mortem tyrannis: daemon engines

A tank is one of the oldest expressions of industrial slaughter; small wonder that daemons love to inhabit them.

malicious artillery

possessed tankettes

The showcase of my accidental Death Guard army continues with the warmachines that I've accumulated so far. My partner bought me a trio of the easy-build Myphitic Blight-Haulers a Christmas or two ago; I painted them last year. The Plagueburst Crawler was a decision made once I realised that this army was beginning to actually be an army and therefore needed heavier support than ranks of plague marines and some cultists.

Below the cut we shall see some more photos, O yes.

an unpronouncable name sits behind the bronzed sigil

The kit is really well designed. Games Workshop's modern computerised design team are able to slice together plastic kits that fit like a dream. And unlike a lot of the modern kits, this hefty piece of self-propelled artillery isn't too badly covered in a thousand gewgaws and unnecessary messy details.

That said, the stripy white paint style I use gets a little tedious on such huge surfaces. It turns out pretty well though, giving this thing a real sense of a timeworn machine crawls out of hellforges.

The sponson guns have some fiddly details, which slowed me down a little. After staring at them for a long time, I realised that the hoses gave me an opportunity to include the splash of yellow that turns up as a tertiary colour (quaternary? the colours are: off-white, muddy green, rusted orange, sickening yellow, flesh tones and muddy steels. that's more than four. drat.). I think they look okay in the end.

There is a great deal of fun detail underneath the side armour into which the designers clearly put a lot of effort. It's a shame to hide it, but having it there will also allow kitbashers and conversion fiends more opportunities. This is sorely needed, as the kit's lack of ostentation has the flipside that multiples of the vehicle all look the same.

The tanks lack the large blank surfaces of regular space marine tanks which allow freehand painting or unit markings - and they are each supposed to be the product of a bespoke marriage of an alien, daemonic mind and a posthuman designer. If the cow-catcher were plain, then painters could use decals or freehand to bridge that gap, but as it is the guns and front piece would be replicated across each tank if I were to get multiples. Frustrating.

A minor quibble though, as I only have one at the moment anyway! If I get a second big tank for this project, it's probably going to be a Defiler - I love spider tanks in SF and they're much better in 9th Edition than earlier editions (not that I care about that a lot, but still).

The mud on these tracks is an experiment with Vallejo's Russian Mud which is super gross and fun. I could definitely have gone hog wild, but then all my stripey white would be hidden! And that takes ages!

three; always three, or seven, or multiples thereof

I mustn't refer to these as Huey, Dewey, and Louie even if that is 100% hilarious.

Myphitic Blight-Haulers are mostly cool because they are weirdly adorable possessed tankettes, which is a design that you absolutely do not get enough of in speculative fiction. Look at this one's horrible little mouth! His gleaming red eye! He just wants to give you a nightmarish, bone-filled kiss.

I painted them a bit over a year ago, I think. The stripey white was obviously a little tedious, but it helps texturise the armour plates which could otherwise easily become very dull.

I'm now in two minds about the flesh tone of these machines. One the one hand, painting daemons in vaguely Caucasian flesh tones really emphasises the body horror of these pulsing fusions of unholy magick and unutterable alien technology, but on the other it's a missed opportunity for the kinds of wild, funky colours that can make Games Workshop products really stick in your mind.

For example, mrkaim81 on Instagram has been doing Blightkings in horrifying yellows and grimy blues, and I love the little bastards. It's one of those things that I keep going back and forth on in my approach to painting little soldiers: grimy and horrible? bright and weird? edge highlighting?

(Moving away from that last one a lot these days, to be fair.)

The only real problem with these tankettes is also what makes them great. Being an Easy Build model, they're (relatively) cheap and the kit is super easy to both assemble and paint. There are even neat details that the armour conceals, providing options to the more dedicated converters.

Unfortunately, that same simplicity of kit design means that every single one is identical. Not great for Chaotic daemon engines, the products (in part) of warped and ever-shifting thought patterns.

The sculpted-in warts, boils, pocks and scars mean that it also becomes very noticeable that each is identical. The blazoned fly rune is also sculpted on and has details that should be unique. I scraped, chipped and used a little green stuff to create a tiny bit more variance, as well as painting the rune itself in three ways (bronze, rusted iron, and rotting bone), but making each look as unique as it should requires actual skill as a sculptor.

Still, they're fun as hell to paint and I heartily recommend them.

The single eyeball was done as a creepy red lens, but I think would look even better as a human-style eye, but I've only just learned how to do that. I painted the multimelta ceramic, the same as I had done on my Dark Eldar Scourges (if muckier). The result here is that it looks grown, which is just cool.

Some other details to note. The maw is a combination of bone and rusted steel bionics; the missile launchers look like clusters of tumours; the fleshy interiors take the washes-and-glazes system I use for rotting flesh very well. 

The bases are the same rotting warzone-cum-city that I use on the rest of the project, but here I draw your attention to the plastic straw-as-rusted pipe. It's a classic for a reason!

That's all for this time. I need to do some photoshoots for the infantry!