7 Chaos Warhounds(160pts)

I think these are some cracking sculpts, but having now completed them, I wish I’d thrown in some more conversions to make each one a bit more unique and Nurglesque. Anyway, here’s the unit of 7 on their display tray.

I tried doing a lot of Contrast paint work on these and then highlighing up on the raised areas. These first two are relatively straight forward:

These two I went a bit darker and tried adding a bit of pattern to them as well (again, this is something which I should have explored further)

The warhound on the left here is the most converted model based on the warhound sculpt. I received it incomplete and so added an extra head, a troll’s back leg and a tyrannid’s arm at the front. The dog on the right was painted using Typhus corrosion, which gave a really interesting effect as the colours separated (I didn’t shake it enough) and then I highlighted up from that base.

The leader of the pack is a conversion I had started years ago, based on a metal cold one and with a wolfs head, horns and horses tail added. The base colour for this was also Typhus Corrosion which adds a bit of texture to the model and highlighted up. It’s not a good paint for this technique as it’s quite thick and certainly isn’t great for your brushes.

So that brings the tally up to 3155 points. I’ve got some spawn and plaguebearers on the painting table at the moment. More of that next. 

The Great Lord of Decay

"What is the response of living men to the undeniable and inevitable futility of life? Is it to lie down and accept death and the coming to naught of their every endeavour? No it is not! Faced with the inevitably of death what answer can there be but to run through life at a great and unstoppable pace, cramming each day with hope, laughter, noise and bustle. Thus, happiness and human endeavour are sired by a coming to terms with decay and futility. This realisation is the key to understanding the Great Lord of Decay and his worshippers."

At the moment it feels like my hobby output is gathering pace, but it is, from past experience, very stoppable. However having this hobby does provide some relief from the futility of life, it gives me something relatively private to think about, to plan, to execute and the hope is always there that I can realise my intentions and make my hobby as good as it can be. So here is my latest endeavour, keeping the real decay and futility of life at bay, renewing an old miniature with inspiration from another old source and enjoying the process of making. Thus I am a worshipper of the Great Lord of Decay.

The quote above is from the same page of the Lost and the Damned as the Tony Hough illustration which my latest model is based upon, and reminds me of why I was drawn to Nurgle originally, many years ago. Not the contemporary bloated, pus filled, superficially plague ridden approach but the idea that in addition to this, in the face of death and decay there can be joviality; a carnival attitude, hustle and bustle. 

Here's my homage to that era of Games Workshop writing, illustration and model-making:

 

 

Here's a couple of edited images of the above photographs, which make it appear even more illustrative looking, with an exaggerated contrast and brightness. I couldn't quite get here with my painting and actually I'm not sure I wanted to.

And here is the model in front of Tony Hough's illustration. There is definitely some likeness and I hope I've caught the spirit of the art, but overall I'm well happy with how it turned out.

Here's some WIP photos and a breakdown of the painting process

1. Zenithal primed undercoat, grey followed by a white misting coat from diagonally above. This helped create an exaggeration of the shadows and highlights. (this photo is quite over-exposed so looks lighter than it actually was.)

2. A very dilute wash of a black Contrast paint (with a touch of washing up liquid) over the entire model. This unifies the undercoat, deepens the shadows and makes the detail so much clearer to paint.

3. A further, darker wash was applied just to the areas of shadow. The idea being to replicate the strong contrast of the original illustration.

4. Here you can see the steady build up of layered highlights, starting with a pale grey and adding subsequent quantities of white.

5. The final highlights were pure white, again to create that illustrative stark contrast. The plinth was painted last and deliberately left dark, highlighting up from black, to ensure attention wasn't drawn away from the model. It also meant that the black lip of the model's base blended in more with the outer plinth. Here I haven't started painting the elements on the plinth.

So that challenge, to recreate a Tony Hough illustration is done, I know there will be some amazing entries and I am very much looking forward to seeing what others do. For this blog, I'll be returning to the completion of my LostandtheDamned army; some colour and some warhounds next....

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!

Level 15 Sorcerer (205pts)

So I felt that my collection of models (an 

So I felt that my collection of models (an army?) needed a leader, so I dusted of this converted sorcerer on a Palanquin raised by Nurglings. I've jumped between Warhammer Armies and the Lost and the Damned here, choosing a Level 15 sorcerer profile (155)  from the former and giving him the palanquin (50) a free (ridiculously) Staff of Nurgle from the latter. 

The main part of the model, the palanquin, is of course the classic Citadel version, unadulterated, but I didn't really like any of the riders that came with it (I have him going spare) so created my own from some plastic zombie and chaos bits and greenstuff for the cloth. 

The staff of Nurgle uses one of those Beastmen heads from the sprue on a plastic spear. Here's more on what appears to be quite a potent staff:

The wormpile model I shared in my warband post is perfect to represent the remains of the failed magic test model. 

So with this sorcerer leading the masses the total now equates to a current total of 2995pts which seems like a good opportunity to take a group shot of a 3000pt army:

 

Much more to come though.... 

Dragon Ogre Shaggoth (335pts)

So here’s the first character for the army, a Dragon Ogre Shaggoth, a level 25 hero at 335pts. There was no option for one of these in Warhammer 3rd Edition Armies and I think it was several editions of Warhammer later that he was an option for Chaos forces, which must have coincided with the release of the model upon which my conversion was made. But of course the Lost and the Damned book had the option to field one, so here’s my Nurglified version:

I remember being on a lengthy hiatus from the hobby, but the release of this model somehow infiltrated my ignorant bubble and I was mightily impressed. Such an imposing sculpt. So when I did return to the fold, this was a model I wanted to get my hands on and convert. You can see more about the process here from 5 years ago!

And here’s the info from the Lost and the Damned, those lovely stats come at quite some points cost...

This is now a total of 2790pts for the growing army, another character next...