A Plague On All Their Houses

Long, long ago, when I first started this blog, I painted up a squad of Plaguebearers. For anyone who doesn’t want to dig that far back into the archives – and who could blame you? – here’s a reminder of how they look.

I like to think my painting skills have developed a bit since then but on the whole I reckon they hold up fairly well. However for some reason I stopped working on them after completing 18 models, rather than rounding them up to a squad of 20. The other day however I spotted the remaining pair looking lonesome and dejected in a box of odds and ends and decided that it was well past time I did something about them.

For the first one I tried to keep it fairly close to the style of the originals, albeit with a few new flourishes. This turned out to be harder than I expected, recreating the old style from memory taxing my brains and memory to the extent that the whole thing turned into a bit of a chore.

For the second one I decided to say “stuff it, let’s just get it done” and abandoned the old style in favour of painting it entirely in various styles of disease-ridden, bruised and tortured flesh.

He looks a little different to the older models but he ties in fairly well with some of my newer servants of Nurgle.

With these two done the whole squad is ready to get out there and spread some diseases.

This also brings me another squad closer to getting my Death Guard army up and running so at some point I’ll have to dig everything out of their boxes, tally it all up and have a think about what else I want to paint up. In the meantime however I thought this was a good moment to turn my attention away from 40k to look at a game I actually play instead, and put together a little Warcry warband of Nurgle daemons.

Lead by a Sloppity Bilepiper (still the most fun thing to say in Games Workshop’s catalogue) the warband also includes four Plaguebearers, two swarms of Nurglings, a Beast of Nurgle (the converted tree creature) and the Daemon Prince of Nurgle who normally leads my Death Guard, currently moonlighting as a Plague Drone.

Realm of Plagues – Part 2

In my last post I showed the Nurgle terminator that had grown (slowly) out of a combination of loyalist and Putrid Blightking bits, helped along by my ongoing exploration of greenstuff. I actually prefer using loyalist terminator parts for Nurgle models as they’re rather less ostentatious than the chaos models and for Nurgle bare ceramite and rust is the only way to go!

Anyway I didn’t want him to get lonely by himself so I threw together a couple more Nurgly terminators. See what you think – but keep in mind its very early days for these two, and you know how long it took me to finish off the last one.

First of all here’s the squad’s champion.

Part of me wonders what’s going on inside that armour? Has he been blessed with the face of a Nurgling – or is he long dead and one – or more – of the little pox-mites are animating the corpse? Are we in fact seeing one of them peaking out through the front of the armour to see what’s going on? I think I’d rather not know…

We also have this chap, who carries the squads beloved Icon of Despair in the hopes that Grandfather Nurgle will rain his benevolence upon him and his brothers.

If anything he’s got even further to go than the champion – especially when it comes to building up the greenstuff around what is currently a rather waspish waste. As ever your thoughts are appreciated on both of them so if you have any feedback or suggestions I’d be glad to see them.

Rotting Ways

Way back in the mists of time, one of the first squads I started to build for the Beasts of Ruin was my plague marines, led by Golothess the Befouled.
I still love old Golothess but I’m not too proud to admit that the rest of the squad are showing their age a bit (check them out here if you don’t believe me). Nurgle provides a great opportunity to learn with greenstuff, and ugly results can still look alright on ugly models, but still, none of these guys really wow me now. Over the years I’ve added a few new recruits here and there which, I think, improve the quality of the squad overall. Then this guy came along and shook everything up.
I know I should be all modest but I really like him. The problem is he’s a little bit bigger than his mates.
Now that’s not the end of the world, chaos ought to be chaotic as I’m forever saying. However having made him I found myself wanting to make some more. I decided to give him a home in a new squad (expect a few WIP pics soon), and call Golothess’ Acolytes finished, at least for now. Before they could step, shamble and crawl into graceful completion however there was one more model to finish off – this bearer of the icon of despair.

