Painted Blightlord Terminators

This is a squad of Blightlord Terminators for my Death Guard army in Warhammer 40,000. Like all of the Death Guard their forte is being hard to kill, and even ‘normal’ Terminators are hard to kill too so you can imagine that shifting a block of Blightlords is quite a trick. Thanks to a very recent rules change they also now have the Objective Secured ability which really helps them as they want to just sit on an objective and not die while scoring lots of points. This squad is equipped with a Blight Launcher on one of them which slightly improves their ranged output but I’ve found it fairly anaemic anyway against anything with even a modicum of armour. For melee I’ve equipped one with a Flail of Corruption, partly because it increases their melee damage but mainly because it just looks really cool. The rest are mostly armed with Bubotic Axes except one who has a Balesword; it’s not completely cut-and-dried whether one is a better option than the other but most importantly there are only three axes in the box.

The Blightlords got the same general colour scheme as the rest of my Death Guard, a rather Khornate dark red and brass scheme on their armour. Painting them was an absolute joy as each one is a unique champion of their unholy masters. I could have spent from now until forever picking out more and more details but at some point I had to call them finished and I’m really happy with the final results.

I figured that each is worthy of a photo alone and even now I couldn’t say which is my favourite.

Next on the painting table: Sabretooth.

Painted Myphitic Blight Hauler

Here is the second my Myphitic Blight Haulers for Death Guard in Warhammer 40,000. I’ve generally tended to run them as a pair so it’s nice to have some colours on this one, though I don’t have a lot more to say about using them on the tabletop than I did last time.

I’ve kept the painting of this Blight Hauler largely the same as the other one in that the armour is red and bronze, and the horrible fleshy bits are green. I’ve tried to switch up where I used certain colours in order to avoid having both Blight Haulers come out looking identical so for example the badge of Nurgle embossed on the front of the carapace is different. But fundamentally the painting experience was the same and I did find it quite enjoyable. I only have six more Death Guard minis in the Pile of Shame right now so hopefully I can ‘complete’ this project fairly soon.

When I first bought the Blight Haulers, for some reason I was expecting them to be much bigger than they actually are. I find these little Daemon Engines rather cute as the zoom around the table zapping fools with their various guns before trying to eat them in melee.

Next on the painting table: Doctor Voodoo.

Painted Plague Marines

This is a squad of Plague Marines for my Death Guard army in Warhammer 40,000. The Plague Marines can be equipped in a truly bewildering number of different ways with various squad members able to swap out their bolters for all sorts of other toys. I tend to be more of a believer in having more bodies on the table in 40K so I generally just field the squad at minimum size (which is five strong) and with no special equipment; they’re generally used to sit on an objective and die slow enough to score me some VPs while the rest of my army does the flashy stuff. It would be more fitting to field them in squads of seven since that is Nurgle’s sacred number in the lore, but in fact it’s just a coincidence that I own seven of them.

I thought that painting the Plague Marines would be quite a long and tedious process as each miniature is quite busy with little details such as tentacles escaping their armour, badges hanging off their weapons and sigils on their pauldrons. But actually the opposite was the case – I really enjoyed picking out all the different characterful parts of each miniature and making them individuals in a team. I kept the colour matching the rest of my Death Guard, with mainly dark red, black and bronze for each and then brightened each one up with some light green where it worked well. These sculpts are all single pose (I assume that they’re from some old box set as I got them second hand) and I didn’t convert any of them. However, I think that at least for some of these it wouldn’t be too hard to do a few weapons swaps or similar if I got another set at some point.

Next on the painting table: Bullseye.

Painted Myphitic Blight Hauler

This is a Myphitic Blight Hauler for my Death Guard army in Warhammer 40,000. Like the Foetid Blight Drone, it’s meant to be a sort of tank that has been taken over by a monster which gives the whole thing a very creepy look – from the front a tank with teeth, from the rear more like a snail trying to get into a shell that is too small for it. I really enjoy Blight Haulers in the game; they bring useful anti-armour guns in the form of a multi-melta on one side and a missile launcher on the other. If anyone gets too close they can be more trouble than they’re worth in close combat as the teeth give them some bite (pun intended) against all but dedicated melee specialists.

