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.

My goal was to create a literal hellmouth. I'd seen a Chaos cultist conversion that did some light work to a figure whose mouth had expanded to the point that it draped down to his feet and fed into an extradimensional space. (I can't find the conversion, frustratingly; it was probably from Convert or Die or WilhelMiniatures, but no dice in re-discovering it thus far.) Interdimensional portals already feature in Lux Larvalis' fluff (its Rhinos are gateways into Nurgle's Garden, which conveniently explains their cramped interiors while letting me go nuts on the gribbly bits), so I figured — why not let a Chaos Lord be a portal to a hellscape?

I started by adding a layer of green stuff down the front and building up the sides with ropes of green stuff.

I then continued adding ropes of green stuff to build a bottom lip — a literal lip in this case — as well as cheeks. Once this was dry, I added layers of flesh inside and outside to smooth out the ropy textures. In my excitement, I didn't capture any photos until I'd already added two of the elements crawling into realspace from the warp:

Next, I added layers of thin green stuff to the final form so I could add some texture. Then I went in and fleshed out the back of the model, to provide some sense of real, 3-D existence to a figure that was trying so desperately to defy Euclidean space:

I went back in and photographed this angle later,
after I'd added sand and stone to the base.

Finally, I added a scything talon from a Genestealer kit to cement the idea that this Chaos Lord was serving as a conduit to the warp:

All in all, for such a quick bit of work, I'm happy with how it turned out. It's not exactly unique — like I said, it was inspired by a very similar piece (that I can't find now for the life of me) — but it's definitely different from most 40k models.