DuskRaider's 40K Nurgle - An Experiment in Flesh and Machine

[Krakendoomcool]

This is such a great thread. I'm only just getting through it now.

 

Pestigors are fantastic, it's an inspired decision to use the skulls as heads. I particularly like the one with half a skull showing through and one eye left! Adding fur to them really adds another layer of disgustingness. Pestigors are such a great idea in the fluff but without any good models. I recently made a Nurgle Bloodbowl team so had the same issues.

 

I love your Necrosius. I feel the forgeworld Necrosius is a rare off day for the normally excellent Nurgle forgeworld stuff. Yours is fantastic and makes me want to go make one myself right now.

 

Love the colour scheme on the marines. Bone coloured with black shoulder pads. The daemons have horns that darken to black so this matches in very nicely with that. I feel im constantly searching for colours on my marines that im happy with.

 

The whole army is lovely...I mean disgusting.

[hushrong]

Your vow looks off to a great start! Looking forward to seeing more progress on the pestigors and Sgot!

[DuskRaider]

Thank you very much, guys! I appreciate the kind words on the level of disgust my Death Guard bring about, haha.

 

@Kraken: thanks for the praise, brother. I was a bit skeptical about using the skulls but they turned out decent in the end. I do want to avoid the completely undead look but I obviously want the Pestigors to look decayed. I imagine the more decay the more they are seen as blessed or favored by Nurgle. I do love the idea of Beastmen, especially the concept of them in an Imperial Auxilia army... I had plans to create a 30K Militia force using the various options to represent one but 30K kinda well... died around here. When Dark Imperium was first released they had mentioned Pestigor herds but GW never followed through with a model.

 

As far as Necrosius... sigh. When I first created him I had little to work with as far as the new Death Guard, the starter box and Easy to Build kit being the only thing out at the time. With everything else out now I feel I could and probably should do better. Between the coloration disparity and uninspired bits I'm just really not feeling him anymore. Perhaps I'll see how Zardu Layak scales to the Death Guard line and use him similar to my INQ28 Plague Marine.

[Krakendoomcool]

The skulls are spot on. You have to take a risk to get something really great. A beastman Militia force would be something else too. Sounds like you are making some nice choices already with the kroot and skitarii weapons. They could be cultists or renegades.

 

I'm surprised you feel that way about Necrosius. I think he's brilliant. I think you picked the right parts anyway even if more bits have been released since.

[DuskRaider]

The Shattered Tusk Tribe slaughters it's way to completion.

 

It took a couple weeks but I've completed the Pestigor War Band. I had a lot of fun doing these because I allowed myself to go outside of the normal scheme and make them unique. It was also interesting (and sometimes frustrating) playing with green stuff to finish these guys. I was initially concerned the fur would look out of place but the end result isn't too bad.

 

From here I'm finishing up the Plague Marine leader and then it's into the Cultists and Zombies to end my first vow. I'm hoping to have these done soon because I've already decided on my second vow and it's much bigger...

 

Minotaur #1

 

Minotaur #2

 

Shaman Bale-Eye

 

Standard Bearer

 

Pestigors

 

Shattered Tusk Tribe

 

I was going to write up some fluff but I'm on my mobile device and just don't feel like dealing with it now, so yeaah... whatever.

[Verux]

These are some seriously gnarly looking daemons in a good way of course!

[KrautScientist]

I think you've really knocked it out of the park with the Nurglite beastmen, especially given your initial misgivings about hitting the right notes with the project: These are so disgustingly awesome -- the perfect mix of diseased flesh and mangy fur, with some excellent conversions that end up looking like stock models. Very nice!

 

Have you thought about painting an eyeball for the first Minotaur's cyclopean eye socket? The face could use a bit of a focus point, and I remember PDH's plague minotaur using a milky, bloodshot pupil for great effect.

[Krakendoomcool]

These are way more disturbing now you’ve painted them. Something about the colours. The bones on the arm of Minotaur #1 are disgusting.

 

The standard bearer has a great creepy banner. I’m getting a ‘Blair witch project’ vibe from that unsettling thing. Great job.

 

I love the fact these are Pestigors too. Really great job.

[Sgt. Blank]

They look amazing with the paint on Duskraider! I like how they tie with the rest of your force but have a subtly different look to them too!

[Augustus b'Raass]

Holy crap! You did some work, my friend! As other have said, they look even creepier now that they're finished - well done!!

 

May I ask where this guy's banner bit is from?