I tried to keep the same kind of overall colours here as I did for the Bloat Drone. The armour is a deep red and I like the way it contrasts with the bright green of the squishy daemon inside. The Blight Hauler has the same issue for painting that I had on the Bloat Drone in that I wasn’t sure how best to do all the pipes and tubs hanging off it. I eventually went for a bright pink as it stands out adequately from the red armour without going too far away from the main red colouring; I consciously want to avoid using much blue on this project as I worry that they’ll start to look more like a circus and anyway I find that I get better results if I keep the amount of one primary colour to a minimum. The Blight Hauler was overall rather fun to paint, not least because it let me play with both organic and metallic surfaces.

Next on the painting table: Omega Red.

Painted Foetid Blight Drone

This is a Foetid Blight Drone, part of my Death Guard army for Warhammer 40K. Perhaps appropriately for an army of diseased stubborn trench-fighters, the Death Guard are not blessed with an abundance of mobile elements and the Blight Drone fills that role quite nicely. In the lore it’s sort of a cross between an attack helicopter and a demon which is why it looks like a vehicle from the front and slug from the back. This particular miniature is armed with double Plaguespitters which are short-ranged autohitting horde-clearing guns. In play I’ve preferred to use the Fleshmower (yes, it does exactly what it sounds like) to make my Plague Drone a serious melee threat; the idea is to jam it down the other side’s throat as soon as possible in order to neuter their (probable) advantage in mobility while I slog the rest of my army across the board.

Painting the Foetid Blight Drone was a lot of fun; it’s quite like painting two separate miniatures. On the front there is the armour plating which I really enjoyed used red and bronze to bring out. Meanwhile the back is the demon / slug / blob thing which takes a very different texture to the mechanical parts. The Daemon-Engines for the various Chaos factions in 40K are always a lot of fun and I’ve enjoyed the way that the horror of this magical hybrid is brought to life as a miniature.

Next on the painting table: Cyclops.

Painted Malignant Plaguecaster

Here is a Malignant Plaguecaster, another Death Guard mini from Warhammer 40,000. Unlike the Lord of Contagion who, I suppose, is this guy’s boss, the Plaguecaster is a psyker (i.e. a space wizard) who specialises in making his own side harder to kill while doling out occasional wounds to his enemies.

Also unlike the Lord of Contagion, I actively disliked painting the Plaguecaster. The mini is really busy but somehow not in a way that comes together nicely; rather it just feel like a lot of needless bling cluttering up the sculpt. In addition, the pose just looks really unnatural, although I will admit that I don’t really know what a 10,000-year-old space wizard would look like when he’s walking around. Finally, and this one is definitely on me, I tried to use the same paint scheme as the Lord of Contagion and while this mostly worked, it had one unfortunate side effect. Trying to keep the ‘magical green fire’ look on the Plaguecaster makes it look like he’s a balloon artist trying to inflate a giant piece of broccoli. Still, I’m glad that he’s done and I did learn a few things about colour choices which will hopefully help me in the future.

Next on the painting table: Wong.

Painted Lord of Contagion

This is a Lord of Contagion, part of the Death Guard for Warhammer 40,000. He’s a leader with a melee focus, and therefore I suppose will spend his time just slightly behind something big and scary ready to counter-charge.

I don’t have any specific plans to actually play a Death Guard army any time soon but I wanted to test myself by painting one of the big minis in this range and decided that a few test / practice miniatures would be useful. The crimson and bronze colours I’ve picked are thematically linked with another group in the lore (specifically, followers of Khorne and the World Eater chapter of Chaos Space Marines) but I felt that they would fit in well with this miniature. And even if he’s a follower of Nurgle, that huge chain-axe the Lord is wielding will still spill plenty of blood. The mini is really busy and I found that he didn’t really come together until the end as there are just so many little bits of detail from the Nurglings underfoot (tactical Nurglings!) to the smoking tripartite trophy rack atop his armour. To contrast with the crimson armour I went with what I hoped would be a noxious and mystical looking green flame effect on the stuff coming off the censers and trophies; I’m a bit torn on whether this actually looks good in itself but it does at least stand out nicely.

Next on the painting table: Corvus Glaive.