Let's Do the Time Warp Again

It's been about a month since I've updated anything, but not for lack of doing anything: I recently came into a lot of Age of Sigmar miniatures — auctions and swap meets at your local FLGS are the best — and I've been busy doing a lot of grunt work on that front. To wit:

Formerly Slaanesh Chaos warriors. You can also see half-completed Marauders, left, several metal and plastic Plaguebearers in lovely plague green, the beginning of my kitbashed astrolith bearer (plastic saurus along with an unknown plastic totem), a modern plastic skink (which will one day be a skink chief), some old plastic reptile swarms, all Games Workshop; you can also see Genbu the Tortoise, from Wyrd; and a metal Skully from the original Calico Kate kit by Ninja Division (formerly Soda Pop Miniatures).

As Old as I Wanna Be

I wanted my knight to project that it was old — neglected, cursed with Nurgle's decay, and slowly succumbing to Grandfather's entropy.

The very sharp eyed among you may have noticed that the shot of my primed knight was ... rough, shall we say. Literally rough — I'd applied fine-grain sand to edges and other locations before priming, to ensure I had some raw texture to work with down the line.

Next step: The rust undercoat. First, I hit everything with a silver — I'm so tired of working with ceramite colors, I can't even explain with words — and then I added the rust colors.

Games Workshop's Knight Valiant, with a base made with cork and the scenic base from Forge World's Perturabo model.
Fine-grain sand has been liberally applied to the Knight Valiant.

To create the initial illusion of rust — it won't be the final, there's plenty more to do — I used Golden Hi-flow acrylics with an airbrush. I laid down a base of Sepia, then overlaid with Transparent Iron Red Oxide. There's a reason I'm laying down the rust effect first: it's because I'm going to create a mask, so when I apply my primary color, teal, I'll remove the mask and get a nice rust effect.

Alright, I Did Finish the Summer Plaguebearers

Plastic and metal plaguebearers by Games Workshop, including sand, rocks, and Secret Weapon Realistic Water.

The autumn summer plaguebearers are here! I had zero energy to work on much of anything hobby-related last month — between the new job; wrapping up some large, document-related things I was doing for a friend; and the general vagaries of life, I just sat on these guys for a few weeks. (I did do some work on the knight, of course, which I'll post soon; I've also been rebasing Seraphon lizardmen for Age of Hammer: Warsigmar — and I have the gruesome, hobby-knife-inflicted wounds to prove it. Cut away? I ain't no sissy.)

I Could Finish the Plaguebearers ...

... or I could start a brand new project. "Should" has no place in this conversation.

Thanks, Games Workshop! Good-bye, project discipline!

Knights are super-cool. Big stompy robits? Oh, yes please. I have a FW conversion kit I bought second hand, but until recently I wasn't really in a position to drop $150 on a plastic robit, no matter how fracking amazing it was. But then this dropped, along with an even bigger, burnier robit kit (and a steal at only $170 United States!), and my new job started up ... and here we are.

Sorcerer's Complete!

Wielding a mighty scythe and accompanied by dozens of jovial, diseased horrors, Kamran Shedimzadeh calmly surveys battlefields overran by Nurgle's foul daemons. Serene and detached even by the standards of Lux Larvalis, he takes few pains to hide from the enemy, preferring to stoically apply his Warp-given talents where they're most required.

Kamran Shedimzadeh, a counts-as Sorcerer on Palanquin of Nurgle. Games Workshop bits: Death Guard Plague Marine plastic head; Putrid Blightking plastic torso; Deathshroud Bodyguard plastic scythe head; unknown ork arm and tailpipe; unknown kroot arm and rifle; unknown servitor with censer (!!?!); Tyranid Ravener plastic back; Tyranid metal Hive Tyrant lower torso (3rd edition); several Nurglings from various plastic kits; a classic metal Nurgling; Chaos Space Marine plastic backpack; three skulls from the plastic skull kit. Forge World bits: Plague Marine upgrade kit resin shoulderpad. Wyrd: Railworker drill arm from The Rail Crew plastic kit. Pumice, stone, and kneadatite.

I ended up not adding a bloated gas sac (as considered in the last post about this guy); I couldn't get it to look right on him. I'm pretty pleased with this result, overall.

