Acceptable Radiation: Foul Blightspawn and Co.

Wednesday, February 21, 2018

Foul Blightspawn and Co.

Another of Mortarion's foul spawn are bloated marines who roam the battlefield sparaying toxic miasma at friend and foe alike. Unfortunatly for the valiant forces of Him On Terra, these diseased fluids seem to embolden the unrepentant Death Guard while inflicting upon the righteous inumerable maladies that lead to nothing but a painful demise. These heretics are must be dealt with carefully; they carry upon their backs giant cauldrons of their filth and any attack on them has the potential to rupture the tank. I have witnessed such calamities create countless Imperial martryrs.

-Excerpt from the Reports of Inquisitor Corrigan, 3 226 765.M38

I generally tell people not to get me hobby supplies as gifts. Between trading things off or putting them in a pile and forgetting about them, I am just afraid that I wouldn't show the gift the respect it deserves. With that said, this year one of my children insisted on getting me a model to paint for Christmas. I picked out a few models I would like so it would still be a suprise and I was rewarded with the Foul Blightspawn, which was actually the one I wanted the most! I began working on him, along with two more Plague Marines, right away.He was largely painted the same way as my previous Plague Marines, so I won't repeat that here.

I did change up a few things. First, I used a different scheme for the shoulder pads. It appears that prior to (or at least simultaneously with) the Heresy, the Death Guard used two styles of shoulder pads: (1) white pads trimmed with gree and (2) green pads trimmed with brass. Although the Death Guard maintain more order than the other heretic legions, the loss of marines over ten thousand years adds up. By mixing up the shoulder pads, I wanted to give the impression that the units are more "ad-hoc" than highly organized as command structure breaks down and units merge to keep up their fighting strength. So although I will paint a batch of plague marines with the same shoulder pad sstyle, I will be mixing it up between batchs.

I also tried to take the highlights a litter higher an applied oil paints so for the highlights so I could blend them a little better. I don't think I'll be doing that again though. After comparing the models, I like the original better as far as that is concerned.

I also changed up the way I did the steel, to make them look dirtier and more rusted. You can see the metal arm and parts of the backpack below are more rusted and grimy looking. On the last models, I liked the simplicity of silver followed by lots of washes, but I didn't think it looked that great either.

And though the studio paint job has him wearing a helmet, the overall shape of the skull to me looks like a malformed and diseased cranium, so I painted it like flesh. You can also see the Plaugebearer skull on the base. I wanted to get across that the toxins he has are so malevolent that even demons are not immune.

Another departure from the studio model is the purpose liquid in the tank and dripping from the hose. While green makes sense, I wanted something that stood out more. I was going to add bubbles to the glass as well, but I was so happy with the way the liquid turned out that I didn't want to risk ruining it!

I also started the first of the models from the Dark Imperium set as well. Nothing too different here, although I wanted to paint the smoke in green brown, largely done with layers of Athonian Camoshade and the Nuln Oil.