Tag Archives: chaos daemons

Keeper of the Emerald Pox

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I thought I’d put up some pictures of the mob leader of these plaguebearers I completed back in March.  This daemon bears the honorific Keeper of the Emerald Pox because she was the first one I tried it out on, even if she wasn’t the first miniature I finished bearing that disease.  Either way, the emerald pox has become one of my favorite maladies because I like the way it looks and the ease of application or infection, if you will.

Having a laugh with her (mostly) cheerful compatriots as they march toward victory!

 

Make sure you get my good side!

 

In the meantime I’m picking away at a few random neglected models for the current iteration of Azazel’s Neglected Model challenge for May 2018.  My plan is to get at least one model done by the end-of-month deadline.  So far the most promising candidate is an ork tankbusta I started in (maybe) 2015, though I’m also hopeful about finishing another one of my horribly neglected cultists as well.

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Plaguebearer With Banner

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This is a closer look at the lucky and honored standard bearer from the mob of twenty plaguebearers I recently completed.+  At this point I should probably issue a Nurgle Warning:  there are one or two icky pictures if you continuing scrolling down.  Gifts of our generous Grandfather are not for the overly faint of hear- … er, stomach!

I tried to do a whole Cycle of Existence thing with the banner, where you have birth and life transitioning to various stages of decay and finally death what with Nurgle not just being exclusively all about the aforementioned death and decay as many (or at least some) of the uninitiated believe.

I put this model together and after the glue dried I noticed that one of its horns was pressed up against the bell in an awkward way.  I tried filing it down a little and didn’t like the results.  So I cut about halfway through the offending horn with some cutters and then tore it off.  I was going for a jagged break rather than the clean slice of the elegant Slaanesh Xacto knife.

Gives new meaning to talking out the side of your mouth.

I originally tried an experiment where I painted his belly teeth black.  It seemed good in my mind but I don’t think it worked out well at all on the model.  So I redid the teeth in a lighter color and then used some rust washes, with a final bit of blood and Nurgle’s rot.  The mouth doesn’t really stand out on the model at a distance, but I don’t want it to.  I like how it looks close up though.  The focal point of this guy should be the banner.  With that in mind I kept the plague sword kind of basic too.

“They’re not good dancers they don’t play drums … “

I’m really quite pleased with how the pile of worms on the base turned out.  So much so that I ended up putting a bunch of them on my Great Unclean One’s base when I put her together.  When you collect Nurgle, you are never at a shortage for nurglings nor little piles of intestinal parasites, though with the size of these beauties I’m thinking someone’s intestines had a little transformation and decided to go on crawl-about.

A somewhat confused but ultimately effective advance vs. an IG gun line.

So next time I’m hoping to put up a couple of pictures of a pink horror I painted as the first of a squad of ten to go with the brimstone and blue horrors I finished some time ago, who are now veterans of many a desperate battle.  I’m also working on another cultist as well, and the last odd plaguebearer that will finish off the ones from my Start Collecting box.

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+  Twenty-two if you count the metal skeleton snake undead bit box thingie and the ancient Sebelex the Devourer!

A Prince Among Daemons

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I finished this guy some time ago and I thought he’d make a nice respite from the endless Nurgle stuff I’ve been posting over the last few months (and the months to come, I’m sure).  He sat around for a couple of years in the box and then had a shamefully long career as an Unpainted Slayer.  Like many of my models, the ones I use a lot are the ones that get moved to the top of the painting queue. +

Note the purity seal; he’s certified 100% killy and quite buff too.

His highness has been my favored slave for many years and has led many a successful rampage, massacring hordes of enemy troops, hoofing it for linebreaker or legging it after hovering airplanes, directing his bloodletter minions in flipping over tanks, cleaving APC’s in twain with one mighty blow from his hellforged sword, and so on.  Truly, his catalog of feats is too storied to list in full here.  If anyone deserves to be a fully painted model, it is this fine fellow.  He truly is a prince among daemons!

His tail ended up on a bloodthirster, but I think the teal tong is working for him.

I magnetized the stacks coming out of his back so I could give him some wings if I wanted.  So far, I have found in 8th edition that wings are not really that necessary for him to carry out my directives.  Mostly he has been the leader of my Khornate spearhead forces, coming in behind enemy lines while my other minions do their thing.

I did the flesh in the same way I did my bloodletters.  If I had painted him now I might do it a bit differently, using a layering technique instead of (or in addition to) drybrushing, but I’m not inclined to mess with Good Enough.

A magnet and a malefic talon.

I also put a magnet on his left vambrace where I can affix a cyclone missile launcher that he occasionally commandeers/steals from the Tentacles for the All Father guys and uses these days as a counts-as warp bolter though in previous editions it served as a counts-as relic flamer (presumably shooting warp missiles), or some other random weapon.

