Death Guard WIP: Pandemic (updated Jan 21 - fully painted Obliterator unit)

[Svartmetall]

Cry 'Dogs!', and let slip the Havocs of...no wait, that's wrong...

After a very busy week where much of my spare time was eaten up by mortgage stuff and other things, I've managed to finish the lion's share of the GS work on the Havocs.

Here's a group shot:


And some detail shots, starting off with the Champion:


And his second-in-command:


And the rest of the squad:




Hopefully I'm starting to get the hang of integrating the Tube Tool cabling in with more traditional Nurgly flesh; the Champion and the second-in-command are the ones I'm happiest with right now. I'm trying to get the cabling to sit naturally with everything else and not look all Here Is The Tube Tool Part, if you know what I mean.

And now, thanks to the wonders of eBay, I finally have the particular heavy weapon I've been wanting for my Havoc Champion - a Legion of the Damned heavy bolter:

The things are like rocking-horse shit, but I finally managed to get my hands on a pair; I have a bunch of the standard old-school metal heavy bolters, but I love these ones with the skeleton on them. So once they're stripped - they're marinading in Dettol right now - I can start final assembly with the heavy weapons. I'm going to give the Champion a powerfist, and random close-combat weapons with maybe the occasional bolt pistol for the others. And the second LotD heavy bolter will be reserved for the second Havoc squad's Champion

Painting is slowly progressing on the Dreadnought, although I realised that it's a lot easier to paint a Dread with the arms off - I'd gotten so carried away with the idea of finally getting him finished that I went ahead and glued his arms on, when I should've waited. Cue some careful hacking and slashing to get them off again for painting purposes. Doh!


As always, all C&C is welcomed.

[[MaGiC]]

when are you going to start on sculpting heads

[SocietySoldier]

Once again you dress to impress good sir, I always love checking this thread. Do you plan on giving any of them the big rotund belly plates at all?

[Svartmetall]

And here's the first finished Havoc, one of the 'ablative armour' guys:



And from all angles:




He doesn't have a heavy bolter, but I figure all Havocs would have the modified backpack that allows them to pick up and use a heavy weapon should another squad member drop theirs (I very much had the 'Enemy At The Gates' thing of "...when the one with the gun gets killed, the one behind picks it up and shoots" in mind); getting the backpack cabling to sit just right with a clean joint involved making it and bending it to the right curvature, then letting it cure hard and cutting this so the faces of the cable section properly matched the angles of the backpack's side before gluing it on. He has the cabling for targeting optics attached to his upper skull curving down to just above the right eye, but hasn't fitted his scope over the right eye since he isn't currrently using a heavy weapon. I know, I know, I'm over-thinking things again...

Now I have him as a baseline for the unit as a whole, it should be relatively quick now to finish the whole lot; the only thing slowing me down now (apart from the fact that I seem to be immensely sleepy a lot of the time right now, no idea why) is working out the best way to pin the metal heavy bolters to the models' shoulders while keeping their right arms looking naturally posed.

[Civik]

Svart, you truly are the silly putty miracle worker. As for overthinking things, it lends character to the model and since you _actually_ get something done when you overthink it, I don't believe it hurts at all.

[Svartmetall]

Here's the first heavy-bolter-wielding guy:


I'm finally happy with the balance of the weapon on the right shoulder; this took several different goes with blu-tacking stuff together before I was satisfied, as it's quite tricky with these big chunky weapons to balance them visually with the figure as a whole, and also have enough physical room for the bolter itself next to the head. I particularly like the detail of him holding two heads, ready to be made into blight grenades, in his left hand.



And here's the next non-heavy-bolter guy:

[RGilbert26]

The green cables, are they just very well crafted green stuff or is it green stuff put over wire?

[Inquisitor Lok]

Looking awesome as always. I must say, the old style of heavy weapons (in particular the Heavy Bolter) look so much more menacing then the newer ones (That are held with both hands)

@RGilbert, And i believe he has a special tool which lets him make the cables out of GS. Svart talked about it a page or two back if i recall.

