The trees STILL have an attitude problem

I've always had this feeling that trees should look like... well... trees. In most cases, I prefer some nicely based Gaugemaster trees. However, for reasons I honestly don't quite recall I have a couple of Citadel Woods in my bitz box. I decided that it was time to make an evil wood. I was inspired by two pieces of lore from the old Realm of Chaos tomes - if you haven't got these, try to get hold of a copy. They're the most Chaosy thing that ever Chaosed. Anyhow, the passages in question are the descriptions of the 'Tree of Damned Shades' and the unwholesome forest around 'The Marcher Fortress'. I decided to make some nasty trees that can either be used as spooky terrain or as Feculent Gnarlmaws.

The two trees I started working on were pretty different. One was almost intact whereas the other had been rudely sawn off halfway as part of my Coeddil conversion. This meant that one of them would be traditionally... uh... treeish, whilst the other might take a bit more thought. 

With the more complete one, the first thing I had to do was to put some visibly and identifiable Nurgle bits on it. I find that if you add a couple of very recognizable bits to a piece, it chases the mood of the model to fit the theme. In this case, I used symbol Nurgle glyphs, some of the rotten heads from the Plaguebearers sprue, some bells and a Plaguebearer head. I also added a spare Kharibdyss head for extra creep value. You'll notice that some of the ends of branches have been replaced with bits from the Rotigus staff but the Great Unclean One sprue. 

I had a special idea for the other one, give its shape. I added a Nurgle glyph to one side, but the main event here was the addition of a Maggoth mouth to the end to give it the feel of a carnivorous plant crossed with an angry dune worm. 

Finally, I added some more ghoulish bits. The larger tree has a zombie hand groping from the end of a branch, and I glued Woodland Scenics lichen onto both to be the flesh vines. 

The trees are mounted onto 3mm MDF bases to give them an extra bit of bulk. And there we have it. More evil trees for a display or game board!

More manky death goats

The Blood Bowl Pestigor looks like a fish.

This really saddens me. I think I know what they were going for, but it doesn't work for me.What does work for me are Pestigor, as readers may recall. Seeing as GW and I seemingly differ on what the galaxy's most unhealthy murder-goats should look like, I decided it was time to makesome new ones.

Both of these beautiful specimens are based around the bodies of Plaguebearers. They have the right bloated and sickly appearance whilst being more or less the right size and shape. First of all, I clipped the legs off and plained down the stumps.

Next, I cut the legs off of some spare Gors (my WFB Beastmen army has about 400 Gors, a fact I still can't actually explain and find faintly embarrassing, the point being that I can spare a few bodies). The legs had to be pinned onto the sides of the Plaguebearer bodies because the join will be both too difficult and too fragile otherwise. I then filled in the gaps with my usual PVA/tissue solution followed by green stuff.

The arms were easy to sort out. In one case I literally just lifted some Plaguebearer arms and repositioned the sword-arm. With the other one, I used a spare Gor arm. The burst pustule wossnames were just drilled in with a fine drill bit.

The heads are Gor heads, but they mainly looked like massive angry goats rather than creepy diseased creatures. So I filed off those big glowering eyebrows and replaced them with the eyepieces from the Marauder Horseman champion's horse. Getting these off the original component is NOT easy: you have to cut the eyepiece away with damaging it or taking too much of the horse's head. There's a nasty cut on my thumb to attest that it's a bit of a slog!

It's also worth noting that the Plaguebearer models have massive great necks. I needed to prune them back, pinned the head to the necks and then fill the gaps.

Once I'd painted them, there were some issues even with the filling, specifically around the leg joins. So I decided to hide the problem by bulking out the fur with black static grass. 

Sorry about the Gor arse. But it had to be done.

Anyway, that's another two added to the horde!

The Derelict Paragon

I'm glad to finaly be able to talk about this one, because the fact is that this Knight gave me more trouble than all the ones I did before. It wasn't that the conversion was particularly difficult: he's actually the simplest of my Nurgle Knights. The problem is that I started the project half-cocked and without thinking things through properly. I'm happy that despite this I managed to come up with a fairly decent end result.