Since his claw is a pretty good weapon in is own right, I painted it a little different than the rest of his body and included some miscellaneous symbols and script.

Think that cross piece could use a little Brasso or something.

The sword, which has turned out to be a gruesome weapon indeed in 8th edition, was my first experiment with the (then) new (to me) Nihilakh Oxide.  As it has turned out I love that stuff. ++

I sometimes imagine the sword to be a trophy he pried out of the dead tentacles of a defeated Nurgle prince in one of the many Wars of Establishing the Pecking Order.  Being a Khorne daemon and thus having some sense of decorum and cleanliness … aka Burn It With Fire, I’m sure he occasionally gives it to his attending bloodletters and tells them something like, “It’ll be clean enough to eat off, you scum, or I’ll know the reason why.”  Nevertheless, some rust remains even after endless bloodletter tongue polishing.  There are limits; it is a Nurgle sword.  I think at the end of the day our prince figures if he doesn’t catch any too-lingering diseases from the thing, it’s a win.

I was able to scrounge some other daemon prince pieces and with the extras you get in the regular box I have a complete axe daemon ready to assemble.  It has been languishing in a sandwich baggie for a couple of years though.

Deep Striking in 7th Ed:  “Guys, we were supposed to stick together!”

Further, a couple of months ago I picked up another new daemon prince kit when one of the game stores I play at was offering a 50% discount to get rid of some stuff.  So I’m thinking that eventually I’ll do a prince of Nurgle and probably one of Slaanesh.  I also have an old Fantasy Chimera kit, which I got at a huge (I forget how much) discount some years ago when another store was getting out of the Games Workshop business entirely.  That thing will probably be my Tzeentch prince, as well as possibly a Chimera.

Ambitious plans indeed.  In reality they’ll probably languish for some time yet while I work on current projects.  I do have the bad habit of collecting too much stuff I take forever getting to, but I try to balance that with the good habit of finishing the stuff I work on, though perhaps Becky the Bloater is a rare lapse from that good habit.

For next time I’m hoping to do either a battle report of our last game or perhaps some pictures of a couple of plaguebearers from the recent Cloud of Flies.

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+  I used to subscribe to the ancient maxim of “If they ain’t painted they don’t go on the table.”  The problem I found with that was I’d buy new stuff and then by the time it saw play an edition or two would have passed and it’d be old stuff.  Now my maxim is “if I play with it a lot then I work on painting it.”  This is much more satisfying in that I get to play with new stuff and my forces still do get painted, at least eventually.

++ Common wisdom dictated the axe was a better choice in 8th edition, but that was before it was universally recognized that modifiers are applied after re-rolls.  Given the prince’s re-roll aura buff and that the various points costs have been changed to something reasonable, I think a case can be made for both weapons (or for neither!) and it comes down to individual preference, build, or in my case WYSIWYG considerations.

Feb 2018 Painting Challenges Completed!

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I am pretty happy this morning having completed both the Squaduary painting challenge and Azazel’s Neglected Model challenge.  It was a close thing with Squaduary.  I was painting the last two models up to a half hour before my bedtime, and the flocking was still wet on those last two when I took the picture  Talk about cutting it close but at least I wasn’t up until midnight!

Another effect of all of these challenges is I’ve been posting more than is usually my custom.  So at nine posts for February, I’ve set a personal record for blog posts in a month with none of them being re-blogging The Regimental Standard, etc.

Squaduary Complete: Ten Plaguebearers! +

My goal with Squaduary was to paint a legal unit of plaguebearers, which means ten models.  These daemons will most likely be part of a single unit of twenty in games, but if I ran them alone I think the one with the poleaxe could optionally be my standard bearer.

Azazel commented in the Sebelex post that seniority should count for something and suggested our ancient daemon for the post of herald. (Sebelex is that one way in back waving a bone club.)  I don’t think the mighty Urnafortunus would wear that, but Azazel is right, older is better in 40K so we have to do something for our bits box metal monster.  So Sebelex will be mob Under-Champion.  As under-champion it will lead one mob when the current unit is broken up into two squads.  Not a bad beginning and certainly a lot better than languishing for another fifteen years or so in a games store bit box!

Cloud of Flies Codicil Complete: 20 Plaguebearers … and friend!

In addition to Squaduary, I also wanted to bring my plaguebearers up to a twenty daemon squad.  They have a rule called “Cloud of Flies” where if the mob has twenty or more models than they are harder to hit.  So I instituted the Cloud of Flies codicil to the complete-a-unit challenge.  That meant I had to complete some pre-February work-in-progress plaguebearers, which thus wouldn’t count toward my ten for Squaduary, but would count toward Cloud of Flies.

