I get it. He's playing to Nurgle's comedic side. There should always be an aspect of absurdist, despairing humour to Nurgle. But I didn't get enough sense of the morbid, the monstrous, the threatening about Mulch. He was, for my personal taste, a bit too funny and not quite scary enough. So what to do? The idea of a maniac gardener rampaging into the mortal world, spreading the garden of Nurgle wherever he goes really appealed to me. I thought about it for a bit. Then I decided that the answer was in a Tyranid's guts.
I don't fully trust myself to sculpt a shell, and the chances of sourcing one that was exactly right for my idea was slim, so I decided from the off that Mulch would be a slug rather than a snail. To create his body, I got a spare Tervigon belly, left over from a conversion I did for a friend's Christmas gift. From the belly, I removed all of the distinctly Tyranid bits, such as the half-formed Termagant heads that can be seen on the flanks. I then glued the two halves together and waited for them to dry solid.
Next, I took the gribbly tentacles left over from a Warhammer Fantasy Slaughterbrute kit. If you make the Slaughterbrute variant, the tentacles are left over, and the fit between them and the front of the body wasn't bad. I pinned it in place and used plenty of poly cement to ensure a strong bond. The general outline of Mulch was taking shape.
Next, I decided that I had to attach him to a base. This was a little tricky because the egg sack isn't designed to sit flush on a base. I had to trim it down a bit to create flat contact points, which I secured with pins and poly cement. After this, as you can imagine, it was gap city. Using a combination of PVA glue and tissue, I filled these gaps. Once dry, I sealed them with liquid green stuff. Now, as to locomotion: the official Mulch model has a bunch of hooved feet, but that's not how molluscs get about. I know, he's a daemon, not a mollusc, but it didn't quite ring true. I sketched the idea of many scuttling arachnid legs, but I wasn't satisfied with the imagery. I decided that I would give him a slug's form of motion. Studying how slugs, this is accomplished with muscular surging movements accomplished by what to the outside observer looks like a skirt of tough flesh. This was very easy to achieve. I used the PVA/tissue/green stuff method above to build a skirt of flesh around him. As it was setting, I was careful to go around and run a blade underneath the mass so that it would not adhere to the base. This took a while to dry, during which I had time to think about eyes.
Land molluscs are well known for their comedic eyestalks, and the Mulch I'd created thus far had perhaps swung a little too far away from humour. I decided he needed fleshy eyestalks. For these, I used some leftover Tyranid arms (I think that they were warrior bonesword arms). I cut these at the elbow joint, filed all of the overtly Tyranid bits off and then cut the lower portion of the upper arms into tapers so that they could fit between the fleshy bulges of the body. I pinned and poly cemented them in place, then gap filled using the method above.
The final touch on Mulch himself was the funky bone growth on his back. For this, I used the leftover horn and Nurgling from my Plague Surgeon. With a bit of green stuff and a pin, this made a nice bony growth.
By comparison, creating Slimux himself was fairly easy. I chose the booted Warhammer Fantasy Putrid Blightking. This might seem an odd choice, but I thought if there was ever a daemon who would wear wellies, it would be Slimux. I used the musician component from the Blightking kit and added a flailing Nurgling from the Plaguebearers kit to make the 'bait' component, which was then pinned to the wrist. Then came the shears.
Oh, the bloody shears.
Right. So, I took the axehead off of the axe in his hand and replaced it with a plague knife from the Plague Marines kit. But shears have two handles, of course. The other handle was a spare bit from the Warhammer Fantasy Maggoth kit (one of the back banners, I think). I attached another plague knife to the end of this one. Then, I pinned and glued the two handles together at an angle. This was far and away the most difficult part of this conversion. I was relieved when it was done!
The head was simple enough: a warty old Plaguebearer head from the Plague Drones kit.
I painted Mulch and Slimux separately, then pinned Slimux onto Mulch's back. He's at a slightly funny angle, but I'm quite pleased with him. I'm looking forward to seeing him squelch his way across the battlefield!
Better get on with some evil trees, I guess...
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