Winter's Finally Flippin' Here

IT TOOK SO LONG
AND I DIDN'T DO ANYTHING

After reviewing my winter plaguebearers, I realized that I was overcomplicating everything again. To wit:

Metal and plastic Plaguebearer kits.

That's correct, sharp-eyed viewers. I just left the horns alone, tidied up the details, and finished up. The hardest* part? That Nurgling front-and-center between the plaguebearer's legs. For the love of Grandfather ...

Perhaps He's Best Unclean One

I finally assembled my Great Unclean One kit, and ... wow. Color me very impressed. There are tons of options, and Rotigus, the kit's alternate build (I built a bog-standard GUO), gives plenty of options that can easily be folded into a large-scale conversion. (I've got an idea for a Contemptor conversion I've been kicking around for a while that might incorporate those pieces.) When I've knocked out more of my army, I fully plan to purchase this kit again and massively convert it.

But there's one thing that makes me a little sad about the kit: just how much it outclasses the Forge World Great Unclean One. To wit:

Left: Forge World Great Unclean One. Right: Games Workshop Great Unclean One. Both are stock, except for a repaired horn on the FW model — I bought it second hand and the original owner had lost the piece long ago.

Chaos Decimator: Ready for Priming

I finally finished off the Decimator. I had no more flat surfaces to cover, so I had to stop.

Chaos Decimator. GW bits: Primaris Redemptor Dreadnought; Nurgling from unknown kit; cloth and torsos from Putrid Blightking kit; unknown Eldar weapons; flesh sacs and pipes from unknown monstrous Tyranid kit; Plaguebearer head, arm and icon; leg from Skeleton kit; monstrous fangs from unknown Tyranid kit; head and arm from Helbrute kit. Forge World bits: plate from Nurgle dreadnought; shoulderpads from Plague Marine upgrade kit. Privateer Press: skeletons from Cage Rager; back from unknown Trollblood kit. Kneadatite, chains, framing wire, framing nails, pill bottle, pumice grit and bells.

I'm only partly kidding: I had a lot of fun adding layers upon layers of junk onto this model, so I just kept going until it got difficult to do more.

Another Quick Aside

When I reviewed my collection and realized I had holes in it — as shown in A Tiny New Project and A Tiny Project Continues Apace — one of those holes was a barebones Chaos Lord. Volero Scalpondus, the head of Lux Larvalis, is a Chaos Lord on Palanquin of Nurgle; he's too big to really be a standard Chaos Lord, and I don't really want to use him in every single matchup, anyway.

In any case, I resolved on creating a quick-and-dirty Chaos Lord: Something horrific, but relatively simple.

I had a vision, and I started here:

Chaos Space Marine kit with Plague Marine Upgrade Kit pieces.

A Tiny Project Continues Apace

A little confession — while I have most of the strategic particulars of Lux Larvalis dead to rights (how many tanks, how many warriors, intelligence assets, etc.), I only have three characters sketched out to any degree. This guy is not one of them.

Chaos Sorcerer on Palanquin of Nurgle. GW pieces: head from Plague Marines kit; front torso from Putrid Blightkings kit; back from Tyranid Raveners kit; lower body from 3rd Edition Hive Tyrant; left arm from an unknown Ork kit; backpack from Chaos Space Marines kit; exhaust port from an unknown Ork kit; arm and staff from unknown kroot kit; power scythe head from Deathshroud Bodyguard kit. Forge World piece: Plague Marines Upgrade Kit shoulderpad. Wyrd piece: arm from Rail Workers from Rail Crew kit.

A lot of the creatures and forces of Chaos I put together start with an internal vision — some idea, usually inspired by some bits I have lying around. This piece came together from two items I've been tinkering with, one of which didn't make it to the final product: The body of the metal Hive Tyrant (The long tail on this guy) and some Forge World plague marine upgrade bits I've had lying around forever and a half (I went with the heftier blightking/new plague marine pieces instead for size reasons).

What I didn't start with was a backstory, a formal position in Lux Larvalis, or even a name.

Chaos Decimator, Part 4

"Unleeeeeash meeeee": Primaris Redemptor Dreadnought (GW) with Plaguebearer head and arm (GW),
Skeleton leg (GW), Putrid Blightking torso (GW), Cage Rager skeletons (Privateer Press), miscellaneous plate
from Nurgle Dreadnought (Forge World), and various Tyranid spikes/fangs (GW).