I managed to hit that mark as well and above is a picture of the full mob, as well as the mob mascot, our bits box old metal skeleton snake thingie.  Despite much grumbling in the ranks as well as a fetid petition from certain unknown troublemakers, I decided not to count the snake skeleton as a completed model for the codicil though in games it certainly takes it place as a counts-as daemon.

Finished the final two on the last day:  the sand’s still wet on their bases!

But my Glory as the premier Chaos Lady of the Santa Cruz Sector does not end there!  I also completed Azazel’s Neglected Model challenge as I said at the beginning of this post.  The idea is to paint a model that you started at least six months ago but never finished.  Well, I have tons of models that fit that bill so I completed a cultist and of course our friend Sebelex the Eternally Neglected, Devourer, Throttler, etc. ++

Nice weapon, but could use a stock.

I’ve already put these pictures up in previous posts, but I want to put them here as well so all of my completed challenge pictures for the month are all in one place.

Hanging out with Cultist One, who wasn’t part of the challenge.

Those are some pretty meaty throttling hands.

+ Can’t escape the ubiquitous cat hair it seems. Note the strand coming out the shoulder of the furthest front right plaguebearer. I knew that my cats were aligned to Chaos, but I thought they had pledged themselves to Slaanesh, not Nurgle!

++ So my Work-in-Progress Nurglings pointed out that I had “set the bar a little low” with Azazel’s challenge only committing to completing at least one model. I reminded them that they do have the “Squishable” special rule and that seemed to shut them up for a time. Sebelex pointed out, “If you complete the challenge then the Glory is yours for you are the Fearless Leader. The details are unimportant. All that matters is the victory.” I like how that daemon thinks and perhaps I need to reappraise the whole under-boss/herald thing.

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Final Note:  I want to include a Nurgle-Triggering Post Warning for sensitive souls like the much esteemed John and others.  We don’t want to ruin anyone’s morning tea or afternoon aerobics, evening eviscerations, etc.

Sebelex: Devourer of the Dead

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I was rummaging around in a game store bits box sometime in late 2016 or early 2017 when I found this thing.  I did the white prime job shortly after slapping my two bits on the counter as payment in full.  From there it continued to languish for maybe about a year until I started working on plaguebearers.

This miniature struck me as being pretty old so I poked around a little trying to learn more about it.  The notation M22 1984 was on the bottom of the base.  I found out that the model was produced by Grenadier Models with M22 referring to the model and 1984 to the year it originally came out.  Further, this rather humble (by today’s standards) little bone waver had a name:  Sebelex, Devourer of the Dead, and was one miniature that came in a boxed set of ten demons.

I vaguely remember this box from back in my teenager D&D days.

I also acquired a few other old looking pieces at the same time.  One turned to be a colleague of the Devourer, the somewhat frightened looking Mxomyceles, Duke of the Mire, and the other a humanoid brain thing with fairy wings.  I thought they were all part of the same set but I guess Brain isn’t as it turns out.

I’m thinking the Duke of the Mire will declare his fealty to Slaanesh while the Brain, appropriately enough, will enter the service of Tzeentch.  Goodness knows I have plenty of Nurgle minor champion types in the ranks and/or in production so I don’t need more of those.

Sebelex proudly displayed top row, third from the left.

Below is how our ancient demon turned out.  Since the metal Sebelex is going to be joining the Swelling Horde as a plaguebearer I applied a coat of gloss varnish and then a matte layer for protection against grasping fingers and rolling dice.  The thing I like best about this miniature is its age:  it is older than many of my regular opponents and we all know in 40K that the older something is the better.  Let the galaxy boil (break out in, that is)!

As I said in my previous post, Sebelex here is a double threat.  It is a natural to fill the role of a plaguebearer, and as for being a neglected miniature I wouldn’t be surprised if it has a neglected history of decades before it fell into my greedy clutches, where I duly neglected it in turn.  So I declare my little lead demon grist for both Squaduary and the Neglected Model Challenge.  Let it be written, let it be done!

Completed Sebelex the Devourer

The blurry plaguebearer lurking in the background of the picture above is yet another body I finished for the Squaduary challenge.  She’ll be one of the worthies in the group shot of the completed mob (hope festers eternal!) I’m planning for tomorrow to get in under the challenge deadline.

Then the plan will be to inflict/feature a few posts of individual plaguebearers or small groups, as is my normal practice.  I’m not sure yet what I’ll be working on for March.+  I accepted a job offer to drive a bus and if everything goes well I should start soon.  I imagine that will cut at least somewhat into my painting time, but we’ll see.

