3 Finished Plaguebearers

Today was actually the best day for painting we’ve had in a long time in Vancouver. There is a breeze, my hands didn’t sweat, I don’t have to OD on water. Too bad my sleep schedule is so messed up I slept away most of the day. I’m up now and paint is drying as I’m almost done Fleshy, Drabby, and Knarly. I’ve finished the eyes which are oranges and yellows. I think I need a bit more yellow but yellow notoriously doesn’t cover well, even over orange and white.

I did the handles of the swords brown even using my Reaper Master Series Terracotta on them. I did the champs tongue purple. I did my new dark purple system of GW’s Liche Purple then the Foundry Royal Purple Triad. For fun I blended on the Wet Palette, which is behaving more today in the milder weather, the inbetween shades. Alas I still haven’t gotten the handle on the wet palette and may have rushed things too much. I did a very thinned down old GW Purple Wash too. Now like a lot of other things it is drying.

I’m painting the glob on Knarly’s sword an old GW Jade Green which I plan to highlight with an old GW Putrid Green.

I painted the nipple ring on Fleshy a P3 Blighted Gold colour which is a great Nurgle colour even if it does suffer from some separation issues, it is still workable.

The bases will be drybrushed with three GW browns: Scorched Earth, Snakebite Leather, and Bubonic. They already got a fresh coat of Delta Ceramcoat black which is nice and flat and covers well. I reach for it a lot to save my Chaos Black for finer detail work, now.

That’s about it, when everything is reasonably dry I snapped the pics then they are off to the box to get Matte Varnished. I plan to go with Purity Seal even though I hear horror stories about it frosting models every now and then. When I get a job and lessen my debt load I’ll hopefully have used it up and switch to Testors.

I think after all these years I’ve finally gotten good at drybrushing. I come from the old school where we drybrushed with old brushes. This can be really hit and miss which is a way to describe drybrushing itself. Over the years I’ve acquired some makeup style brushes and on my last trip to Deserres I bought the smallest one yet. This is much superior to the old worn out Tamiya brush I was using. It was actually a joy to drybrush up the dirt with my new brush. Maybe I’ll have to try drybrushing something else besides dirt and skulls… Of course you still need to get just the right amount of paint on your brush, this is more important than the kind of brush you use.

In case you didn’t notice the Putrid Green turned out to be a boulder. Shows you how often I use it. So the green glob on Knarly’s sword is GW Jade Green and one of the oldest pots in my collection, GW Bilious Green from the Monster Paint Set I believe. I blended the colours together, oh yeah the midtone was, a not quite as old, GW Striking Scorpion Green. Anyway I mixed various midtones over a very solid two or three coats of Jade Green base. I then put too much old GW Green Glaze on the model, but it worked out fine, I built back up my highlights even better using the wet palette and then I put some pure Bilious Green on and modicum of GW Yellow Glaze and voila slime! I may use some other tricks to keep it nice and slimy.

So which is your favourite one? All three are great sculpts which is probably why Nurgle lesser daemons are the only metal ones left in GW’s catalog. Drabby was the least work, but he has the nice exposed bones. Fleshy I like though his skintone could have had a lot more depth to it, but it is a unique colour. And Knarly I really gave the P3 Wet Palette a bit of a workout blending various mid-shades and I also used four different new GW Washes as well as some of my own custom thinned washes, so basically 15 years worth of Nurgle painting experience went into these models, hopefully they’ll result in a glorious victory on Sunday, now I just need to re-base the Beasts of Nurgle and make a 40 strong movement tray to replace my old puny 16 one.