Behold, my badges!

So it took a while, but apparently I earned two more badges on the Internet. If I read the rules better and tried to game the system more, perhaps I could have done even better. I didn’t think this was even an online painting competition, but it turns out there were prizes that I could have won. Online painting competitions are a lot more common than they were twenty years ago.

Besides being rushed for time and trying various untried techniques and paint combinations, I also would have benefited from taking better individual pictures of my models. I pay for webhosting and Flickr and I actually tend to upload smaller images than kids these days, because I’m old and remember when the Internet was slow. So next time I volunteer to paint something for the good of the Internet I’ll try to take better pictures as I think I may have painted more hours than the average participant but earned less points.

Plague Surgeon

WordPress updated since I last posted and if you guessed it works worse, you’d be correct. Every time I tried to use the menu on the left to add a subheading, it would crash. Now experts say subheadings help your search engine optimization so I tried and tried until I used a different button to add this subheading.

So my Plague Surgeon is going to be called Dr. Stealgood, because of course he’s going to make your gene-seed all mine. I actually think I could have done a better job painting him. I wasn’t happy with the grey or even the apron. I wanted to avoid the usual burgundy everyone else does. I did go with white or offwhite armour using a technique I’ve already described.

Nurgling Infested Objective

So the reason I wanted to add a Plague Surgeon to my 9th Edition Warhammer 40,000 campaign army was he had his own agenda. Recovering the gene-seed of fallen foes as represented by a special objective you were supposed to convert, paint and give to your foe to place on the table. So of course I made mine an Avenging Son, because clearly they need something to avenge and apparently they don’t like the Death Guard for some reason that was never clearly explained to me.

Of course I scoured the Internet for bits, of course I had to use Swaggy P or whatever they call this Nurgling which meant buying another entire model to get one bit. Then for the Ultramarine I was pretty sure I had an Ultramarine bit or two. Obviously they are all old and thus not Primaris. Apparently the Imperium isn’t against all mutations, hypocrites.

Bill was supposed to give me the exact transfer to apply and I bought the specific blue to use as the basecoat, but then I used whatever blues and other paints I had lying around for the rest of the model. I put a lot of skulls on the base and a lot chain which I spent a lot of time rusting. So yeah this was a time consuming paint job but it could have been worse. Maybe the Nurgling shouldn’t have been dark green, but I didn’t have a lot of time to second guess myself.

The Future

Since painting these guys, I’ve already painted more Nurglings and I have more models on my painting table but we’ve gotten busy at work again. I think some people are about fed up with us always being busy and being expected to stay late. I expect there will be more changes in the New Year.

We or at least me have not been playing much Warhammer 40,000 or anything. But I did complete my painting vow and earn my badges. I don’t know if that will impress Vince Venturella. I did buy some of the paint he recommended so I don’t know if I’ll use much of it on the models currently on my table but I can see some Poxwalkers in my future not to mention, Blightlords, Plague Marines, and probably more Chaos Cultists. I seem to be big on footslogging this edition, because I have lots of painted models so might as well push them around on the table.

The problem is of course is the cheap models die easily and they can’t kill big tough stuff, I’m still hopeful the Blightlord Terminators can, so that is the unit I will optimize next. I also will likely get new HQ on the table, maybe not in 2023 but in 2024. Not sure when I’ll paint a tank or a daemon engine but eventually.

I don’t keep up with the rumours, but I think Necrons may get the next codex, but if regular Chaos Space Marines get their codex before the Death Guard, I’ll probably go back to being Nurgle Renegades or I could just run my non-Nurgle guys the Nefarious Fire. In the mean time, I hope to keep painting with my new lower standards, but basically it is the weekend or nothing, as during the week I work late and don’t have a lot of spare time or energy, hence updating this blog later than usual, but I got my badges.

If you have thoughts on the optimal Death Guard army, online painting competitions or people’s obsession with badges and vanity metrics you can leave a comment below. If you hurry over to the Bolter and Chainsword you may even be able to vote in an online painting competition and see all the models better than mine.