Monday 30 July 2018

Vyrotar Gloameth



The eldest of the Gloameth brothers is the brutish Vyrotar. Even before his elevation to the ranks of the Death Guard he was a monster, wandering the wastes of the Plague Planet devouring other diseased tribesmen as he found them. Upon his ascension, Vyrotar bloated out into a towering giant of tumorous flesh that even Terminator plate could not contain. The warp, however, is malicious in its jests. Vyrotar's helm became sealed and impossible to remove. In order to fuel his cannibalistic appetites, the elder Gloameth must shred his victims into bloody slush that can float through the corroded vents in his helmet. This makes him a terrifying spectacle whether in battle or stalking the plague lands...


I end up with a lot of spare bits. This is largely because I tend to convert a lot (and buy cut price bundles wherever I can). The idea for Gloameth came to me as I was rifling through my bits looking for something else. The idea was simple. The execution was a little tougher, though ultimately not that much of a bother.

The main trunk of his body is a spare torso from the Pusgoyle Blightlords kit. The legs are from an Easy to Build Blightlord Terminator. Attaching these was a slight aggravation and required some filling. Nothing too irksome, but a little harder than expected.

The Bubotic Axe also comes from the Easy to Build kit (Tainted Cohort, for clarity). The combi-bolter is a spare I had lying about from my Blightlord Terminators. 

I wanted him to have a kind of Pyramid Head-esque vibe. I had a spare Lord of Contagion head, which seemed like a good bet. The angle would have had him looking at the ground, so I pinned it in place at a more satisfactory angle and filled accordingly. 


And there we have it! A nice, quick addition to my collection. Plus good gross-out value.



Sunday 29 July 2018

The Biologis Putrifier: an odyssey in frustration




"At some point, you really just have to finish your work and release it as is-if only so you can go on and make other things with a glad and determined heart."

- Elizabeth Gilbert



I have a confession. I really didn't have fun painting this model. It started fine, but as soon as I got to those bloody blight racks...



I tried to be clever was the problem. I wanted to do the bottles as clear with liquid sloshing about in them, as a lot of people have. It didn't work. At first I thought it was my paint job so I refined it. It looked worse. 


I didn't touch the model for a couple of months after that, except to play some games. And then a couple of days ago, I hit on the answer: the clear bottles just didn't work with my very dirty aesthetic. Not at all. What I needed was simply corroded brass bottles to fit the rest of my collection. But I dithered, because I spent a while on the clear bottles. 


Then I thought oh screw it. I went t the model with wild abandon. I won't lie, I rushed it, then trusted Agrax Earthshade and blood-grime to hide a multitude of sins. 


He looks... okay. I'm happy with him. Not my best piece. But sometimes the lesson is: if a model's causing you problems, just hammer it out and move on. I feel much better for doing so!








Saturday 28 July 2018

Commissar Myranda DeSarco

My Ophelian Guardsmen, the 'Defenders of the Faith', are a singularly gloomy looking lot. I wanted the Commissar to stand out a bit. I've always thought that the Commissar is a nice feature of Guard armies, a standout figure in the sea of fatigues. Given that my Guard are quite customised, I thought I'd need to make extra effort.



I made a few decisions early on. First, the obvious choice was to give the Commissar a different skin tone to mark them out. Second, it should be the case that this Commissar should actually look more austere than my blingy Guardsmen. Thirdly, I wanted the Commissar to be a woman. For all its appalling practices, the Imperium doesn't seem to be misogynist, with men and women entering all branches of service except the Astartes and Sororitas. This was where I hit a bit of a snag.



There are plenty of female Commissar models out there, and almost all of them are almost offensively over-sexualised. I'm talking Commissars with miniskirts, Commissars with bondage gear. It says plenty of uncomplimentary things about hobbyists that the sculptors think this approach is a winner - and that they're at lest partially right. It irritates the living heck out of me because a Commissar is a Commissar first and a man or woman second.


Thankfully, the ever-excellent Brother Vinni came to my rescue. This lady Commissar isn't entirely perfect - she's exceedingly busty, for example. But her outfit looks quite sensible, and whilst her boots are a little silly they can easily be hidden.


Hopefully in the future we'll see something like this from GW. For a long time, that company had a very real misogyny problem: when I worked there in 05-06, there was a policy for paternity leave, but not for maternity leave. I heard senior managers making comments which made me quietly leave the room, and I have a friend who has had some shocking things said and done to her in her decade working there. But the good news is that they seem to have got their act together on this. We see a lot more representation of women in the model range. Moreover, not every female model is grossly oversexualised. I hope that one day we'll see female Guard.


In the meantime, we have companies like Brother Vinni!

Wednesday 25 July 2018

The Hanging Tree

Are you, are you, coming to the tree?



I’ve been quiet for a while because I’ve been furiously building my second Nurgle Knight, which I named ‘The Hanging Tree’. Despite the obvious The Hunger Games reference I just made, the inspiration for this was actually an old Warhammer Fantasy piece of background called ‘The Tree of Damned Souls’, part of Marius Hollseher’s surreal odyssey into the Realm of Chaos. This has influenced me before, being part of the inspiration for my Coeddil conversion. But with this Knight, I had the idea of a monstrous gibbet tree from the garden of Nurgle creeping into the mortal universe and possessing a Knight. As with the previous Rust Hound, I think I’ll better explain this a section at a time.



