Chaos Daemons: Great Unclean One

For a long time, I have been lacking a real centrepiece for my Chaos Daemons army. I had focused on Heralds for my HQ choices, to buff my infantry units, but they lacked a bit of visual pizazz.

Sure, I've got a Soul Grinder, but the focal point of any army should really be the unit that the other units revolve around, rather than one of the useful-but-not-extraordinary Heavy Support units.

The Great Unclean One from Forge World is an excellent (and very very weighty) model, and is super-easy to paint. The vast majority of this guy was painted using washes.

This was my first attempt at using Blood For The Blood God - one of the Citadel Technical Paints - and I have to say I was pretty impressed. In the pot, it just looks like red paint, but once it is on the model you can see its translucent nature more clearly (geddit?)

The welts, sores and wounds on this chap are what help to give him an awful lot of character and depth. Every inch of his body is devoted to the grotesque.

There are even maggots infesting some of the open sores! Gruesome! This model was great fun to paint, and just like with my Rogue Psyker in the previous post, the hard work was done for me by the sculptor. This was basically just a 'colouring in' job. And with Nurgle, it doesn't matter if you colour over the lines!

Chaos Daemons: Army In Progress

Some of my friends wondered how my Daemons army was progressing, and whether I could post some pictures on the shared (private) blog that we jointly contribute to, so i took some photos. Turns out I have more Daemons than I first thought. Who knew?

Whilst a little Nurgle-heavy, my army is one of Chaos Undivided, drawing in warriors from all four of the Ruinous Powers, from Daemonettes to Screamers, Bloodletters and Nurglings.

Here's my freaky Fanged-Vagina-Faced Herald of Slaanesh, cobbled together out of Kromlech/Maxmini bits and the Tzeentch Sorceror kit.

My Herald Of Nurgle - basically just the WHFB Nurgle Lord sat atop a 40mm base, so he can tower over his fellow followers of the Plaguefather.

My Soul Grinder and Plaguebearers, shambling along as usual, and providing a backdrop of bilious green and faeces brown to my army.

My Herald of Khorne - once again pilfered from WHFB. I just feel that Heralds should stand out from the crowd, rather than being a slightly larger Bloodletter/Plaguebearer/Daemonette/Horror.

Speaking of which, here is my Tzeentchian contingent, featuring not one, but two heralds, and a Burning Chariot to give them a bit of firepower.

So there you go...

Chaos Daemons: Plaguebearers No.2

Continuing the Nurgle theme that has featured so prominently this week, I thought I should include these Plaguebearers.  These were some that I bought off eBay (always a good source for cheap(er) miniatures).  They were already assembled, but the painting was all my own.

The Plaguebearers were lots of fun to paint, and consisted primarily of a black undercoat, olive green basecoat (actually, the technical name was Death Forest Green) with a brown drybrush (Snakebite Leather in this instance), and then a liberal washing with a dark brown (either a wash or watered down brown paint).

The Plaguebearer kit is absolutely fantastic.  Not only does it fit together well, but there are so many options, and tonnes of bits left over at the end of it all to allow you to create some horrors of your own.

There are some nice, gory details - such as exposed entrails and bones - which grubby the models up a little.

The bone-coloured Plague Blades were painted using Karak Stone (a kind of khaki colour) which then had a stagnant green wash over it (in this case, Athonian Camoshade from the Citadel Wash colours).

Aaaaaaaaand, there you go!  The finished article!  Easy to paint, and lots and lots of fun to play with on the tabletop.

New Arrivals: Glottkin Goodness

 

Calling all Nurgle-Worshippers! The ENORMOUS Glotkin kit is arriving this weekend, and here are some sneak previews from this week's White Dwarf (released on Saturday). I managed to grab a copy a little early, and I have to say this kit looks FANTASTIC.

Standing head and shoulders (if you can tell where the head and shoulders start and finish) over last week's Maggoth Lord kits, this is an absolutely massive model, which looks like it would be a great centrepiece for any WHFB or even 40K Daemons army.  The conversion potential is massive, to say the least.  Perhaps a Great Unclean One proxy?  An enormous, OTT Daemon Prince?  Even just as a focal point it is a great item to include.

At first I was a bit "Meh" about the prospect of them, but closer inspection reveals them to be... "WOW".

Chaos Daemons: Herald of Slaanesh

Here's another Herald!  This one is the actual GW Herald Of Slaanesh, albeit placed atop a 40mm base to match her up with the other Heralds.  The buffs that Heralds can offer Daemon units are fantastic, but they will *always* suffer from being shot to bits when they first arrive in play.