[Svartmetall]

And here's the finished Havoc squad:


Firstly, the final non-heavy-bolter guy:


...the next two standard heavy-bolter guys:



...and finally the Havoc Champion:



The augmetic detail on the top of his head:


It took me a while to decide how to do his backpack; I knew I wanted something more ornate than the normal ones the rest of the squad have, but it still had to work when asymmetric to allow for the heavy weapon. In the end I took one of the Possessed backpacks, cut off the right-hand vent and relocated one of the spikes to the middle of the backpack body; between that and the bones on his LoTD heavy weapon, hopefully it gives him some overall visual unity and style. I will be doing another squad of Havocs - but with missile launchers this time - and having these guys finished means I now have a visual reference point to keep the next squad unified with them. All C&C is welcomed, as always.


So...what next? In terms of new stuff, given that I have one in several army lists I'd like to try playing - and having had the box sat on my shelf for way too long - I think it's Vindicator time. And continuing in a vehicle-y vein, as part of Operation Finish The Bloody Thing I suspect Crabzilla the Defiler is next on the List.

[HoopyFrood]

Loving the blend of old school arms/guns and greenstuffed nurglieness there. The melee weapons on the metal arms are especially tasty, although I do spy some flash-lines (!). The Champion also really looks the part, with extra nurgly backpack and tubes out of his head.
A Vindicator har a lot of nurgly potential for a vehicle. It is basically one solid mass with a big fat gun, which makes for good stuff if you want to make it more organic looking. I always thought it was hard to make moving parts on a vehicle look organic, how do you make a turret that turns 360 degrees look like a (neck)-joint?.. If you are taking requests of any kind, I'd love to see a vidicator-slug =)

[Svartmetall]

This the Possessed I mentioned in the Angels Of Disease thread - I started him just before I moved into my house over two years ago, and he's just sort of sat there since then. I've always liked the idea of a Possessed who's reasonably normal(ish) on one side, and fully Daemonically mutated on the other; so now he'll combine Operation Finish The Bloody Thing and Operation Stop Painting Like A Tard. I've already finished his construction, adding the right arm and resculpting his back to fill in the gaps in the original Spawn torso:




The Tallarn Flesh basecoat was done back when I started him (no, I have no idea why I started painting him before I'd finished building him either) but what I've done in the last couple of nights is the armour pieces & weapon, paying particular attention to working at highlighting the metals. On the flesh the plan is to go from natural flesh on the right hand side to green on the tentacles, which should be a challenge to my painting abilities as they stand - but then that's the point.


Also, it being my birthday last weekend, I treated myself to a model I wasn't convinced by at first sight but which has seriously grown on me since - Mamon, Daemon Prince of Nurgle:


I have a few things I want to customise on him a bit, but I think he's going to be both a lot of fun to paint and a really cool HQ model.

[Svartmetall]

Well now...we have a shiny new Codex to play with. So without further ado, preamble or prevarication - here are the first 6th. Edition members of Pandemic.

First off, a WIP Helbrute that I really need to think up a name for (I like Pestilens Triumphans, but that's reserved for...well you'll find out in due course :P):


I need to bulk up the weapon a bit, otherwise it'll look too weedy next to the big CC arm; I'm thinking to use one of the ectoplasma cannon breeches from the Maulerfiend kit as a casing or surround for the 'Brute's multi-melta barrels since that matches the Helbrute's details well and is just about the right size. I replaced the CC arm's stubby fingernail-type things (you'll see where they went in a moment) with long talons, added a bunch of hanging flesh descending from just below the head, and re-distributed the horns around the head to give him a Nurgle-approved complement of 7.
Head detail:



Next up, an almost-done Plague Champion modelled with one of the new weapon combos possible in the new Codex - in this case, a plague knife and lightning claw:


I just need to finish off the GS work around the arm joints, then he'll be ready for painting. I love the look of the Mk.III Iron Armour, and I like his 'come get some!' pose too I have enough Iron Armour sat waiting to do a full squad, so he'll have some minions soon enough.


Since Obliterators are now in Finecast, it means reposing and generally buggering about with them is far easier than it would otherwise have been. I haven't in any way forgotten or abandoned the Minotaur-based Oblits from way back when, but seeing the (excellent) Hitech Miniatures Carcass Virus Cult models made me realise I wanted my Oblits to be more tech-y looking than they had been, so I seized the opportunity to mess about with some FC ones and this is the result:


Re-posing the legs alone makes a huge difference to these models; not only does it give them quite a bit more height, it also stops them looking like they've just shat their pants. I'm still steering well clear of the 'weapon porcupine' look you see so much with Obliterators, though; whenever any of my Oblits have more than one weapon barrel, it's always the same type of weapon to keep it looking consistent.
A few more angles:





