Hey everyone,

for this army project I wanted to give my Space Marines some more dynamic poses. I am super tired of the generic Space Marine holding his bolter in front of his chest. I wanted to create something more special. Even for the regular tactic marines.

With this tutorial I want to show how you can make your Space Marines look more dynamic without too much chopping and no modelling.

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First I make the bases. In this step I take small/mid size pieces of gypsum (or whatever stuff you like to work with) and glue them with a good amount of super glue to the base.
Then I mix normal liquid glue with dry potting soil or fine sand and put it on the base as well. For this I use an old modelling knife. 

While the glue/sand mix is still wet you can start arrange your Space Marine legs and remove the glue/sand mix on the base where the feet would stand. You can now start glueing the legs on. I take super glue and put enough of it on the gypsum parts and plastic glue on the plastic parts (base and feet). Then I put them on the base and let everything dry.

In the next step it gets a little tricky because there is no real instruction for that:
I usually glue the torso armour together and think about what pose I want. A shooting Space Marine with stretched out arm holding a Bolter? A commanding Marine pointing in one direction saying like ‘Let’s go brothers, for the emperor!’? Here you can let your imagination flow. Then I glue the torso on the legs. After I held the other piecse like arms in place to get an idea how it’s going to look I glue every piece on. One by one.

One of the most important things (I think) is the bending of the upper body in combination with the legs and head direction. You can check how your own upper body and arms move while you do a certain pose.
As you can see on the Marine on the right in the picture above for example the chest is not in line with the legs. That is because the left arm is stretched out. He’s like ‘reaching’ for that Xeno head he’s about to shoot within the next second. Also the whole body is leaning slightly forward to give it the extra dynamic.

In the end you have some non generic Space Marine with character. Take a look on THIS post to see some more poses of my Space Marines.

NOTE: I made all of this with Space Marine parts of the older kits. The current tactical squad box has even more parts to personalize your marines

I hope this was helpful for some of you.

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Cheers, Philipp