Rather pleased with him, especially the banner, and he’s given me lots of inspiration for the forthcoming second squad. As always any thoughts, feedback or, especially, inspirational ideas for squad number two, are welcome in the comments box.

Of course, it wouldn’t be right to wrap up the story of Golothess and his acolytes without a final group shot.

And here they are, leading the march of Nurgle’s beloved children in the quest to contaminate the universe. Let the galaxy rot!

Change In The House Of Flies

I was keen to show off some Work-In-Progress images of this guy as part of the ‘No Guts, No Glory’ series, particularly as those pieces have all been about finding out what I can do with the (amazing) Putrid Blightkings kit and this one has stretched my adventures with those particular models well beyond anything I’ve tried before. However in the end it wasn’t to be, beyond a quick snapshot here. However, unlike a lot of models where there’s a comprehensible – if only tacked together – shape fairly early on, this one stayed as a pile of disparate bits right up to the very end. It wasn’t until the last moment (and a few hair-raising eleventh-hour tweaks) that I got to see the finished piece myself and confirm that it was all actually going to work.

It’s with tremendous relief then that I get to see him finished (incarnated?). Obviously this could have been a trainwreck but I’m glad I persevered. Take a look:

 

He’s a fairly big lad, even leaving aside the fact that he’s in mid-air, which – in my opinion – is how a daemon prince should be (big not flying!). Here he is next to my Nurgly Dreadnaught Igorin Rotbringer.

 

And buzzing over the heads of the worshipful ranks of the Rotten Souls.

 

So what do you think? Is this another dread summoning for my daemonic legions or should I have left him to gestate in some toxic sump a little longer? Let me know in the box below.

Outbreak of Evil

I’m still forging ahead with my new traitor guard project but let’s take a quick break from them because they’re not the only thing on my painting table. I’m also working on a fairly big, and extremely complex, Daemon Prince of Nurgle but I’m hanging fire on showing it to you until it’s finished – mainly because until then it’ll be in twelve disparate bits and I’m not entirely sure how, or even if, it’s going to work out. In the meantime, in order to keep me fresh and stop me succumbing to ‘big model panic’, I’ve also been working on a few more plaguebearers to join the Rotten Souls.

No Guts, No Glory – Part 4

So, here goes with another batch of Nurgle conversions joining the fetid ranks. First of all I’ve finally got around to making a second Chosen. In many ways this guy is built exactly as the designers intended, with only a few tweaks to move him from the world of Warhammer to 40k. Take a look: The biggest change is on his back where he has a convenient strap to hang a holstered bolter on. I know I’ve not really pushed the boat out here in terms of conversion work but then again ‘if it ain’t broke’ and all that. I always really liked this configuration of the Blightkings – to me it’s the pure, unalloyed essence of Nurgle. You can almost imagine the buzzing of the flies that surround him and the dolorous tolling of his bells. Plus that executioner’s axe just nails it in my opinion. As a result I really didn’t want to change much about him, just lift him from a fantasy setting and transfer him to the far-future as subtly as possible. Hopefully you’ll agree that’s what I’ve done. I did toy with the possibility of giving him some kind of Space Marine type backpack but dropped the idea. Pulling it off without fouling the axe looked like a real hassle and it’s not like he really needs it – if he can survive without most of his internal organs then he can do without whatever it is that Space Marine’s keep in their backpacks. Anyway, that’s not everything I’ve been working on. Here’s two more Plaguebearers to join the Rotten Souls. I’ll probably make a couple more to use up the extra Plaguebearer parts I’ve acquired (more on that below). Do you ever feel like you just can’t surround yourself with enough Plaguebearers? Must just be me then… Look at his happy face! And then we have this monster. He’s still at a fairly early stage yet but I’m really enthusiastic about him so expect to see more of him shortly. I’ll talk about him more in a future blog but I was so eager to show him off to you all I snapped a quick shot and added him to the end of this post. Once he’s finished he’ll be a Daemon Prince of Nurgle. He’s also partly the reason for my making more Plaguebearers, as I managed to pick up several of the riders alongside the Rot Fly body. Eagle-eyed readers might notice that his left arm is the one that used to belong to this Chaos Terminator. On the terminator it was proving to be just a bit big and heavy looking so I swapped it out and put it to use here instead. Of course that also means I’ll have to find a new arm for the Terminator now (‘armless joke anyone? Armed and dangerous? I’ll get my coat…)

