Painting Challenge entry 15: Nurgle Daemon Prince

Time for the next fortnight challenge entry, this time with the theme "Favorite Character". I went with a Nurgle Daemon Prince to celebrate the loving touch of Papa Nurgle. Chaos has always been my favorite faction in Warhammer and now that I sort of restarted it by digging up old minis it had to be the way to go. Of the four Chaos gods Nurgle has somehow always been my favorite. The disease ridden greenish hordes just somehow caught my eye.

To lead my new forces I of course needed a mighty hero and what would be better than a daemon prince. Sadly I'm not too thrilled about the Jabba the Hutt style aesthetics of Nurgle Greater Daemons etc. and then the regular Daemon Princes just look a bit too clean to be aligned to Nurgle. So I really had no choice but to convert something a bit more suitable for myself. I like the looks of GW's Plague Drones and thought that a bloated corpse fly would be the best shape for a mighty champion of Nurgle to morph into when he is bestowed with more and more of Nurgles gifts. The mini itself is made up of parts from GW's Daemon Prince, Plague Drone and Chaos Spawn box. And a helluva lot of green stuff...

Nearly everything on the mini except for details has been painted with an airbrush. The armor on his back was painted green with brown for shadows and yellow for highlights. The skin was painted with violet in the recesses and in the areas of any cuts and boils to simulate bruising and then covered with a light layer of yellowish brown and a final highlight of light grey. This was all washed down with brown and red inks to give the shadows a bit of definition and to have the lowest part of the body look suitably gory. I finally added a bit of violet on the tips of the wings to add some contrast.

All the oozing pus and paint was done with GW's special effect paints. Mostly worked out great, but I put a bit too much on his stomach area and wasn't able to clean it up afterwards. Didn't have time to repaint the area with the skin tone so I just had to add more pus to get him done in time for the challenge.

Painting Challenge entry 14: Winter War Ski troops

Next step in my Winter War project was finishing a small 5 man squad of Finns with skis. I had wanted to do them for the hero themed fortnight challenge, but thanks to the delivery taking over a month to arrive from the UK I had to skip them then.

The minis are from Warlord and are just far superior to anything from Baker Company. Not without their own problems though, as at least my set was filled with horrendous amounts of flash that took ages to clean. Still most of the detail is crisp and the flash was in areas that was relatively easy to clean without damaging any details so I'm pretty happy with them. Another issue I had was that all but one rifle was missing the end of the barrel and the front sights. Won't matter during gaming, but does stand out a bit in close-ups.

I'm probably going to run them as a Kaukopartio or Sissi squad in Bolt Action as they differ quite a bit from anything that Baker Company does so they won't really mix that well into other squads. Will be interesting to see how the Baker Company ski troopers will end up looking. The greens looked a bit hollywoodish, but it's quite hard to say from just pictures.

 

I'm a bit behind schedule on the challenge at the moment, I'm hoping to catch up with my last few entries as I have the last Winter War Finns about 50% complete now and I'm planning on doing a rather large entry for the final fortnight challenge. Plus I have the challenge "entry fee" nearly done and Danny the Dino is only missing eyes and teeth anymore. There are however some hindrances with a gaming weekend and a quick holiday trip in between me and my painting.

Painting Challenge entry 13: ACW Union Cavalry and Artillery

I finally got my cavalry and artillery units finished for our ACW campaign. Luckily the game got postponed so these are easily in time for the new date. After these guys I still have 5 regular infantry and 2 zouave regiments left. They are not needed for the first few games though so it might take a bit of time to get them done.

Nothing special to say about the painting. Coloured basecoat and then just adding details. 5 Artillery batteries with their limbers, 2 mounted and 4 dismounted cavalry units and 3 command stands. These are quite fun to do as you can build sort of mini dioramas quite easily without the bases starting to look too crowded. Like the destroyed cannon on one of the artillery bases. It was broken in the bag when it arrived from Baccus so I just decided to use some casualty figures around it to create a slightly battered battery :) I guess I should try building some walls etc. on some of the bases to show the troops being in cover.

I tried a different background with the photos this time. A black background instead of the regular light grey or the scenic base that I normally use. Seems to bring out the colours quite nicely and finding proper settings for the camera was easy. Might use these instead of the grey backgrounds in the future as I like the effect more.

Painting Challenge entry 12: Ensign Kennedy

For the casualty themed fortnight challenge I converted and painted Ensign Kennedy of the 1st Royal Scots from Waterloo. Other entries and the voting is up at Curt's blog so go there to see what everyone has come up with for this theme!

After being mortally wounded at Waterloo carrying the King's Colours in front of his Regiment a Sergeant attempted to take the flag from his hands. Refusing to let go off it the sergeant picked him up to carry him back. Impressed by the deed the French stopped firing until the two got safely back to the British lines.

As I already told earlier this was the first bigger conversion that I attempted. The previous ones had only included some filling of gaps after changing arm positions etc. For this one I needed to change the pose of the ensign heavily by mostly redoing the legs and the torso. I also redid the hair to show it hanging down.

Parts are sourced from Victrix British Line infantry box, their artillery box and the Perry British Infantry box. The top part of the flag staff is from Warlord games.The whole setup is mounted on a Warbases casualty base to allow tracking casualties.