Legs

These were probably the easiest part of the model. I drilled out pockmarks at random, and added a groping hand from a Vampire Counts zombie to the knee of one. The real tricky part here was the shin guards. I had this idea of crucified victims strapped across them. But most human models are bigger than you expect them to be, and it quickly became clear that this would look daft. Instead, I used some of the semi-intact corpses from the Vampires Counts Corpse Cart. One of them I left impaled on the spear he comes on. The other I wrapped in model barbed wire before attaching. I finished the legs by attaching a spare Nightmare Bell from the Great Unclean One





Left arm


Not that much change here. You know the funky daemon-skull things from the Great Unclean One’s flail? I cut one of those in half and glued one of them to the back of the reaper chainsword. Moving to the side, I used a random Nurgle icon from the Plague Marines kit and applied it to the side with copious green stuff to obscure the scroll. I drilled a few pockmarks, but something seemed missing. After a moment's thought, I added some Feculent Gnarlmaw bells to add a bit of weight. 




Right arm

Same pockmarking method here, and the spare half-skull from the Great Unclean One's flail again. I really wanted to have this as a flame trailing brazier. Luckily, I had a spare plague censer from the Warhammer Fantasy Skaven Screaming Bell, and pinning this to the cannon arm wasn't difficult. I tidied up with green stuff. As a final touch, I added a Nurgling from the GUO to give a sense of movement. 



Torso and head

I've put these together because they were pretty much intrinsic. I got this Knight second hand, so that carapace was already in place. I had to hack it back a bit to accommodate the head of a Myphitic Blight Hauler. The head was reasonably easy to pin in place and secure with poly cement. There was a fair bit of gap filling to do, but it wasn't that difficult. The head looked a bit off, though. Not imposing enough. So I added some Great Unclean One horns, which did the trick. 




The carapace itself was the most difficult part. Well, the branches at any rate. I used the three main branches from a Feculent Gnarlmaw, which I pinned in place and gap-filled. The victims were a headache. The one on the monster's right is from the Pusgoyle Blightlords kit, which I made the mistake of wrapping in model barbed wire before hanging it. This made it difficult to paint. The other two are Cadians with, respectively, a bare foot from a Haemonculus, a Greatsword head, a zombie arm and heavily repositioned feet. I learned my lesson from the first one and attached the other two before adding the wire. 









You'll notice fleshy roots or tendrils. These are just Woodland Scenics foliage. You have to glue this down very well. 

Base

I decided that there should be a toxic river floating across the base. I built up the banks using spare bits of MDF offcut. The sewerage pipes are just straws (you can get a massive pack of them from Wilko or Poundland). The ooze you can see from one of them is Uhu craft glue.




The broken down ence is wire mesh and a random bit of plastic, and the Nurgling is from the Easy to Build Tainted Cohort. The strange quadrupedal critter is a Plaguebearer's head attached to a Chaos Spawn tentacle and mounted on the body of a Skaven giant rat. The diminutive critter is a spotter gnoblar from the Ogre Kingdoms Bulls kit, his head replaced with a Plaguebearer's. 


And there we have him! The second Rust Hound is complete. 

Think I might paint a goblin or something. 

Monday 23 July 2018

I haven't disappeared

I'm working on a fairly big project. Regular service will recommence in a few days.

Saturday 14 July 2018

Imperial highborn lady

One of the aspects of the 40k universe which is really loved but miserably under-represented is the peculiar ins and outs of civilian life. We've seen reams of artwork, volumes of lore and great novel explorations such as Eisenhorn and Ravenor. But these rarely if ever get into sculpted form. 


I decided this needed addressing. 



This imperial noble woman was very easy to create. The basis is the Govenor's Daughter from Black Scorpion Miniatures, who is available for a very reasonable £4.50. Now given her look, I could probably have let it at that. But I wanted to visually 40k-ise her.



The first choice was easy. I affixed a purity seal to her dress, unmistakably making her Imperial. An improvement, but something was still missing. So I pinned a servo skull to her side, presumably to function as her aide. That looked much better!


And there you have it. About five minutes in total!


Thursday 12 July 2018

The Plagryn

Enforcer Tyllman wondered if he could claim time off in lieu for this. 
He doubted it. 
Six days. Six days of sneaking about in the corpse of a city, observing, transmitting. Inquisitor Horn has better be getting something out of all this. Tyllman had rarely slept more than an hour or two - and then, only in the most secure bolt holes he could find. He was tired and twitchy. He was hungry from self-imposed rationing. And his underwear was annoyingly sweaty.

Six hours ago, Horn had sent him the signal to get clear.


He drew in a breath and peered out across the open rockcrete space. A shipping yard from the looks of it. Abandoned now. Abandoned and empty. Fifty meters straight across. Then a few outer habs, and out into the woods. Tyllman could make it. 

Except he couldn't. He saw the single, stumbling mutant wandering out into the glass-strewn wasteland just before he began to move. Irritable, he sank back into the shadows of the looming septic tank. He watched as the shambling, diseased creature wandered into the open, shouting disjointed half-sentences. 
Just wait it out, thought Tyllman, wait it out and -



He jumped at the sound of a sudden, gurgling roar coming from the left. He ducked quickly behind the septic tank's supports as he saw the nightmare crash into the open. It was a massive thing, Ogryn-tall, loose threads of flesh and organ swaying as it moved unsteadily. The monster moved deceptively fast, and within seconds, great snapping mandibles closed on the head of the plague mutant. 


Tyllman watched grimly from the shadows as the monster crouched and began to messily eat the rotting thing. He struggled to identify what it could be. It had the general shape and outline of the Plague God's lesser daemons. But it was much bigger and more aggressive...



Which was when it occurred to him. It was a Plaguebearer. A Plaguebearer which had emerged from the mortal ruins of an infected Ogryn. Silently, Tyllman activated his body-mounted pict-stealer and made his way back, further into cover.

He wasn't going to get to leave yet.