A break from the green

I've made a bit of progress with my Ork Armoured Brigade recently, so a few weeks ago I decided to take a break from painting all that green. Unfortunately I figured it would be good to add a few more gribbly Nurgle types to my Chaos Warrior Winter Warband, and, what with these guys being dedicated to all things rotten, they, of course, tend to be painted in various verdant, putrid or bilious shades of green.

Luckily, however, that's not at all what I had in mind.

I wanted them to fit in with my other Slaves to Darkness warriors – worshippers of my homegrown deity, Gshtaad, (a kind of mash-up between Khorne, the Blood God and the aforementioned Nurgle, Lord of Decay). These guys tend to be clad in rough leather and dark, badly-maintained armour, with pallid skin, on crisp, snowy bases.

To achieve the look I was after, I made some minor adjustments to the Putrid Blightkings' suggested build. Instead of following the instructions in the box, I used as much armour and as many helmets as I could, opted to keep overtly Nurglish symbols to a minimum, and to only have a few mutations on show. As a result there was a little green stuff work involved to blend together disparate components, or remove the odd mutation*, but not enough deviation from the box versions to warrant me recording it. Therefore there is no "Behold raw Chaos in all its glory!" photo today.

But here are some (admittedly slightly out-of-focus) close-ups of the finished characters.**

*To be fair, most Chaos mutations look pretty odd.

**The Lord of Plagues, in the middle of the third image, was painted a while ago and has only been included here for completeness. This is actually the third time he has appeared on this blog. Only fitting for such a great sculpt.

Deff metal clanker

"Ere, where's dat runty Ork, Kikbag? It's time for his krumpin'. Stop him gettin' all uppity."

"Boss, what's dat noise?"

"He's not just snide and mean, dere's bad stuff too. He's like a humie, that one. Always whingeing and whining. Reckons he deserves more 'n his lot, don't he?"

Stomp... stomp...

"Er, boss."

"Shaddup. Fortunately I'm here wiv his daily dose of clobber, to keep him on da straight and narrow. I'm all heart, me. So where is da weedy little disgrace for a git?"

Stomp... stomp...

"Always 'anging around with dat crazy old doc and dat one-eyed mechboy. I oughtta put a stop to dem three."

"Boss!"

click... whirrr... WHIRRR... SLICE... SPLASH

Everybody loves a ramshackle, post-apocalyptic, bipedal war mech, right? Everybody except that Ork Warboss. And maybe people who play Eldar. In fact perhaps not everyone loves this kind of thing at all. Maybe it's only me? But it's lucky for Kikbag that I do, as this little buzzsaw wielding can of whup-ass was a proper labour of love, taking me years to complete.

It was originally inspired by (and the chassis based on) the Werewolf Walker model in the ill-fated Airfix Robogear starter set from decades ago. Although the Werewolf was pretty far from being a masterpiece, the introductory boxset was an absolute gift to sci-fi modellers. I talked a bit about it back here, but basically the Robogear starter set was full of not-particularly-good models that were constructed from some really cool parts (like jet engines, robot legs, cockpits, tank tracks etc.) so it was fantastic fodder for people who liked chopping fings up and putting 'em back together diff-rent.

The starter set contained a bunch of models, most of which were also available separately.

Some of the separate Robogear kits were actually quite good. This was not one of them.

In the end I kept only a few aspects of the original model, changing most of its shape and details, then adding a load of spare parts from the official Deff Dread and Killa Kan models, and popping a visible Ork pilot inside.

The Ork pilot idea actually came from a really old Warhammer 40,000 comic book series. In Dan Abnett's Titan God-Machine there is a brief moment when an Imperial base gets attacked by a greenskin horde and we get a page (below right), drawn by Anthony Williams and inked by Andy Lanning, that shows us some unusual designs for Ork walkers. It inspired me to try to ensure that none of my Ork vehicles ever looked too similar to one another.

This one is the second completed member of what will be a larger Dread Mob (you can see the first one, the Mega Dread, here), so I decided I could go all out with the spinning, whirring, choppy close-combat theme and give it the full complement of four rotary saw blade arms.

I'm happy with how the model turned out, and excited to see how it looks alongside the rest of the unit I've got planned. But I'm less happy with my current camera. I bought the wrong phone that didn't have the macro function, and my pics have been blurry and vague ever since. If I'm able to get a better upgrade, I'll post some new pictures in the future. In the meantime, for the sake of completeness, here are couple of the now-mandatory 'nude' shots.

Cooking with gas

It's been a while since my previous post, but, for once, that's not for lack of effort. I've been furiously working away in the background, trying to get through some of the (many) remaining units for my Ork Armoured Brigade. 

I finished these little walking Zippos this week, a unit of ten Burna Boys. They're made up of a cross section of models from some of the various releases since the revamp of the Ork range for 3rd edition WH40K, circa 20 years ago.

There was a tiny amount of conversion work to get them to feel like a cohesive unit, and not a bunch of disparate re-designs – but that was mainly focussed on trimming down some of the excess bulk from the troops in the Loota/Burna Boys boxset. Other than that it was only really a few head swaps to narrow down their design to a mix of face masks, goggles and bandanas.

So now these guys are done and ready to join their rowdy green comrades in my ever-growing Ork horde, while I move on to the next handful of boisterous, muscular, humanoid fungi.

Turn up the heat!