I was misinformed the other day when I said I only had four miniatures left for the project...
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| squirmy wrigglers |
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| Lord of Virulence |
I have been going back and forth on including some Nurglings in the project. On the one hand, they aren't really Death Guard. On the other, everybody includes them in lists (not that I've played a game of 40k in 10th) for holding objective markers. They're also cute little guys, and I would be building fun little dioramas for each lot... but I could 'finish' the project quicker if I didn't do them.
In the end, I not only did some (nine!), I bought new bases and some extra models from eBay.
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| Lord of Virulence |
Oh, and this guy. I actually finished him first. He's been sitting on my pile since the mid-2024 no-undercoating time, but I was a bit nervous to start painting him. In the end, deciding on a couple of different styles of flesh for his pipes, mimicking the guns on the first Plagueburst Crawler and allowing the mess of pipes to just be read as 'grungy metal' rather than getting bogged down, all allowed me to just paint him much the same as the rest of the force.
He's a really great sculpt - comes together with minimal nonsense, and the excessive detail works for a centrepiece character like this. I love the bulging belly full of fluid that he then excretes as a weapon, for instance.
His right arm is red, meaning he's a Terran veteran from before the Heresy. Funnily, there's a Terminator equipped with a heavy flamer analogue in my Heresy force (not yet posted on this blog). While the Mark of armour is different, it's possible that soldier has become a lord over time...
I dislike the slime on his claws, but modern GW sculpts love that shit, so whatever.
Okay, onto the Nurgling bases! These are in order of completion.
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| ol' triple skull jim |
So I started with two 40mm bases and a pile of old metal Nurglings I picked up years ago, and the various leftover Nurglings from a host of projects - some of which looked like they wanted to be mounted. So I had to make some mounts! This one is an Age of Sigmar ghoul, with a Plaguebearer arm and some skulls (three, an important number for Nurgle). Great fun.
The vague concept for this base was a dead thing that had been split open with a swarm of Nurglings rushing out. I wanted to start using this tube of UHU glue I'd bought with the intention of doing blood strings, and these bases is a good time to test that.
Look how wet it turned out. Hell yeah.
I then got some bases on eBay, together with some of the Gellerpox Infected guys for some variance. I already had a few Glitchlings, but I really liked the worms and flea-demon things as well, and I wanted the bases to look like a real mix of daemonic things. I've expressed before how I find the 'all daemons are humanoid and fall into defined categories' to go against the very nature of anarchic chaos.
Pleased with how that dead head came out, actually.
All the eyes are painted yellow and then given a gloss varnish; these look like a tumour of glowing demonic eyes.
Like I said, I had some Glitchlings. These are bio-mechanical daemons, hence the metallic aspects. The blue was was vaguely piratical, so he was painted bluish, like something drowned. I also piled rusting metal onto their base, to drive home the corrupted technology angle.
The twins were painted as a joke just for me. One was given a greenish wash and highlighted up, the other a sepia + a red right hand - that is, a post-heresy Death Guard scheme and a pre-heresy. Of course, the two look basically the same in the end! Ah, well. I know the joke is there.
Hard to photograph these things sometimes.
Another mount. I used another ghoul, but this time grossed up one arm and made him carry his own bloody head, while turning his neck into an eye (with mixed success, but the point was to experiment).
His skin tone wasn't quite working, so I then hit him with Vallejo's Moss and Lichen technical paint, which then made the green overwhelming. So back to highlights of off-white, but overall I think it still hasn't worked. Which is a good at of lessons learned, and it still works as a horrible chaos spawn once-human steed for daemons. Or something.
This one is impossible to photograph - daemons worshipping at a shrine. The three are a slug-thing vomiting up bile, a Glitchling offering viscera, and an archivist-ling bringing some prayer scrolls. The shrine itself is from Blood Bowl with assorted skulls and helmets, and an Age of Sigmar banner painted iron.
The helmets are from the armies of two guys in one of my hobby chats. Figure the Ultramarine helmet is the least I can do to Musterkrux, while the red chaos guy is from Regular Opponent Mangs.
Some happy bounding guys again (ok, one is just preparing to bounce. bite me). You can see I experimented with some more stringy goop here - it's so much fun.
This base was a lot of fun. A kind of fleshy miniature Garden of Nurgle, with the flea-daemons tending and patrolling the edge. It's possible the above base is them building a second one. This has several eggs forming from the flesh of two Pestigor heads, a tentacle dropping eggs, and a little scarab tending to some glossy black eggs.
Oh, and a hatching football-egg and some little toadstools! Really has it all.
Yes, vomit up those nutrients! Feed Papa's babies!
This is my favourite guy and what all that learning about UHU glue was in service to. Look at this gleaming, gooey, horrifying mass. The tutorial is from Instagram user kwk.bash, although it really is very simple: bend wire into shape. Coat in UHU over several sessions. Eyeball or head to taste. Paint.
The eyeballs are pearly bling things that I got at a craft shop after years and years of meaning to. Notice they aren't yellow, implying that this thing isn't a daemon...
The guy riding him is, though. His skin was done like a cheaper version of the Prince, to help tie them in.
His gooey mount was painted from a black undercoat with layers of red and then drenched in Vallejo Thick Blood. The wet parts of the base are AK Water Gel Swamp Green.
There we go! Three by three sets of Nurglings for the Lord of Plagues. Mostly done in bright, unnatural colours to indicate their unreality, lots of experimenting with methods (most of which I'm not bothering to record - hopefully it all just goes in the noggin), and overall very relaxing.
I'm now working on the last model for the project, and it really is the very last one. Until the Lord of Poxes comes out, anyway...