Chaos Daemons: Herald of Khorne

I've never been a huge fan of the new Herald models - I think they are fantastically sculpted, but they just look too similar to the core troops.  The Herald Of Nurgle looks like a fancy Plaguebearer, for instance, and the Herald Of Khorne looks like a slightly larger Bloodletter.  I therefore decided to use this WHFB Chaos Lord to represent my Khornate champion.

He is suitably impressive (he towers over other infantry models), and he seems to give off a feeling of martial prowess that is the hallmark of all things Khorney. Tada!!!

Chaos Daemons: Flamers of Tzeentch

Here are some Flamers Of Tzeentch: so-called, because... well... I'm sure you can make the leap of logic. These chaps form a fairly important part of my Daemons army because they can shoot! Which is rather important, I suppose...

They were super-easy to paint - mainly relying on drybrushing, with only a few details picked out for finishing touches.

As with all Daemons, these chaps are very forgiving of slap-dash painting, and look great after a few washes to pull the colours together.

Chaos Daemons: Herald of Nurgle

Sticking with Nurgle now, and here is my Herald! Unadulterated - not even a headswap!

This chap is actually the Nurgle Chaos Lord from Warhammer Fantasy Battle, but I have popped him on a 40mm base to appropriate him for 40K to use as one of the faction leaders for my Daemonic army.  This guy is one of the most commonly kitbashed miniatures in the GW range, and it's not hard to see why - the detailing is fantastic, and its corpulent frame is exceptionally tactile.

I particularly like this guy as he doesn't hold any weapons which require the barrels to be drilled out ;-)

Chaos Daemons: Soul Grinder

Some much-needed firepower for my Chaos Daemons, in the form of this gnarly chap.  A Harvester Cannon comes as standard, and upgrading him to having Warp Gaze makes him a good anti-tank option.

Chaos Daemons: Plaguebearers

The Plaguebearers of Nurgle are possibly the best kit that GW have released in the past decade - they are superb!

I won't rant on about how much character the Nurgle daemons have - I always do that, and it's daft to repeat myself over and over.

These guys required a minimum amount of effort.  Spray-primed in the Army Painter Necrotic Flesh, and then just washed in a variety of shades!  Voila!

This is my second unit of Plaguebearers, and I already have a third, waiting to be constructed.  Can't wait!

The spirit of the old metal miniatures meets the technology of plastic moulding. Love it!

YOU GET A FLY HEAD!  A FLIPPING FLY HEAD!!!

Chaos Daemons: Burning Chariot Of Tzeentch

Ah! The Burning Chariot! The very epitome of what it is to be a glass hammer. D3 S9 AP2 hits? Nice! AV10 all over and the likelihood of being smashed to ribbons by the end of Turn 3?  Not so nice.

Good things about this kit?  LOADS of bits left over, including a full bonus Herald of Tzeentch, if you choose to go with the Exalted Flamer option.

Bad things?  It feels SUPER fragile, due to all the spindly bits in it.  That said, it shows how much can be done with plastics these days.  This would have been completely impossible with the old metal kits.

Chaos Daemons: Screamers Of Tzeentch

The Screamers are a bit of an odd model to paint.  Well, I guess they're a bit of an odd model, full-stop. The difficulty with painting them, though, is judging how much detail to go into.

In some ways they are super-easy, because they are effectively just blobs of energy spawned from the Warp, so you could do them as a single colour, but if you look closely, there are loads of tiny details to the model itself.

I opted for something in-between.  I made sure that the models featured a few of the details that make them so cool, but I didn't go to town completely on them.

EYES! THE EYES!!!

Chaos Daemons: Nurglings

Nurglings are some of my favourite Daemons in the 40K universe - they're neither particularly powerful, nor are they particularly effective... but they're FUN!

They're also really fun to paint.  You can spend ages on them, painting them rank by rank, and highlighting all of their boils and sores, or you can just paint them in one block colour and slap some washes on them - either way works just fine!

They're chock-full of character, as well - in the same way that the Plaguebearers are.  Nurgle seems to get all of the best Daemons, I think - whilst the fluff surrounding the other ruinous powers is very good,  the individual models of the Lesser Daemons can often lack a bit of the charm of the Nurgle ones.  All hail Papa Nurgle!

Chaos Daemons: Beasts Of Nurgle

These are some of my favourite-ever homemade monsters - my Beast Of Nurgle proxies!  Suffice to say they cost a lot less than the £15 per model (is that around $25?) that GW ask for their regular finecast ones.

Basically, these guys are just made of a small sausage of clay (about thumb-sized) with some of the spare heads from the Plague Drones kit on top, and I put some clipped-off Chaos Space Marine horns into its body as tentacles.

I covered the clay with some Stirland Mud (the textured paint that GW sells) - this adds a bit of texture, but also covers over the roughness of the clay - and then painted it in a variety of shades of green and brown.

They're not as physically imposing as the GW ones, but I guess I saved myself £45 ($70)!