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. 

The Harvester

The Eldar spat on the ground and glared up defiantly. The show of bravery vaguely amused Lord Eiterfex. Defiance was generally what happened when the enemy ran out of actual achievements to be proud of. 
"You think you have won, lackey of the Promordial Annihilator?" the xenos raged, struggling against the grip of the Plague Marine who held him more to show his unbrokenness than in an attempt at actual escape. 
"Well, my men are still standing and most of yours are dead," said Eiterfex cordially, "so I'm going with a yes on this one."
The Eldar didn't see the funny side and spat again. 
"Your vile feet may yet defile Eth-Athon, but with every drop of your blood we come closer to avenging Kurnous and wiping you from the universe!"
Eiterfex leaned over in his throne to Kallador Doomhark. 
"Which one's Kurnous?" he stage whispered. 
"Hunter god," growled Doomhark, glaring at the xenos, "this one's an Exodite."
Eiterfex grunted, and waved a hand to Brother Maladax. 
"Send in the Harvesters, Mal."
He stared steadily as the Eldar's face turned from hateful defiance to horrified astonishment as the awful, sawing buzz filled the air. dark, lumbering shapes passed overhead, and within moments the sound of shrieks came from behind. The Eldar struggled to see what was going on. 
"You're right, of course," Eiterfex said conversationally, "resources are the biggest problem we face. It's difficult to create a new son of Mortarion. That's why we need lots of spare bits and pieces."
The Eldar barely had time for the horror to sink in before a monstrous sting stabbed into his back, delivering him into a new world of horrors...

This was significantly easier to design than to execute, largely because of those wretched rotors! The starting point was a Dark Imperium Bloat Drone. Initially, I had the image of this being a vast, bloated monster, but on reflection I decided that a nasty, hooked wasp-like form would be better. So, I sawed off the back of the Bloat Drone, just behind the round metal bit, and then pinned the body of a Rot Fly onto the back. It looked rubbish! But that's usually the case at this point in the build. I used poly cement, waited until it ws firmly set and then went on.

Next up was the sting. This bit was easy. The sting itself is a spare Maggoth horn. I imply trimmed down the bottom of the Rot Fly's abdomen until the sting could fit smoothly then used poly cement to anchor it in place. I stopped at this point to do a bit of gap filling, and then moved on to the damn rotors.

I had the idea that there should be four rotors, principally because I hd four lying around but also because I wanted it t look bulkier than a regular Bloat Drone. There was no easy way to do this: the carapace of both the Bloat Drone and the Rot Fly are hatefully curved, which basically meant that it was a case of pinning the four rotors in place, drenching them in poly cement and then leaning the model at such an angle that on each side the rotors would more or less line up with each other. When this was finally one, I filled in the gaps.

Now, for its mouth I got aspare Maggoth mouth, trimmed down the back and glue it to the Bloat Drone just beneath the probe (I had to cut off some of the cabling for this) There was a lot of gapfilling after this, but eventually looked nice.

To finish up, I added four arms from a Dark Eldar Talos. I envision the Harvester slinking around the battlefield, stinging survivors to immobilise them, and then using those long, groping tendrils to scoop the still living supine forms into its vast maw, to boil in its guts until the Synod of Suffering can make use of the flesh...

The Headsman

None can say for sure exactly where Lord Eiterfex got the towering, ghoulish entity which he jovially refers to as 'the Headsman'. The creature has been seen in proximity with the Synod of Suffering's lord for many centuries, which discounts the possibility of the thing being made by Eiterfex's new disciple Belisarius Cawl. In general shape, the creature vaguely resembles a blasphemous hybrid of an Astartes dreadnought and a rangy humanoid creature. Certainly there are biological and metallic components, but the creature seems to have at least some daemonic qualities: for one thing, stale blood continually seeps from the nightmare's sutured body in quantities totally unsustainable in a biological form. For another thing, there are seven credible reports of the creature's apparent destruction, only for it to reappear elsewhere. Whatever the nature of the thing, Lord Eiterfex makes brutally effective use of it as a linebreaker... and as a gristly butcher of screaming captives when the battle is over...

One of the many great things about Nurgle is that you can use bits and bobs to make horribly effective nightmare creatures. I had all kinds of bits laying around from other conversions/sprue spares. So I decided that I would make a... thing. 