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Hidden Content

Standard Bearer

[DuskRaider]

Thanks folks, much appreciated!

 

@Kraut: Bummer, I see the eye didn't really show up for most of them in the pics. They're Blood for the Blood God Red with some white in the middle but it seems it didn't photograph very well. I'll admit I'm not great at painting eyes and I usually don't do pupils to avoid the googly eyes look.

 

@Auggy: The Banner is from a long out of production Rackham Confrontation model, the Drune Standard Bearer. Quite possibly some of the best models ever made (the game in general) and a vastly superior game rules wise...sorry GW. Good luck finding one, though, it came in the Ragnarok War Staff box for the army as seen here:

 

http://unispel.com/catalog/images/confrontation/drune/warstaffcarmed2.jpg

 

The Banner definitely has a creepy Wickerman feel to it. I see it as reverence to a former member of the tribe (probably a Champion) with the "body" comprised of limbs and heads of enemy casualties of battle... perhaps even transformed into Plague Zombies and then having their reanimated heads stitched into the Standard to make up the "body". When marching to war, they set it ablaze.

Edited May 14, 2018 by DuskRaider

[TURBULENCE]

Truly disgustingly inspired goatmen. Geez I miss those old Rackham miniatures. I still have a few random ones put away.

 

Keep up the good work!

[DuskRaider]

Thanks bud! I still have a couple armies packed away somewhere, mainly Ophidian & Yakuza Goblins. I see there's a Kickstarter attempting to revive the game with a MASSIVE box set of something like 200 minis HERE. Man, I hope it makes a come back. 

[Pearson73]

Wow, really good job painting the warherd, the open wounds look disgustingly sore and painful, whilst the general effects of rust and decay are very naturlly finished.

[DuskRaider]

@ Auggy: HERE you go

[DuskRaider]

                                                          Manrasz Sgot

                  The Exile, The Wanderer, The Rake, Apostate of the Lost, Shepherd of Nurgle

 

 

          The night sky in real space is something I've longed to witness with my eyes for millennia... not since the Crusade and my failure. This is not how I envisioned my return from the ether; surrounded by degenerate mutants, abhumans and outcasts.... gone were the days of glorious conquest at the head of one thousand strong Legionnaires into the heart of the hated enemy. Now... now was the time of skulking in the shadows and hiding like vermin.

 

   I think to The Incident. My failing, my falling. The IVth Black Crusade helmed by Ezekyle Abaddon himself, the worm. My Lord; the Commander Bregan Camsraith; had given me the great honor of leading a large contingent of IIIrd Grand Company alongside the new Warmaster. I was part of a triumverate of Death Guard with elements of the IVth and VIIth Grand Companies also selected by the Death Lord himself. By this time I had given up the title of Standard Bearer to another and bore the responsibility of commanding a large swath of the Company at my Lord's request. How I wish I could have refused this duty...

 

   To a Legion Company, their Standard is their most cherished relic. It is their pride and their honor with many being quite ancient. Ours was no different. The fool Abaddon, he had El'Phanor in his palm and he let it slip. When he loosed the Legions upon the surface, everything dissolved into chaos. It was in this time that the Imperium struck... and their aim was true. I can still see the orbital strikes rain down from the heavens. I see my brothers dissipate into nothingness. The image of Drop Pods clad in cerulean blue slamming into the surface of the planet haunts me... the XIIIth Legion. What the initial siege and orbital bombardment did not lay low the XIIIth and their successors did. Of the seven hundred brothers I led into battle, only fifty seven remained. Of them the Standard was not. I remember watching as it hit the mud and was trampled under powered armoured boot. 

 

     Lost. The Banner which IIIrd Grand Company has lifted; which I had lifted; in countless battles since the Unification War... gone. Tossed aside like a rag. Retribution was swift. My Lord brought his judgement upon me like a hammer fall. I was stripped of rank and all association with the Ebon Third.

 

    As the Deathshroud scraped the sable void from my armour I thought back to when we learned the Ist had carried out Exterminatus on Barbarus. Perhaps my Lord, being of Terran descent such as myself and many others in the IIIrd Grand Company, felt he had prove we mourned the loss of the Legion's adopted homeworld. With the death of the planet it was decided we would no longer bear the Mists of Barbarus upon our plate. The deep green was ritually scoured from our panoply forever, replaced with funerary black.

 

   I should have faced the ripping blade of Molotarka, my Lord's immense eviscerator, but instead I was sentenced to exile. Would that I had met my fate at the edge of the blade...

