag now, one thing in a back catalog, one thing on the shelf. Which is exactly why the list was never the lesson.
The process hasn't aged a day. Armor style, scale, compatible bits, sculpt to blend. That checklist works no matter what's in production when you read this.
Which is also why this isn't a Dark Eldar trick, or even a 40k trick. The same four questions build a grimdark squad, a sci-fi trooper, a pack of mutants, a band of post-apocalyptic survivors, or a fantasy monster. Faction, kits, the scale of the problem, all of it shifts from project to project. What doesn't shift is the method. Stop hunting for the model that doesn't exist, and start hunting for the one that already speaks your army's language.
From the Workshop
Skip the eBay Hunt. Print the Bits.
One thing genuinely is better in 2026 than it was when I built these, and that's sourcing bits. Back then, matching a kit meant trawling eBay for out-of-print sprues and hoping. Now you can print the parts you need at the scale you need them and skip the hunt entirely. That's half the reason we make the stuff we do. Our Evil Space Elves STL line is built for exactly this kind of cruel, surgical, gothic conversion work, and the Surgical Arms set in particular would drop right onto a build like this one.
Raid the Evil Space Elves STLsNow stop scrolling and go build the model you actually want.