A Great Unclean One (based on the LatD illustration)

There's an Oldhammer project happening at the moment which is to create something from one of Tony Hough's amazing illustrations. Now a lot of his work is 40K based and therefore not for me, but having scanned the wonderful images in the Lost and the Damned, I came across one of his illustrations of a Great Unclean One, on page 12. It's certainly an illustration which I'd seen before but it's not until I have a ulterior purpose that I actually stopped and studied it properly, even more the case when I'm about to create a sculpted version of it. 

Now I'm not usually one to post wip photos, but I'm particularly happy with this as it's taken a fair amount of work, thought and observation. 

Part of the thought process for this type of project, is about what materials, parts, bits, models etc to use. I already owned an incomplete classic, 3rd edition Citadel GUO and I had the head of one of the more recent ones (from some old project many years ago). Now it's a head I don't usually like but I could see a resemblance to Tony Hough's drawing, both in terms of the wide shape of the head, the wide, toothy grin and the shape of the horns. Hopefully you can see that here:

To complete the scene I needed a couple of naked admirers and found these courtesy of Hasslefree miniatures. Both have had head swaps, the female heads being snipped away and a skull and a Tyrannid(?) head replacing them.

With the miniatures all gathered it was time to do some cutting and sculpting. The classic GUO legs section was far too narrow for what I had in mind, so I sawed through it, off centre in an area lacking in details, in order to space and then bulk out the gap between. I then wanted to change the pose of his left arm so made a snip at the wrist, so as to reposition it. I didn’t own a right arm and looked briefly on eBay but wasn’t willing to pay £15 for one, so decided to fully sculpt that appendage. As always Nurgle sculpting, thankfully, is quite forgiving!

The next stage was to start to put it all together, to see whether I could actually realise my intentions and keep it as close as possible to the illustration. This involved a fair amount of careful drilling and pinning to join respective parts together and to make a solid base for all the sculpting to follow. Here you can see that I chopped off the original horns and inverted them so that their shape was more reminiscent of Hough’s illustration and removed his goofy bottom jaw so the head sat more comfortably on the torso without any sign of a neck. You can also see the armature for the right hand here. I had the torso of the GUO ready to go without any changes (yet). The left leg had to be substantially repositioned, so an admirer could fit on his thigh, this created quite the gap and quite the forward step, but I figured I could reduce the space by extending the belly outwards to fill the gap.

Thus began the process of sculpting. I started off with milliput to bulk out the model and fill all the gaps (sorry no photo here, I was in a sculpting frenzy and didn’t want to stop the flow) and then green stuff for the details and texture. You can see that I’ve added a plastic tongue (from the Giant set?) and lots of postules made from dried seeds, pushed straight into the wet green stuff. At this stage I had to make a crucial decision - do I sculpt over the lovely mouth belly to maintain the Hough homage or do I keep it exposed for nostalgia sake? Obviously the former won out. Here you can also see me experimenting with the GreenstuffWorld green stuff roller to create some of the ribbed intestines protruding from his open belly.

There are lots of little details in the illustration that I wanted to include in the sculpt, so I will share those here too, as these are intrinsic to trying to capture Hough’s style of work. When an earlier wip photo was shared on the Oldhammer Facebook page, it highlighted that the illustration seems to be quite renowned for the uzi toting Nurgling that hovers in the top left corner of the picture. So I found an old spore (?) model and sculpted over it to create the Nurgling. The top hat is made from a plastic tube off cut and a circular bit of plasticard for the brim. The uzi is the nozzle from a gun off the Gaslands sprue and a snip off a cable tie:

Here you can see, in more detail, the lounging admirer. A greenstuff tongue was added as if to lick the man breast and some hair and spikes adorn her head. Her left leg also had to be snipped and repositioned at the knee to both fit on and to represent the illustration. You can also see a tendril wrapping itself around her other knee and the completed belly, sans mouth.

A close up of the head shows some tiny rolled maggots infesting his horns as well as a four legged, hairy skull creature on top. I was really pleased with the sculpting of the GUO’s head, I think I hid the goofy, quizzical look of the original sculpt and created a more sneering, malevolent look of the illustration. You can also see the sculpted bile coming from his mouth, this will be added to with some stringy UHU glue after painting. 

I had to think carefully about how to create all the webs and strands of organic goo that drape off the GUO. I had a eureka moment when the vacuum cleaner got clogged with a long, thin piece of string, so used it here, soaked in pva to make it solid. I also found some tiny roots from some moss that I had in a baggie and used them to dangle from his right hand. 

And from the back, not quite so much detail here, but you can see some beads squished into the milliput sculpting.

The last part was the base. Now this is me breaking my own rule (to a degree). I’ve never really appreciated display plinths, much preferring models to be properly based, but I was given this wooden one and decided to use it here. I’ve compromised by also basing the model on a round 60mm base and then magnetising both so that he can be separated from the plinth. It seems to be a sound solution...

Both bases required some added detail and interest, so I got to work with the greenstuff roller and made some more worms to scavenge around in the foreground and hit the bits box for a range of organic looking bits. In fact I delved to the very.p bottom of the box and pulled out some interesting shapes of off cuts and unwanted pieces, including bits of horn, a pouch, some sort of lip thing and bits of resin skull. On the left is part of a GW familiar, on the right a resin chap with gas mark that I was given at a meet up, sorry I can’t remember who. Obviously there is an old Nurgling at the forefront because it’s just too cool and a mistake of Tony Hough’s not to include one there!

So there we go, the model is made. I’ve just undercoated him today with a zenithal undercoat of grey and white and my intention is to monochrome him (adding a dark wash for shadows first) then with just some washes of very subtle colour, in an almost illustrative style. Hopefully my skills are up to the job, we shall see!

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?