The trunk of the body is a Dark Vengeance Helbrute which I got in a job lot a while back. The model is... fine. But I'd already painted one. So I sheared off the arms and legs. I wanted to give him a bit more height, so I used a par of spare Forgefiend legs. The feet looked a bit daft, so I replaced them with spare Maggoth hooves. I had to do a lot of pinning and filling toget the feet, legs and torso to work together!

Now, I had the idea of him being similar to the monstrous executioner from the film 300. I had a vision of long, powerful arms with sutured blades at the end. Maulerfiend arms would serve: I sawed the hands off and replaced them with daggers from the Great Unclean One. With a bit of filling, these were pretty easy to pin onto the torso. 

I sketched a few ideas involving eyes, all of which looked absurd. So I decided it would be blind, possibly with the bundles of cables high up being remains of where the eyes once were. Still, it needed a little something else, so I inserted a Maulerfiend tentacle into the maw to serve as a hellish, rusted tongue.

When I'd finished, I looked at my latest creation and wondered if I should make a diorama of a Constable landscape. Or some nice clouds.

It's flashback time: The Corpsewalker

Right. I know that base is a horrid colour. And I know that my paintjob could have been better. This was 2012, my first attempt at Chaos in 40k. But more importantly, I was so impatient for some reason. I'm planning to add some bruising and repaint the godawful base, but I thought you might appreciate the conversion. It's another example of those times when you can make something pretty decent out of the ruins of an old kit. I say this because I had three Sentinels from my old Cadian army way back when. That army was eventually repainted, but these three Sentinels had been smashed beyond any sensible repair by some really silly storage choices.

I also had a Vampire Counts Corpse Cart which had got... erm... compressed. It's always depressing when models get broken, and I decided to try to do something useful with them. That's how I came up with the idea of the Corpsewalker. This was long before the current Death Guard look, so I had some ideas which probably don't entirely fit in terms of general shape. But nonetheless, I had the idea of a ghoulish, slinking walker which patrols the battlefield after the Death Guard have secured victory, picking up the corpses of the fallen to be taken away for whatever horrible experiments the Plague Marines have in mind. This was years before Lord Eiterfex had taken up residence in the rotten corner of my hobby devoted to Nurgle, but I now imagine that the Corpsewalker is something which the master of the Synod of Suffering commissioned Belisarius Cawl to build.

One of the Sentinels wasn't smashed beyond salvation, but the cockpit was jelly. So I took it off and added a spare torso from the Maggoth kit, then filled around it to give the idea of a boiling, seething mass of flesh possessed by a daemon. I had some spare whips from the Witch Elves kit, and I added these as metallic feelers on the front. Now, I wanted to create a kind of flatbed to link it to a second pair of Sentinel legs. So, I got two of my Leman Russ sprues and used parts from the ozer blade component to create hefty metal rails. On top of this went the Corpse Cart.

The back was made from another Sentinel where the body had been shattered. So I attached the leg-chassis and legs to the back of the flatbed. It looked a bit odd at this point, and I remember deciding it needed something on the back.

Remember earlier on I said that my Cadians got repainted? Well, I reworked them as Traitor Guard, which involved head swaps. That left me with a load of Cadian heads. So I filled a spare cage from the Giant sprue with heads. To the bottom of this I attached an inverted set of exhausts from the smashed Sentinel cockpit, to serve as both a base and some sort of nasty dispenser for blood and disease.

An there we have it! Not my best conversion, certainly not my best paintjob, but a good example of how models broken in transit or storage can be put to good use!

The Spidefiler scuttles from the hellish factories of Belisarius Cawl...

Cawl coughed, infected mucus drooling from his faceplate. Scrapcode fevers gnawed through his innards with gleeful flushes of hot and cold. The Hellwright grinned, insomuch as he still could grin. Even now, bowing low, his life in the balance, he could not repress a feeling of pride. He could feel the masterpiece skittering about in the necrotic valley below, the gurgling wails of its victims forming a song of suffering and discord. 
"I like it," hissed Lord Eiterfex, above and nearby, "I think it will do nicely."
Cawl didn't dare rise yet. 
"I am glad it pleases, my lord."
Eiterfex chuckled, wet and rotten. 
"You've done well, Cawl, stop panicking. Grandfather will be pleased."
Cawl straightened up slowly, cautiously. He was careful not to look directly at Eiterfex. He still had waking nightmares from the last time. Instead, he looked down into the valley. The great horror of flesh and rust was weaving webs of steely thread around the yowling victims. 
"I'll start building the rest," he said eventually. 

