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.