2 Chaos Spawn (50pts)

From the largest pointed unit (1200 for the Plaguebearers) to the smallest, a couple of Spawn at 25pts each. In the LatD these are described more as a pack as can (and probably should) be led by a Champion of Chaos, so eventually I'd like to do a converted spawn made up of lots of bits from my box and add him to these two and add a leader to marshall them around the battlefield.

Obviously these two are both classic Citadel miniatures, the left model being an old Plague Elemental and the right one being a Spawn of Nurgle, the latter having a slight conversion in removing the funny legs that came with it and sculpting some tentacles there instead. Both these old models though suffer from the perpendicular restraints of sculpting from that time, so when faced from the front both models look quite flat and symmetrical (although with the slug spawn you can reposition the tentacles on it's head to create more dynamic movement) and hence why I've photographed them both on the angle.

For this Beast of Nurgle I did a little research on slugs to get the correct colour scheme and used a little gloss varnish to capture the slimy nature of it's body. You will notice the basing on both models is slightly different from the rest of the army, in that there are a collection of organic shapes molded into the landscape, the idea behind this is based on the premise that:

 "the very proximity of a Beast is sufficient to kill small animals and plant.... or may age and decay perceptibly in their presence" (LatD p.20)

So a collection of small bitz from the box were impressed into some milliput and sculpted into the base to give the appearance of a dying, organic mass surrounding the model as it moves forward.

With the Plague Elemental I also experimented further with some skin painting techniques. Over a white undercoat I painted all the pinks with Contrast paints and highlights. Over this I then mixed some crackle medium into the pale green colouring of the skin and dabbed this onto areas where I wanted to create a peeling, cracking skin effect over the pink, exposed areas.

And to finish here's a group shot of the army including the most recent units for a cumulative total of 4405pts

Next up are some kitbashed Nurgle Beastmen, using mostly plastic kits...

Plague Elemental

One of the first Oldhammer blogs that inspired my own blogging, is the work of Don Hans, not just his incredible glowing and layered colours but also his distinctive basing technique. For this Plague Elemental I wanted to create something similar, in that I imagined the Plague Elemental leaving a trail of organic detritus in his wake and surrounding environs. I combined this with my regular basing technique and threw in some swamp too for good measure! (More on the base further down).

The miniature is not a great sculpt, it seems quite "flat" and looks particularly bad when viewed from straight on, but better from these angles it does have some charm:

Hopefully you can see from the images that I have re-mastered the crackle medium skin technique that I tried (unsuccessfully) to share with you here. I realised that you need to lay it on pretty thick for the effect to work. Partly scared that I would lose the detail on the model and also for a desire to show the plague-ridden skin falling off in patches revealing the pinker flesh underneath; I applied the crackle medium (mixed with some Nurgling Green) in small, thick clumps on more prominent areas of the skin. Hopefully you can see the effect in more detail here:

For the base itself you can see below how I used some cork board to build up a raised area and then smoothed out the plastic base where the swamp would go. A layer of milliput was added and whilst still wet a load of organic looking plastic bitz were added, including some beads and bits of rice to look like boils/bubbles etc. A two headed rat was added as a little follower too:

I then attached the model and used some artist's modelling impasto to join/fill/smooth everything up and add some texture too: 

You can see from the completed model that lots of gloss was also added to the swamp area and the organic plague area too. It was painted with a multitude of thinned washes over white, ranging from yellow, pink, green and some brown:

This model was also painted for the Warhammer Forum's Painting Challenge and you can see the results of  which here.

Thanks for looking!