There's one last thing I want to do to this plaguebearer — I want to add a breathing mask to its mouth. I'm a little torn on how I'm going to do that; I'd like it to be clear plastic, which poses a half-a-dozen hurdles, but I'd settle for a green stuff mask. We'll see.

But there's more!

An Old Plague, Part 2

I'm mixed on poxwalkers. Yeah, I get that they're good (probably still decent even after GW toned them down), but ... like, zombies, man. They're a little played out. Still, I managed to accidentally my way into about 60 of them while picking up various Dark Imperium lots for the foetid bloat-drone. Since they were decent fodder at first, before Chaos cultists and plaguebearers got significant boosts from updated rules, I ended up fielding them a lot at the start of 8th Edition.

Long story short, I painted a full unit before moving onto my plaguebearers. It's likely going to be, say, 13% of an eternal shame that I finished them before I dug into my favorite one-eyed daemons. (That's almost a full e-shame, for those who count things like that.)

Poxwalkers from the Dark Imperium kit.

A Tiny New Project

While I stick closely to the core of my Nurgle Daemon lists — plaguebearers, plagueburst crawlers, foetid bloat-drones, and poxbringers — I often swap out various support pieces and leaders. One of the key pieces I go back and forth on a lot is Chaos Lord v. Chaos Sorcerer: The former offers decent accuracy buffs to all my artillery, while the latter offers a significant accuracy boost to a single model. (There's a signature Chaos Sorcerer ability called Warptime that would tilt the decision for most armies ... but I don't use it all that often: I don't run Mortarion, a giant model that really likes getting the massive movement bonus from the ability, and my daemon big bads don't need the speed since they fall from heaven like lightning ... and they're not legal targets for it anyway, natch.)

But I realized the other day that I had a hole in my collection: the palanquin-riding Chaos servants have the daemon keyword (and thus help Epidemius provide boosts to my entire army), but I didn't have a Chaos Sorcerer on Palanquin of Nurgle.

Well, Smite — the Sorcerer bread-and-butter shooting power — can kill things pretty good, and daemon killing power is what powers Epidemius. I set forth with half a dozen boxes full of bits to rectify my mistake.

Chaos sorcerer on palanquin of Nurglings. This kitbash includes: A head from the new Plague Marine kit (GW);
a torso front from the Putrid Blightkings kit (GW); a torso front from the Tyranid Ravener kit (GW); a backpack
from the Chaos Space Marines kit (GW); a bit of pipe from an unknown ork kit (GW); a drill arm from
Wyrd's rail worker (part of The Rail Crew kit); an arm from an unknown ork kit (GW); a rifle and arm from
an unknown kroot kit (GW); a power scythe from the Deathshroud Bodyguard kit (GW), and the tail of
a 3rd Edition Hive Tyrant kit (GW). There's also a classic metal Nurgling and just a smidge of a modern
plastic Nurgling (both GW) in the background.

Chaos Decimator, Part 3

I'm coming down the final stretch on my Chaos Decimator sculpting.

Decimator-in-progress. Bits catalog: GW — primaris redemptor dreadnought; putrid blightking torso;
Tyranid monstrous creature weapons; skulls kit; unknown eldar gun; Tyranid monstrous spines;
plaguebearer arm and head; PP — unknown trollblood kit.

You can see some of the progression here, with the biggest change being the putrid blightking torso hanging off the left leg. That's in the process of being converted into a grub or some other kind of disgusting Nurgle creation.

Chaos Decimator, Part 2

I've gone through a lot of tentative designs for a Chaos decimator. Most of them didn't get to the scribbling-on-a-napkin phase; others were originally slated for my hellforged contemptor (which is a whole 'nother can of beans); and a few were earnestly explored and dropped for a variety of (mostly petty) reasons.

Things I knew I wanted:

• Gross Nurgle messes. This one's a bit of a given, I guess.
• Some kind of receptacle for foul, disease-ridden liquids. (Think Mamon or the infamous Very Manly Baneblade.)
• Ridiculous, otherworldly guns that look nothing like an Imperial weapon. (I have many inappropriate feelings about the soulburner petard, which the Imperium doesn't get — the weapon clearly relies on Chaos to function, so I felt it shouldn't look like a regular Space Marine gun.)
• A disgusting daemon head.

