Blightshroud Terminators

The first thing that hits you is the smell of corruption. In seconds it's a stench of rotting meat and waste, death and disease and putrefaction. Tears fill your eyes as the miasma flows into the room and in seconds the tears are mixed with blood. 

Blood also flows from your nose as your olfactory organs fail in the face of a stink that's almost physical in its force. Your body spasms as you struggle to hold your breath, but then your gorge rises and you vomit over the floor. You become aware of screams in the corridor outside. Through blood-tinged tears you see a pair of glowing green eye lenses which seem impossibly too far from the ground. They belong to a hulking figure encased in armour covered in millennia of filth and grime. 

"What are you?" you manage to gasp through blood-crusted lips.

The creature emits a wet gurgle that you realise with horror is a chuckle. The last thing you see is a glint of light reflecting off a raised rusty scythe...

The time between me spotting these on Etsy and hitting the "buy" button was about 0.2 nanoseconds. I've always loved the Mk.1 Saturnine Terminator armour and I had a few of the metal models back in the day. I have found a few on Ebay but the cheapest one I've come across was priced at $60, so getting these three resin versions for $30 seemed a much better option. The fact they're modeled as Death Guard is just a bonus.

These guys are more regular XIV Legion than Plague Marines, and have just started their long journey to Nurgle's Garden. So I went with their original livery of white and dark green instead of just painting them the usual plague colours.

I primed all three of these chaps with grey spray, and that turned out to be a mistake. I kicked off the actual painting with their shoulder pads and cloth, using Castellan Green for the basecoat and about a ton of Nuln Oil and Agrax Earthshade to shade it and make it dirty. Some thinned Loren Forest was used for the highlights and then I did the metal areas with Iron Warriors and another dollop of washes.

The reason that grey primer was a mistake was that I had to paint about 15 layers of Ivory over it to get the basic armour colour. If I'd used white spray I could have saved a ton of painting time, but at least I know this for the future. 

The scythe handles are painted Burnt Umber and Mahogany Brown, and their wrappings are Khaki highlighted with Tallarn Sand. The weapons got a good slathering with Agrax Earthshade and Nuln Oil, and the pipes leading from their wrist weapons are Kabalite and Moot greens.

Moot Green is a wonderfully vibrant shade, so I also used it on their helmet lenses.

And now for the filth. Using a small piece of sponge, I daubed Dry Rust all over their armour and weapons to make them look aged. Once that dried, I mixed up my own wash of Athonian Camoshade, Agrax Earthshade and Casandora Yellow, thinned it with some Lahmian Medium, and set about plastering it all over the models. I think I used a bit too much yellow, as I ended up with a colour best described as "the day after having two onion bhajis, a vindaloo and six pints of lager". But the shade grew on me and the yellow tinge just adds another level of discolouration.

I used pure Agrax Earthshade to touch up some areas and add more depth to the shadows, and then added some lighter highlights to the shoulder pads with more Loren Forest. Two of the Blightshroud have boils on their shoulders, which I painted Wazdakka Red and Pink Horror with a spot of Ionrach Skin for the pus. 

They're on 40mm bases. I put a couple of small lumps of Crayola putty on each base and then slapped on Stirland Battlemire and some Stirland Mud to get a nice mucky texture. The small mushrooms are, you guessed it, from Etsy. They were painted with Ionrach Skin, and then the heads were washed with Biel-Tan Green and the stalks with thinned with Seraphim Sepia. I glued them to the bases and then filled any little gaps with more Battlemire.

Barrels of fun

I picked up these hexagonal barrels at the same time I got the Blightshrouds. They were stupidly cheap, costing only $10 including shipping, and the store owner chucked in a couple of free ones. I glued them together into groups and then painted them different colours. I think they'll look good in my Space Station Zero games.

Fembruary

I'm hoping to get at least one more entry done for this year's Fembruary challenge. Once again work has shat on my dreams, and it looks like I'll get nowhere near the number of figures done that I'd planned to paint. Stay tuned!