Quick aside about the Defiler model. I love that model. Nostalgia has warped my perception, no doubt. I remember the first time I saw it. It was June 2003, a few days after the last exam of my first year at University. I was sitting on Sibly Hall's field with friends, lounging in the afternoon light. I'd purchased a White Dwarf earlier and I opened it to have a flip as we sat there. And that's when I saw the Defiler for the first time. I'd been in the hobby eight years, and I couldn't believe what I was saying. Remember, before this, a dreadnought was a massive centerpiece model for a 40k army. And here I was, faced with a massive metal spider-crab o' death. I look back on it as the beginning of the truly amazing models: the Mumak, the plastic Giant, the High Elves dragon, the Imperial Knight. Okay, they've sometimes gone too far (the clumsily overstated Archaon model springs to mind), but generally GW has wowed us with kits we always thought were impossible until we saw them. And it started with the Defiler.

So when I say I didn't want to use the model for my Death Guard, it's not because I dislike the model. It's because, as ever, I had an idea that wouldn't go away. And trust me when I say, this conversion was even more complex than the Rust Hound. So, I think I'd better break it down into different bits. If nothing else so that I can remember what I did.

Legs

I'm starting with these because they were comparatively easy. I removed the legs from a spare Adeptus Mechanicus Dunecrawler and then cut the foot off of each. I then got four of the long forelegs from the Arachnarok (I had a spare I'd picked up cheap for bits). Now, I had to cut the leg and the claw so that they roughly aligned. Then I used pins and superglue to quickly get a bond between the parts - they components really weren't designed to be together! I then used plastic glue to ensure the bond was solid and left all four legs to totally harden. Then I did some gap filling to make the join look smoother (well, in Nurgle terms).

Body and head

Urg, this was a struggle! I saw the Arachnarok's head off at the neck (and it has a bloody thick neck). Next, I assembled the body halves and face plate of a Bloat Drone. Then I sawed it in half, removing most of the tail so that the back was flattish. After a bit of lining up, I pinned and glued the head to the bod. I left it well enough alone for a while. Then I used tissue, PVA and green stuff to build up a neck so that the join didn't look comical. At the same time, I decided that it needed a mouth, so I inverted the Arachnarok's jaws and glued them onto the bottom of the drone's body, along with the two big mandibles. I had to use the above method to build some flesh up around them, but it didn't take too long. I finished the head by pinning three Maulerfiend tentacles beneath his jaws. The image I had in mind was similar to the scene in the 2005 War of the Worlds movie when Tom Cruise is trapped in the ruined house and sees the fighting machines doing some weird and gribbly thing with their long tendrils outside.

The cannon

So, this bit was actually a lot easier than I was worried about. The limb it's raised on is a Rot Fly's body from the Plague Drones kit. Attaching the cannon from the Forgefiend was easy: pins, glue, some filler. I knew that attaching it to the body would be a different matter. I cut the Rot Fly body until its curvature was about the same as that of the Arachnarok's back. Now, I knew that conventional pinning wouldn't be enough to hold the cannon in place. So, I got a much longer, thicker pen. I drilled a hole in the Arachnarok's back and a corresponding one high up on the Rot Fly body. I then put some superglue gel on both holes and fed the long pin all the way through. The superglue dried just quickly enough that I could position the 'tail'. Then I used a fairly large amount of poly cement to seal it. When that was fully hardened, I built up my PVA, tissue and green stuff method to both make the join more smooth and reinforce it a bit. Eventually, when I was certain that this was all completely solid, I clipped the pin off where it protruded from the Rot Fly. You can actually see a bit of it still, dressed up as a random spoke.

Attaching the legs

There really wasn't any easy way to do this. The end of the legs and the spider's body simply aren't meant to go together. It was a case of hack and slash: I cut the surfaces of both sides to be flat and then pinned them in place, with slatherings of poly cement. The gaps were big and ugly, so I built up flesh around them.

Webs

It's cotton glued down, coated in watered PVA and then painted. Sounds easy, doesn't it?

 Size Comparison

Think I might paint a rabbit next.