Follow the Reaper

As I mentioned in the last couple of posts I’ve been working on adding my own “counts as” version of Typhus for a while. Originally I was going to add the torso and shoulder-pads from Forgeworld’s Nurgle Terminators to the legs and scythe of the Deathshroud and have done with it and I still think this could create quite a nice effect. However although I was able to get my hands on the Deathshroud components easily enough the other bitz proved elusive. Although my enthusiasm for the project remained high I was getting a little frustrated until I spotted the gas-masked head in the new Space Marines kit. Presumably it’s unintentional but there’s something about it that just screams “Nurgle”. The project was reborn – or at least brought shambling back into some kind of degenerate half-life.
Here’s the result at last; Ghisguth the Reaper finally finished in all his putrid glory.One of the things I like about the official Typhus miniatures, both from GW and Forgeworld’s Heresy-era Typhon, are their grim, unrelenting aspect; a powerful, almost medieval, death figure. Thus although I enjoy the carnival, celebratory element of Nurgle I wanted this model to be a little more stern, capturing Nurgle’s aspect as a god of despair and decay – Death the Reaper rather than Death from Diskworld.

To this end I posed him surveying the battlefield, as though selecting his next victim. Nurgle, after all, is never in a hurry. Khorne’s followers may rush forwards into battle, the slaves of Slaanesh must dash desperately from one high to the next, but Nurgle knows that someday they shall die, rot and inevitably come to him.

I confess I already struggle to understand how anyone managed to paint anything prior to the release of the new Special Effects paints (definitely the most important and exciting thing to come out of Game’s Workshop last year). Typhus Corrosion (of course) and Ryza Rust were used on the corroded metal work, Nurgle’s Rot helped produce a wonderfully slimy effect on the base and a liberal dose of Blood for the Blood God was added to the exposed guts. Perhaps the most useful paint though was Agrellan Earth which I used on all the corroded metalwork.I talked about this in the previous post but here’s a quick “step-by-step”. I started by painting the Agrellan Earth directly onto the bare plastic of the model. The paint is then left to dry and crack.

Once it had dried I sprayed everything black to seal it in and protect it.

A couple of layers of browns and some Boltgun Metal (or whatever you kids call it nowadays) are drybrushed over the top. Drybrushing is key to preserve the texture of the surface.

A quick layer of Ryza Rust (or any other grimy orange) finishes the job. Lovely.

Your Poison Throne

Continuing the Nurgle theme from last week, this post sees the return to realspace of Slatherbile the Indestructible, slithering back out of the warp to take command of his master’s putrescent servants.Not the most groundbreaking of conversions this but one I’ve yet to see fail. The addition of the Plaguebearer champion’s head to the body of the Nurgle Chaos Lord creates a Herald of Nurgle that is both wracked with disease and obvious decomposition and at the same time looks corpulent and “in-charge” when standing alongside the shambling plaguebearers.
His name plays deliberately to the pomposity inherent in all daemons. Slatherbile must be, amongst other things, an orator, stage-manager, caravan leader and tallyman, encapsulating the spirit of energetic endeavour and motivation that separates Nurgle’s senior daemons from the feverish exuberance of the rank and file.

It’s safe to assume that anyone calling himself “The Indestructible” holds an opinion of himself that is at least as bloated as his rotund figure. Of course it would be unbefitting for such a distinguished individual to walk amongst the ranks of the great unwashed.
My plan – which I hope I’ve pulled off – was to create a suitably chaotic palanquin for him, combining the key Nurgle elements of rotten wood, rusty metal and vats of virulent toxins, plus the ever-present troop of gleeful Nurglings.