+  Because I truly haven’t had enough plaguebearers in my blog so far!

Maggotmouth and Friend

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The Plaguebearer Express rolls on as I continue toward completing a mob by the end of the month for the Squadary Painting Challenge.  The current offerings represent numbers four and five of the requisite ten daemon squad.  My plan is to have two or three more done on Monday and then wrap things up with a group picture on the 28th.

Maggotmouth here seems to be having a bad day for some reason.

Also, I am finished with the original ten daemons that aren’t part of this challenge but are part of my associated goal of bringing my painted numbers up to twenty by the end of the month.  I will include those miniatures in the aforementioned group shot and then do some individual posts in later weeks.

I originally decided to do something a little different with Maggotmouth’s sword and painted it the same as I did the flesh on my January cultist.  I wasn’t sure if I liked it or not, but for plaguebearers in general the weapon sort of just blended in with rest of the diseased mass of daemons.  Perhaps it might have been a better idea to try on a space marine?

So I started in with the various washes until I ended up with the sword you see above.  I like it better but I don’t remember exactly what I did.  I imagine it was mostly using Carroburg Crimson and Glossy Nuln Oil.  It still doesn’t stand out too much in a group, which is fine, but I do like it better now because it is more grist for the mill of my plaguebearers using swords that all a bit different while not distracting from the daemons themselves.  Know your role, as it were.

Not so MM’s partner(s).  “Every day in Real Space is a good day!” they chirp.

Plaguebearer Five’s (or Fifteen’s if you count the original ten) right arm is an extra from the plague drone kit.  Five and his running partner, Blue Belly, have a bit of a story to them.  I seemed to be in the middle of a spate of dropping miniatures when I was working on this guy.

So I’m in the middle of working on Five while I’m watching tv with my husband, as usual.  I let out with an expletive and my husband, not even looking over says, “Drop one again, huh?”  I look down and congratulate myself on my good luck.  The miniature landed perfectly, just as you see here with nary a scratch.  Then I looked a little closer….

Lucky, huh?

Five must have bounced off the top of his horn, done a one-eighty and then landed feet-first.  I fixed his horn by using my hobby knife as if I were putting a point back on a pencil.  I think it came out fine and I can only hope that anyone picking up my miniatures without permission chooses Five and gets stuck in the hand for their trouble!  Maybe if they are particularly lucky that day they’ll catch a dose of the Emerald Pox.

Maybe not so much.

I might do a weekend post if I have time.  I am almost finished with my single cultist for Azazel’s Complete a Neglected Model(s) challenge.  Just need to throw some sand on his base and let it dry.

I’m going to put a second neglected model into the queue and see if I can finish it before the end of the month.  Maybe another cultist since at my current rate of progress from when I finished the first guy to the second, I will have finished the entire twenty man squad by August 2022.  I think there is an outside possibility I can do better than that!

Plaguebearer Mob Grows by Two

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I got two more plaguebearers done over the the holiday weekend for the February Squaduary Painting Challenge.  This brings me to three complete of the ten I need to get done by the end of the month to have a legal squad, and ten of twenty to fulfill my own Cloud of Flies Codicil to the challenge.

“What doesn’t kill us can still cause hairballs!”

I am feeling confident because while I work to get one or two daemons completed, I pick away at the others so the rest of the necessary mob lingers in a not-done-but-work-well-underway-state.

I noticed a couple of bits of cat hair fuzz on the daemon with two horns after I took the pictures.  If it had been anything other than Nurgle I probably would have retaken the pictures or edited the hair out, but one effect of being ensconced in the way of the Lord of Plagues is an (un)healthy disregard for such things.  So I shrugged and said, “Meh, what can you do?  A little hair never hurt anyone.”

I think Rhino Plaguebearer likes the black sword too.

A closer look at a bit of an experiment with a black sword.  The idea was to use minimum highlighting and dry brushing so there are some very light highlights and it isn’t just solid black up close.  Also used some AK brand Corrosion Texture to give the blade that gravelly look.  I didn’t use a sealer on the sword so I’ll be curious to see how the gravel stands up over time on a gaming miniature.

Sporting some nice Emerald Pox and Blue Bloat.

This time I decided to experiment with a mild case of Blue Bloat.  I used several coats of Drakenhof Nightshade and then some Glossy Nuln Oil in the folds, since I wanted to go for a dry look.  I finished with a bit of a sand-colored drybrush on the feet, which I’ve been doing for my daemons and others lately.

My plan is to knock out the rest of my needed plaguebearers over the next week, and posting them as they are completed to keep myself motivated to finish on the right side of the challenge.  I am also almost done with my one miniature to complete Azazel’s Complete a Neglected Model Challenge and will post a picture as soon as he is done as well.