 

   I have wandered the Warp for millennia... or at least it feels as though I have. The Warp acknowledges no time and so it passes different for each creature within. A moment can feel like ten thousand years; a century but a split second. Adrift in the immaterium, simply existing for no other reason than I had no choice. And then it began...

 

   Upon the Crone World of Xorgai-Ket the first of my disciples found me. Or shall I say, the first group. Beastmen of the Shattered Tusk Tribe, natives of this damned world had been drawn to me like moths to a flame. Following an unseen path to my location, listening to an unheard voice. Their leader, the Shaman Pallg'oz Gluttongue, explained that their patron the Undying God Nurg-leth told them to find me. They would not be alone.

 

   Now as I hide within the belly of this commandeered freighter, smuggled like some rotting contraband to the surface of Pelagius B-XII, I wait for the next sign. A vision or whisper... anything. My foetid God has sent me into real space to retrieve something, but what? Surely my salvation in the eyes of my Legion?

 

 

Well here we are... apologies if that was a little long winded. You wouldn't believe it but I actually deleted a LOT of what I had written... pretty much Sgot's whole background. I changed some of his story a bit, mainly why he was exiled as I thought it would be rather poetic to have the former Company Standard Bearer abandon the Standard itself in one of Abaddon's more... ahem... failed Crusades. So let's get to the pics and I'll throw up some details for them.

 

 

As you know (or should) the model is based on one of the Forge World Anakatis Blade Slave models. All Word Bearers' iconography was sanded off along with purity seals to give me a blank canvas. The head was lopped off and a helm from the GW Plague Marine kit was grafted on (the creepiest one, IMO). His belly was created using green stuff... it's alright, probably the best I could do with what little skill and practice I have with sculpting.

 

 

 

The armour is bare ceramite and battle worn. All iconography and pattern alluding to his origin has been ritually removed. You can see from this angle the oxidation and distress on the metal trim of his pauldron. He's wielding a Combi-Bolter, a bit from Evil Craft. This would be considered a relic weapon and would hail back to the Great Crusade... obviously with some post-Heresy aesthetic added. The firearm's casing is chipped black while the trim is rusted metal. Despite his sentence decreeing he cannot display iconography of his origin he still sports a red bloatfly icon on his Bolter... a symbol of his eternal loyalty to his former Commander.

 

 

The Power Cell is also from the GW Plague Marine kit as are the cloaks. I wanted to give him a ragged and worn feel, and as a bonus the cloth is black, a piece of his past life in the Ebon Third. 

 

 

The Axe... man, what a wicked looking death dealer. It was made using bits from the Putrid Blightking kit. His skeletal hand is deformed and clawed and was sourced from the Dark Imperium Poxwalkers. It seemed strangely fitting to have this weird hand jutting from the almost-elephantine arm of the model. 

 

 

A size comparison. I feel that prior comparisons have misrepresented the size and bulk of this Legionnaire. This has more to do with the size and height of the Pestigor more than anything else, they're quite tall and gaunt. The model to the left is human sized and also Sgot himself is hunched over quite a bit.

 

 

Manrasz Sgot accompanied by his minions of the Shattered Tusk Tribe. It's all starting to come together.,..

[hushrong]

The Pestigors of the Shattered Tusk Tribe look awesome as well as creepy. The conversion and sculpting work topped off with the great paint job really knocks them out of the park.

 

Sgot just looks phenomenal and I loved reading that background quip about him. Awesome conversion work and accompanying fluff makes him such a great character.

[DuskRaider]

Long time, no post... Vow One is complete. Strike up the band.

 

I don't really know how I feel about this. On one hand, I'm quite happy with my Plague Marine and Beastmen. On the other, I am not really all that happy with the Zombies and Cultists. I think my biggest problem was the quantity. Or that they were supposed to be more individual and I fell into the trap of making them regimented. I probably could and would have put more detail into the Cultists if there were half the number I made, but what are you going to do? 

 

The models are quite muted and drab as far as clothing and armour. One must remember, these are humans not super powered monsters or walking tanks, they need camouflage to assist with survival. I also wanted them to look haggard, like they've been through hell (which they have been). Their armour is either rusting and rotting away or it's made from old scrap. They themselves are rotting away while still living and breathing and they live each day with the knowledge that once they die, either succumbing to their illness or in battle, they will become unliving ghouls. Bummer of an existence.