So, I had my base — a massive Primaris Redemptor Dreadnought. I had a list of must-haves. Off to the laboratory!

An Old Plague, Part 1

Games Workshop plague marine from the Dark Imperium boxed set
and a plasma gun upgrade of unknown source.

I didn't start working on my Death Guard when I started this blog — I'd already completed a handful of units. The first to get paint, of course, were a pair of heavy-weapons-toting plague marines. There's nothing really more Death Guard than a bunch of plague marines with big guns, so that's where I went first.

It helped that Dark Imperium loose models were relatively cheap on the secondhand market and that the Easy-to-Build Death Guard Plague Marine kit wasn't a painful buy — I snagged a bunch of marines, a few foetid bloat-drones and too many poxwalkers for way less than retail.

Chaos Decimator, Part 1

A Chaos decimator is classic GW Chowss — predictably, laughably grimdark. They're the most evil, the most blasphemous, the most dangerous creations from the most mysterious Chaos cabal. The model — a Forge World resin — is also one of my least favorite models in the modern line.

Chaos Decimator. Photo taken from Forge World's website.

It's not all bad, of course. What I like: There's a real sense of movement and heft to this model. The implication of inevitability is communicated so well that the model clashes a bit with the static giant robots elsewhere in GW's line — compare to stock Imperial knights, dreadnoughts, etc.

Winter Plaguebearers Update

While they're not done, the winter plaguebearers are starting to take solid shape. To wit:

Games Workshop plaguebearers, both multipart plastic and metal.

They're blue — bluer than I was aiming for in my last discussion — but I actually like how they've turned out. I like it a lot. The color nicely grounds them against the reds and oranges of the rest of the army. The white with blue shadows is also distinct from the ivory in my Death Guard models, which skews orange.

The Harvest of Simurgh, part 1

Salvation! Salvation!

I witnessed the descent of the Emperor's angels myself, brothers and sisters. They streaked across the sky like meteors, striking deep in the twice-damned heretics' choking fogs. I felt the very earth shake as they crashed into the foe! I saw the flashes crack against the night sky as their undeniable fury was unleashed!

Take heart, brothers and sisters! All is not lost! The Emperor's angels will push back the foul mutant and the tainted sorcerer!

— Farhad of Asaak, Imperial Guardsman of the 301st Simurgh PDF, 3715686.M38

Plaguebearers, Part 2: Works in Progress

So, this is where I'm at on my plaguebearers right now. We'll go from least- to most-finished.

AUTUMN

Games Workshop's plaguebearers. Mostly multipart plastics, but at least two metals can be seen in the back row.

These are only based and primed, as you can see, which puts them pretty firmly in the conceptual phase. I wanted to get the summer plaguebearers done first, but I really didn't want to paint two sets of brown plaguebearers in a row, so these are last on my current to-do list.

Plaguebearers

Plaguebearers from Games Workshop, with no significant alterations. Metal and plastic multipart kits shown.

I love plaguebearers, and I've loved them since the first time I can recall seeing them in the late '90s — after the release of their second set of sculpts. While I probably adore the current incarnation of Nurglings more (of course, I'm no savage), there's no other model in the GW range (or any range, really) that has consistently delighted me as much as plaguebearers.

Modeling the Rot

Volero's rusting power armor creaked and sighed as he shifted his weight. He gazed out over the workshop as hooded, stooped figures welded and cut sheets of adamantine.

"How many of these," he asked, stopping as his throat filled with something wet. He choked it back with a smacking sound. "Can you produce ... before Tartella?"

The creature's form cast a shadow across Volero as it reached for a data-slate. It carefully traced two figures onto the device's face with a long claw.

Volero coughed as he took the data-slate. "Yes, six should be ... sufficient."

Below, the cowled workers led a scabbed and diseased thing — a nightmare of a human, with a single eye and a crooked horn — to a half-built machine. One positioned its arms and legs against the plasteel, and four others raised heavy rivet guns.

"One," the thing spoke as the first hot rivet was driven into its arm. "Two. Three. Four. ..."