Get Sick Or Die Trying – Part 13

As regular readers will know I’m working my way towards a zombie horde of forty poxwalkers, although my insistence on making each one unique is keeping progress relatively slow. However with Nurgle showering his gifts on my friends and family at the moment I decided to try to appease him by painting some more of his minions.

Of course the completion of these three models means at I can count this as yet another submission to Azazel’s Squaddie September challenge. I’ve definitely gone a bit mad on the challenge this month but it’s certainly helped to clear the backlog!

Get Sick Or Die Trying – Part 12

As promised, with the Negavolt Cultists now in the bag I’ve returned to working on Blackstone Fortress with renewed vigour and, all being well, I should have a herd of angry beastmen ready to show you within the next few days. However they’re a long way from being the only thing on the painting desk and today it’s the turn of some hideous plague ridden zombies.

I will admit that I’ve not been feeling a great deal of enthusiasm for my poxwalker horde lately. Nonetheless they’ve not been entirely left to grow dusty with those at the front of the heap enjoying the odd five minutes of attention here and there until, as though by some organic process, I discovered that these three were pretty much painted. Thus in between the beastmen I took the chance to add some finishing touches and get them out of the way.

One of my goals with this project has been to make every zombie unique. Regular readers will be aware that I’m no fan of clone armies and so ensuring that every duplicate poxwalker was converted in some way was an absolute must.

This next is one of my favourites so far. I wouldn’t want to make a habit of it but it was fun to really let my hair down and indulge in some ghastly gory horror.

I wonder what this fat lad has been eating to end up looking like this? Maybe it’s best not to ask…

For comparison here he is next to his unconverted brother. The model on the right is the original model, the one on the left is the converted version.

As I said these didn’t take the greatest amount of effort to complete just the occasional few minutes whenever the mood took me over a period of months. As a result they’re probably not my best work but I think they come into their own when viewed as part of a horde. I’ve always insisted that I didn’t just want “some zombies” but a full-on zombie horde and on that front at least I think I can proudly say I’m getting there.

Whether or not this leads to a burst of Nurgly energy remains to be seen although I suspect it won’t, too many other project are vying for my attention at the moment. Indeed this has really been nothing more than a distraction from Blackstone Fortress so I’ll sign off by putting my honour on the line, nailing my colours to the metaphorical mast and promising to get those beastmen painted by the end of the week.

Get Sick Or Die Trying – Part 11

Did I not promise you more poxwalkers just a week ago? Am I not a corpse master of my word? Here’s the latest two shamblers to come lurching off the painting desk.

I experimented quite a lot with this one, mixing some of the agrellan earth texture paint in with flesh tones to cover some of the rougher joins. I actually finished him off about a week ago but I found myself really unhappy with the results. Although he was technically pretty much perfect the results were much too “clean” for my liking (by which I mean painted with precision, he still looked like a filthy rotten git). In the end I took him back to the painting desk and worked over him, he’s muckier now but I’m much happier with the end result.

His new pal here is converted from the poxwalker in the lab coat.

Unlike the previous lab coat wearing poxwalker I painted I didn’t use lots of blood splatter here, but instead tried to make the coat look stained and befouled by decomposition. By way of comparison here he is next to his gore covered colleague.

Of course without getting too graphic it’s clear that his guts have exploded quite violently at some point, which presumably means he wasn’t wearing the lab coat at the time. It builds a somewhat macabre image, in my mind at least, of him, already long dead, taking his coat from its hook and, in a reverse of his habits in life, putting it on before he shambled out of the lab for the final time.

Get Sick Or Die Trying – Part 9

Time for a couple more plague infested zombies to put in an appearance. As I’ve probably mentioned before I’m aiming to make every model in the horde unique, which means converting duplicate sculpts. These two however have turned out exactly as nature intended. The first one wears a lab coat, marking him out as either the doctor who failed to find a cure or the mad scientist who infected everyone in the first place.

In a process that will be familiar to players of pre-heresy World Eaters I spent ages getting the highlights “just so” on his white coat and then covered it up by splattering him liberally with Blood for the Blood God.

His pal here is one of my favourites from the snap-fit set. The green gunk emerging from his mask is a little hammy but otherwise his pose and expression are just spot on.

Whilst I was about it I also painted up these horrible grubs from the Rogue Trader box. Frankly I think it’s disgusting (and downright impossible to photograph well, you’ll have to trust me that it does look better than this in real life). I tried to “steer into the skid” as it were, and play up the grossest elements. How good an idea that actually was is probably debatable. Suffice to say it’s been my least favourite thing to have painted recently.

I think I assumed before I started that painting poxwalkers would be a fairly quick and simple process but I’ve found them to be trickier and slower going than I ever imagined. Still I’m feeling a wave of enthusiasm for the Death Guard at the moment, partly as a result of reading Chris Wraight’s excellent novel Lords of Silence, so I’ll try to channel that into productivity and get a few more finished sooner rather than later.

Get Sick Or Die Trying – Part 7

Zombies are at their best in hordes. A lone zombie may be pretty terrifying if it’s in your house, or even shambling around on your street, but when it comes to zombies as miniatures; more is always better. I don’t want a few poxwalkers I want a mighty swarm to terrorise the neighbourhood. Furthermore I’ve decided I want every poxwalker to be unique (regular readers will know this was inevitable). With this in mind I’ve been kitbashing and converting quietly away in the background of other projects and now it’s time for two more corpses to walk.

As usual I try to sneak in a little narrative where I can. This chap was ordered by his Imperial masters to walk through the streets with his bell warning citizens to remain indoors whilst the plague run its course. Alas there is no one left alive to hear him now but he keeps ringing his bell in honour of grandfather Nurgle’s glory.

Meanwhile his new friend plays to the joyful enthusiasm felt by Nurgle’s followers.

It’s not all about Poxwalkers though; lurking behind the rotten horde trudge their malevolent masters, the Plague Marines…

Grandfather be praised!

Scum! – Part 2

Just a quick one today, another example of the down-at-heal hive scum I’m working on to serve as bullet-catchers for my gangers. This chap certainly looks fairly doleful, although I can’t imagine that working as hive scum is a lot of laughs. Still, if you need someone to engage in questionable and often violent activities in the dark of the Underhive, no questions asked, and you’re on a budget, he might just be the very man.

He was a fairly simple and straightforward model to build (I needed the rest after tackling a Van Saar!), essentially just a spare poxwalker with a bloodreaver’s head and one of the ever useful kharadron backpacks. However as usual if you have any suggestions for tweaks or improvements do let me know.