 

So here we are. Nothing really fancy, nothing award winning and definitely not anything I'd brag about but I've finished the Vow and I can now move on...

 

 

... and now onto Vow Two. This is one of the reasons I wanted to grind these out and get them over with. I have a feeling this one will be keeping me busy until the August 1st deadline.

 

 

Legio Mortis shall stride into battle once again... and accompanied by horrors I shall hopefully get to reveal soon. 

[Eldrick Shadowblade]

Love the story! Cant wait to see the titan! My favorite is the crawly plague zombie!

[Galloway]

Not usually big on Nurgle but these are simply outstanding- the sculpting, the kitbashes, the painting, the writing, all of it. Well done.

[DuskRaider]

Thanks guys!

 

And damn... I had this long post typed out about my plans for the Warhound but for some reason the forum wouldn't post it. Let me try again...

 

Ahem... so with Vow #1 in the rearview we move onto a much larger (both size and points) Vow #2. Admittedly, the Warhound has been in pieces and hiding in a box in my attic for years. I had purchased it close to a decade ago now and had almost painted it to completion in the old Legio Mortis color scheme which was... interesting (hideous). If you've never seen the old scheme you're really doing yourself a disservice (not really). I'd post a picture if I could find one, but thankfully Google search only turns up the much nicer new canon scheme via Forge World. 

 

I'll be basing the Warhound on this scheme from Betrayal.

 

Originally I was going to keep the head black but it decided it would probably look too same-y with much of the hull also being ebony. White crossed my mind as it's the third primary color of the Legio, but I figure it would probably look odd if the rest of the scheme was void of any white (or it may stand out? Unsure). In the end, I've made the decision to go with red. I'm going to experiment with the black, using Black 2.0 which is touted as the blackest black commercially available. What this seems to translate to is an extremely matte, chalky black. Definitely not the void that it's trying to replace or act as an alternative to (vantablack). I'm going to try and make it blacker using Windsor & Newton India Ink and Nuln Oil. Due to this and the vast detail, I most likely won't be utilizing my black technique I've used thus far on my Death Guard.

 

I also picked up the Legio Mortis transfers from Forge World while they're still available. I don't know how I'll be using them on the model, we'll see. This whole thing is definitely a primer for Adeptus Titanicus coming out around the time ETL ends, which is what also convinced / motivated me to resurrect this warmachine in the first place. 

 

As I posted earlier, tomorrow (Friday) I will being pinning the model... mainly the feet which have faired the worst over time. After that, paint application will begin. I have three pots of Typhus Corrosion on the way, I only hope that's enough.

 

 

One more thing, keep your eyes peeled in the near future for some models to tie in with this monster. The coming months should be quite interesting....

[hushrong]

Looking forward to the warhound getting some TLC! Excited to see it get renewed life and what ever else you are bringing to the fore alongside it.

[DuskRaider]

A little update from over the weekend...

 

Operation: Pin the Legs was a success. Some of the pistons are a little wonky and don't quite reach but this is only with two that are hidden behind the shin guard so I'm not too concerned.

 

 

Painting has begun. The Red has been based and washed while the interior has a base coat of Ushabti Bone. I didn't want to go with all rust in the interior and lose detail, also I wanted to incorporate the Legio's third prime color into the model somehow so why not the interior?

 

 

Of particular note is the black. As I stated previously, I wanted to use Black 2.0 but wanted to try and make it a deeper black. I set about attempting this with the assistance of Windsor and Newton Black India Ink. This was VERY interesting... originally I added a coat of diluted (with water) black ink on the Black 2.0. What was so interesting is the Black 2.0 seemed to somehow absorb the ink or gloss or something and the coloration was right back to where I started. I'm not sure how it happened, I have no explanation.

 

The next attempt I added pure undiluted Black India Ink on the Black 2.0 and waited for it to dry. This brought a more desirable result, however the gloss was patchy, as if it has pooled in areas that aren't possible. I remedied this with a wash of undiluted Nuln Oil. The end result is what I wanted, I suppose. I'm not sure if was worth the time and effort but the good news is this is my only Titan so whatever.

 

 

Well that's it for this week. I'm going to prime the legs and weapons Corax White due to them being predominantly rust ala my Death Guard so that will probably be tonight at some point. Until next week!

[Eldrick Shadowblade]

Dusk, What's your photo set-up like? Surely thats not just a cell phone cam?

[hushrong]

Nice to see the Titan taking some form and getting some paint!