The lascannon barrels work well enough to look Chaos-y, but are non-specific enough in this context to work for quite a few of the weapons Oblits can now use. I'm going to make one with an assault cannon in some form (playing with a scratchbuilt multi-barrelled weapon on another Oblit at the moment, but it's not quite there yet) since they can now form those, but have already converted up a melta-wielding one and another with more of these lascannon barrels - those two are currently primed black, though, so despite my best efforts with the camera earlier don't show much detail. I figure once I have two squads of 2 or 3 of these guys done, it'll give me enough of a solid visual reference point from which I can go back and re-work the Minotaur ones to match these guys' more tech-heavy look.


And, while a tad disappointing in the Codex (only 2 base attacks for a 55-point model that can only do melee attacks? Pff) I just had to have a go at some Mutilators, and here's the first of them:

...his mutated right foot/claw thing is where the Helbrute's fingernails went. Waste not, want not etc.

I'd known about Mutilators for some time, which had given me space to think through how I wanted mine to look. Like Obliterators, I didn't want to have them looking like they'd just randomly sprouted differing types of melee weapons from every orifice, rather that they'd concentrated on one type (as their rules suggest); this guy's going down the 'power axe' counts-as route.
More angles:




As always I've tried to blend in the GS work with the model's original details to the point where hopefully you won't be able to spot the joins once it's painted.


And, as always, all C&C is welcomed


_____

[Richter]

Holy balls. That looks ridiculously awesome.

[SocietySoldier]

Those obliterators are crazy, jaw dropping awesomeness

[RGilbert26]

Svartmetall, could you by any chance do a tutorial for us on how you use green stuff?

[[MaGiC]]

he has a tutorial.. as I recall it

I believe it's called nurgle 101, but click his name and find all the posts created by him

EDIT: http://forums.relicnews.com/showthre...-power-claw%29

[Svartmetall]

And here, at long last, is the first painted Obliterator:





And two shots of how he'll look at normal 'on the table' gaming angles:



I've kept the metals clean and non-rusty, because I can't see rust having time to form on something that's constantly extruding new shapes (reinforced by the fact that, in the new Codex, Obliterators have to use different weapons each turn). The armour and skin however match what I'm doing on the Plague Marines themselves; I think I'm finally starting to nail the 'spoiled meat' look I've been aiming for on the flesh.

Unless anyone can see anything glaringly wrong with these, I'm going to forge ahead and paint the rest of the Obliterators and the currently-lone Mutilator to match this guy

As always, C&C welcomed.


_____

[Svartmetall]

And here's Mason the Mutilator (+1 internet for anyone who gets that reference without Googling it) all blended up, just waiting for the final weathering pass:



And next to the first fully painted Obliterator, to show that hopefully I'm able to keep this paint scheme reasonably consistent:


blah blah C&C blah blah...

[Svartmetall]

And here at last is the whole unit, done and dusted; there was a slight delay last night when I dropped this last Obliterator like a spaz, and had to re-attach one of the exhaust pipes on his left shoulder and re-GS and paint it...but here he is:





The whole unit of three Obliterators and a Mutilator:


Other Obliterators and and least another two Mutilators will follow in due course, but this means that now for the first time I actually have a fully-painted heavy support unit (and if the Mutie can counts-as for a Obliterator, two) I'm sufficiently happy with the colour scheme that this will now be the template for anything else that follows (I'm going to re-touch the three Rhinos I currently have assembled so they match).

C&C welcomed as always.


_____

[Exetus]

The modelling is amazing, but they seem a bit too shiny for rot and decay... maybe some rust?

[Svartmetall]

Since Oblits are constantly extruding new pieces (more so since this silly rule in the new codex where they can't use the same weapon in consecutive turns, grrr) I can't square my head around making them nurgly and rusted, rotted, decrepit and decayed; you'll notice they're not actually modelled in a particularly Nurgly way, they'll mainly be sharing an armour colour with the rest of the army.

[Pocktio]

I think it puts across dryness well, like dried out leathery dead organic matter. Works well for Nurgle, it's not all pus and boils!

My oblits now make me sad, as I didn't attempt any sort of kitbashing

[Cuddles]

You greenstuff skills are immense Svartmetall.

A simply wash of nuln oil might make the metal areas less shiny and give them a little more depth. Looking amazing as always though