A Great Unclean One (and some gloss varnish)

Papa Nurgle showing benevolence in taking lepers under his care to unleash further contagion amongst humanity.

When I was a nipper, I coveted one of these gorgeous, Nurgly, lumps of lead to paint up but it was a bit too expensive for my pocket money income at the time. They're still not cheap on eBay but certainly more affordable, so I bid and won!

A fair few months later and he jumped to the front of the paint queue, mainly because I had an idea to add some followers to his base, in this case a couple of old Citadel Mummies that I had in my lead pile. I wanted to create a feeling of Papa Nurgle showing his misunderstood benevolence to his followers with leprosy. 

So here's what I came up with:

A bastard to photograph well with two depths of focus.

You can see some of the extra modelling I've added around the neck so that his head is in a more upright position. The boils etc are bits of rice, seed and bead embedded into the still wet greenstuff

So for this fine fellow I tried some experiments. I undercoated white and then applied that old Chestnut Ink to the model (with a touch of washing up liquid). I then highlighted up with some white. So far so good.

When I tried to apply more washes over the Chestnut Ink I had forgotten that the old inks were not designed to be re-wetted and certainly not with a modern wash that has some washing up liquid added. So the yellow in the recesses is actually where the Chestnut Ink was wiped away with the application of the next layer, leaving white and then the yellow wash settled there. Now I was tempted to start again, but realised that with some further details I could make it work and I'm actually quite pleased with the result, the yellow in the recesses and folds of his skin helps add to the putrescent feel of the model. 

A few more glazes of purples, reds, blues and greens followed by some layering work in the wound areas created a model I am pretty happy with, especially as it did not take too long to paint. It was the individual Nurglings that took the most time.

Similar washes of colour were applied to the Mummies, the only difference is that there was some drybrushing with Bleached Bone up to white to pick out the details of the bandages. 

And here's a poor shot of the model pre-painted. You can see some of the dried seeds I also used embedded in the greenstuff to create boils etc. The end of the tongue is a cut up plastic goblin mouth.

The only other problem I had during the painting of this model (which includes the difficulty of painting behind another model already attached to the base) was that the because of the Chestnut Ink base layer, the paint was susceptible to wearing off quite easily when being held during painting, this meant I had to add some gloss varnish to keep it intact. I don't have any matt varnish to dull it down, but I quite like the shiny, sweaty putrescent skin. And the gloss finish reminds me of the painting style of the Realm of Chaos era anyway. 

Thoughts on gloss varnishing in the modern era?