Having completed Clotticus and Morslug the next randomly chosen Plague Marine Hero was Gurg the Foul.
As with Morslug I did not attach the Nurgling to the base until he was finished, that makes the model much easier to paint. The Nurgling fits on really easily so there’s no problem with this at all.
After painting Clotticus I wanted to take on another of the Plague Marine Heroes, so I grabbed another random box from my shelf and this time Morslug came out.
Learning from Clotticus this time I left the Nurgling off of the base so as to make it easier to paint. The Nurgling was glued on to a bit of sprue to help me handle him while painting. Looking at the model I felt pretty confident that I could paint the Marine when he was attached to the base without issue. Initial painting went pretty smoothly, I kept calm when I thought that the base colours looked awful and just moved on to the wash which pulled it all together.
OK, so this isn’t Death Guard, Nurgle or even Warhammer related but I completed a painting challenge and so I’m quite pleased. Ann’s Immaterium created a Neglected But Not Forgotten challenge, and I decided to go for it.
1987 was a big year for me in gaming. I was circling 40k, I attended the Games Day in London when they released Rogue Trader but I also started Games Mastering the Star Wars RPG. Among the products for it that I picked up were some of the West End Games Star Wars miniatures. The ones that I needed for my gaming I painted up, but one that I avoided was the Princess Leia miniature. She’s tiny and would be basically just black and white, which I’ve always found hard to paint. She was also hard to use as a stand in for anything else, it was obviously Princess Leia. So she was just left as bare metal. Until now.
So, after an impressive 33 to 34 years in my collection, I now present a fully armed and operational, and painted, Princess Leia.
I’ve also photographed her with some of other models that I painted back at the time. They’ve got a lot of carbon scoring. Those boys have seen a lot of action. I painted Leia’s base to match the other bases so she fits in.
I managed to get hold of a full set of the six Plague Marine Heroes (Space Marine Heroes Series 3), I picked one at random and started on him.
He’s pretty easy to assemble but the plastic they’re made from does seem a little bit different from the normal stuff, it seems a bit more brittle, so be careful.
And so on to painting, and this is where it seemed to take a wrong step. I got the base colours down and I thought that he looked awful. The brush work looked rubbish and the finish was poor. I was really quite negative about it. So I hit him with a wash of Agrax Earthshade and the difference was just amazing, suddenly he looked OK, that stuff really is talent in a bottle.
After doing the pools of slime on the magnetised Great Unclean One‘s base I decided to make some wound/status markers for my gaming. These could be used to track wounded 2 wound Plague Marines or for the results of actions like Raise the Banners High. Basically there are numerous reasons why I might want to mark a location, unit or model and a little puddle of filth seems an appropriate way of doing this.
It’s time to return to painting Death Guard units, and this one of the things in the 9th Edition Codex.
did chose to fully assemble this before painting. The flesh skirt is made up of a few pieces and it would be paint it as a sub assembly, and this would make painting the inside of the skirt and the back of the legs easier. However after lot of looking and thinking I thought that this would make basing the model harder and that it wouldn’t be impossible to paint it fully assembled. And it really wasn’t that hard.
I did a little but more detailing the model before calling it done. I used Nurgle’s Rot and Blood for the Blood God in the wounds and intestines.
I also noticed a problem. The flail was really hard to fit into the left hand. I might have assembled it slightly badly but there was also an issue that I’d built up the base with sand and added a grass tuft right where it was meant to go. It looked like the left skill was hitting the tuft and the central one was scraping the slime pool. So what I did was to trim down the skull of centre skull until it fitted in nicely and removed the problematic tuft. There’s been quite a bit removed as the photo below shows, it’s been cut away until almost the teeth.
Continue reading “Magnetised Great Unclean One – Part 6 – Finishing off.”
With the body and base complete it was time to focus on the arms. These were dealt with as if they were each an individual miniature. I think that these helped me keep positive and maintain momentum to finish this project.
The green flesh for the arms was completed before I did the green for the body, but for some reason it avoided the glossy finish that the body took on. For that I was very grateful.
All told this was a very simple stage, but it did take a while. I’m glad that I set the arms aside and finished them as a step in and of their own as trying to do them with the body would have felt like a real grind. When you look at the colours used you realise that there’s a lot going on for some very tiny pieces.
With the body painted there was a quick step left to get the main model finished. I’d been planning to do a slightly different base this time around and had made preparations for this when assembling the model. What I was aiming to do was based on GW’s video about Death Guard basing but I wanted to use my normal basing material to keep it looking similar to my other miniatures.
So when I glued sand to the base of the model I left some clear patches for pools. I also built the sand up in layers, in some places it’s three layers thick. The base was painted first, then the skulls in the pools and finally the pools.
When everything was dry I then added some grass tufts and flowers and the job was done.
An important thing to consider is where the lower skulls from the flail will go when that arm is attached. I’ve put a pool under one skull and some flowers under the other, and I wish that I hadn’t as they get in the way. Since these photos were taken I’ve had to work on those parts, more on that in part 5.
After the problems with the skin I hoped that this stage would be much smoother. And, thankfully, it was.
I started on the back with the cloth and the chain mail, then I moved on to try the colour scheme for the wounds and the boils on his left leg. This let me see the colour scheme all together for the first time, and it looked like it would work just fine. I went for red for the cloth to dry and provide some colour linking to the rest of my Death Guard and Nurgle Daemons. It’s only Mortarion who has purple robes.