Following the Rust Hound and the Hanging Tree, I initially had the idea of going in a different direction with this one: I had this notion that it would have no organic mutations and would instead be leaking pollution and filth. This idea came from the head, which my friend generously donated after he had a different idea for his own Knights (the head is from Shapeways). But the trouble was, I couldn't think of a way to execute it well without boring myself.

I made the fatal mistake of starting the project without having fully squared the ideas in my head. Despite a quarter century in this hobby, I somehow thought that starting without a vision of the end piece was a good idea. I started by using spae Gnarlmaw bells to create a raggedy loin cloth. Before I'd really thought about it, I'd started adding mutations to the legs. I stopped and realised in annoyance that I'd just done the very damned thing I said I wouldn't. Irritated at my own absent-mindedness, I put the legs aside and tried to think of a new idea.

The model was an Ebay rescue, so I had to use the Thunderstrike Gauntlet. I had the idea that maybe I could replace the fingers with scythes for the whole 'reaper' aspect of Nurgle. I cut the fingers at the first joint and used spare scythes and Rot Fly claws to create talons. I was pretty happy with it. For the cannon arm, nothing immediate came to mind, so I went rummaging through my bit boxes. The string of skulls hanging from it was a spare part from a Beastmen Ghorgon, and I thought that it would be fun to have a couple of Nurglings riding on it.

A few skulls added in the Nurgle icon sysmbol was enough to make the cannon seem alright to me. I added a bit of UHU in the barrell gave the impression of oil drooling out. After some thought, I added a spiral of model barbed wire. If I recall correctly, it was because I was starting to think of the head as a World War 1 gas mask and so I thought I'd lean to a sort of nightmare trench warfare feel.

Of course, I then got distracted by something else and put the Knight down for a couple of months. When I went back to it, I couldn't quite remember my previous ideas. The fleshy growths on the back of the hull were added because... well, because that's one of my favourite Nurgle gimmicks. I then did something really dumb I'd found some bits from a Chaos Warshrine and added them to the shoulder pads. It looked kind of rubbish, so I decided to fill in the gaps with glue and sand. It looked worse.

I arrayed the sub-assemblies of my Knight... and got bored again. I couldn't figure out its identity. I lost interest again for a while.

A couple of weeks ago, I kind of flipped. This had been sitting about too long, and even if I couldn't figure out what the central theme was, it was getting finished. Then it occurred to me: what if its theme was that it was exactly what I had made it? A derelict, abandoned on a world after a disastrous campaign, rusting slowly away as its machine spirit goes insane for lack of purpose. Eventually, the monster lurches into unwholesome motion, an aimless and wandering monster with no true identity except resentment, until it ultimatey falls in with more of its own kind.

I added a plague spewer in plague of a meltagun. For the carapace, I added various horns and tusks, as well as the brazier from a Lord of Contagion. I finished the body with a Nurgling from Mortarion riding on top.

 For the base, I decided to go with an abandoned goods yard - I imagine the Derelict Paragon lumbering with dragging footsteps through a desolate, empty world of rusting fences and forgotten cargo. As well as the boxes, barrells and crumbling fence, I added a Sludge Grub for a sense that the vermin have taken over this world. The Nurgling sitting on the barrel is from the Space Marines Heroes series.

Ultimately, I'm happy with him because I made so many mistakes and was so ill-dsicplined, but he Looks pretty decent in the end!

Magos Mestobargos and the Corpsefeeder

A devotee of the Arch-Heretek Belisarius Cawl, Magos Mestobargos is fascinated with the union between flesh and steel, particularly in the ways that discarded and mutilated components may be welded into new and horrific creations. One of his greatest triumphs is the Corpsefeeder, a monstrous daemonic war machine which stalks the battlefield collecting the remnants of enemy soldiers and ruined machines, to be later reborn into a horrific second life...

This conversion came about more or less because I had buckets of bits left over from other conversions. The central trunk was a tattered old Forgefiend which had leant bits to the Headsman and the Spiderfiler among other bits. The Maggoth kit comes with a couple of sets of arms, and that was where the legs came from. They had to be cut and pinned into place. 

The tentacles (which I imagine it uses to forage for bodies and components) are spares from a Dark Eldar Talos (which reminds me that I need to photograph my Dark Eldar sometime). The horns jutting out of its head (?) are spares from a Great Unclean One. 

The tail was the swan-off leftover from the Blight Hauler I used to build the head of the Hanging Tree. I tidied it up a bit and pinned it in place, then built up the flesh around it with PVA/Kitchen towel mix and then green stuff. 

Mestobargos himself and his weird throne wossname is based on half of a Vampire Counts Mortis Engine which I got second hand. I'd already used a good portion of it for throne of Lord Eiterfex, but a bit of side by side comparison showed that it would sit nicely on the Corpsefeeder's back. The throne back with the evil webbing is a leftover bit from the Ararchnarok which the previously mentioned Spiderfiler is based on. For the magos himself, I used Belisarius Cawl's axe (if you look at the link at the top you'll see that I replaced Cawl's with a Lord of Contagion's axe). The head is the alternate head from the Magos Dominus I used to Build Magos Langyll. His extra arms are cabling from the tatty Forgefiend and the hands are spare zombie and ghoul hands, which I seem to always have more of. 

That's basically the recipe, along with a bucketload of filling and pins! Not sure what I'll use him for in games. I might use him as a Plague Hulk, or write some custom rules for him (I play with narrative gamers). I should find reasons to pair him up with his conceptual brother the Blightstalker, who was my first version of this idea.

... what's less clear is how I'm going to store him!

Maggoths and daemons and beasts, oh my!

Forgive me Grandfather, for I have sinned. 

lright, that's not really true, but I have been ignoring my Nurgle stuff for a long time. I've been busy on my Warhammer: Age of Rebuilding project and Dark Eldar and other stuff. But recently, I've been feeling the call of the morbid and the monstrous again. The creeping spirits of John Blanche an John Carpenter have demanded to be set free again. And frankly, I decided it was time to finish some bits that have been hanging about far too long. 

My first offering today is what I shall refer to as the Great Unclean Two. The reason being, I already painted a plastic Great Unclean One when they first came out. However, I always wanted to paint the old Forgeworld one, and the plastic one's release meant that the value of the FW model declined somewhat. I grabbed this one for less than half of the price that GW want for it. 

I love the disgusting grandeur of this twisted masterpiece. Not only do they add character, they make him remarkably easy to paint. I didn't change up my usual infected flesh method, but I did try something new with the ends of the antlers. The darkening at the points is done using these new-fangled Contrast Paints (which are suspicously like a resurrection of the old Citadel Inks). The combo was Snakebite/then Gore Grunta then Black Templar. 

It's worth noting what a heavy model this is: your arm will get tired when doing the smaller parts!

Next we have a Maggoth! I initially got this guy during the End Times for WFB, but I didn't get to him at the time. If you'e familiar with my previous work, you'll know that Age of Sigmar is something which happened to other people. This is important, because when I got back to the model, I had to make a hard choice about basing: if I wanted to use him for WFB, I'd have to square-base him. But almost all of my Nurgle stuff is 40k, so ultimately I decided to put him on an oval. 

I added a couple of Forgefiend shoulder pads to 40k-ize him. Now, originally I had the idea of changing the Chaos Lord for a Plague Marine. But ultimately, I wanted the Maggoth to be a kind of lone stalking beast, so I green-stuffed over the saddle to make it look like tattered flaps of skin. It did't work quite as well as I'd have liked, but it was good enugh.

And there we have it! A couple of long overdue models finished, and my mind is ticking over thinking about new Nurgloid abominations!