Good morning/afternoon/evening everyone!
If you read last week's post you'll have seen my review of the new Death Guard codex and an army list of my very own Death Guard army.
Today I'm going to talk about my first proper army since...oooh, probably before some of you reading this were born...
When the new Death Guard were originally released in 2017, with the launch of the Warhammer 40,000 8th Edition, I was quite taken with the miniatures. Particularly, as a painter, I was extremely impressed with the work the 'eavy Metal team had done on the miniatures, managing to make them look suitably dirty and manky, yet maintaining the clean, bright house painting style*.
Having got my hands on the Dark Imperium boxed set I planned to paint up both factions (the Death Guard and Primaris Astartes) into small skirmish forces. The advent of the Conquest partwork made me decide to expand that into two full armies.
Of course, that never happened.
Both factions languished in boxes, doomed to gather dust with the rest of the Pile Of Shame. That is, until my friend Ollie announced that he'd like to start collecting a 40k army (Astra Militarum, to be exact) in order to start playing some games. I decided to dust off the Death Guard and do something with them at last. Why not the Primaris?
Four reasons:
1. I'd just finished painting rather a lot of Adeptus Astartes on commission, and was somewhat burned out on them.
2. My friend Jack was planning to do an Imperial Fists force, and I didn't see the point in having two Astartes forces in our little gaming group.
3. I wanted an army that would be fairly quick to paint and one thing that my experience has taught me is that it can be very difficult and frustrating to paint Astartes quickly to a standard that I would be happy with.
4. The Death Guard playstyle of basically just plodding forward and rolling over the enemy, while soaking up any incoming fire, sounded about right for my level of tactical sophistication.
So, with the Death Guard chosen as my army, the next thing would be to decide how to paint them. As I mentioned, I wanted to be able to burn through them pretty quickly. I know what I'm like for flitting between projects and I knew that, if I wanted to get this one done, I would need to make it easy and quick to do. However, they have to look good enough to appease my delicate artistic sensibilities, so I needed a scheme that would strike a balance between speed, ease of painting and looking good on the tabletop. I knew I wanted to go for a version of the Death Guard's Heresy-era scheme of grey armour and green pauldrons and so I began experimenting on a few of the spare miniatures from Conquest, that I wouldn't be using in my force.
The Death Guard miniatures are very detailed, with all their mutations, gribbly bits and whatnot, some of them are very busy miniatures, and that can look a bit overwhelming, especially before painting, when the whole model is the same shade of grey all over. I've seen some excellent conversions, where people have cut back a lot (if not all) the bone protrusions and tentacles and they look really good but it did look like a lot of work and, as I said before, I didn't want this project to drag on, so I decided to go ahead with them as they were. In the end, I'm glad I stuck to my guns as, once I started putting some paint on, what had initially seemed an overwhelming level of detail really started to come together and I was reminded why I liked them in the first place.
On to the painting...
As I said, I wanted to get them done quickly. I didn't want to get bogged down in yet another unfinished project. I was determined to get this army fully painted and tabletop ready. I usually go for a clean, 'eavy Metal style but that sort of style does not lend itself to getting done quickly. I wasn't looking to spending 10+ hours on each miniature here! Luckily, the Death Guard lend themselves well to a rough and loose paint style but it's a bit of a step into the unknown for me so I've been looked at a lot of the grimdark-style painting for inspiration. I can highly recommend 28 Magazine if you want to see some incredible work in this grim and gritty style. I'm not trying to match the artistry presented there, by any means, but it certainly is a great source for ideas and, after a bit of experimenting, I had a method that I thought would do the job, giving me miniatures that would satisfy me by looking good on the tabletop but be quick and easy to do.
The miniatures were given a spray undercoat of grey primer. I use this one because, well, it works and it's cheap. After that, all the armour areas were stippled with a couple of coats of Grey Seer. Now, I could have gone with a zenithal overspray of the Grey Seer spray, and it would have worked quite well, as well as being really quick, but I wanted the texture that stippling would give. As for technique, you want to use a good-but-past-it's-best brush. I used an old Series 7 size 1 that won't form a point any more. Taking the paint straight from the pot and loading the brush well, wipe most of the paint off on a tissue and use a stabbing motion to build up the colour. Don't worry that it looks so messy, that's kind of the idea. I did a couple of passes of this, building the layers randomly.
The next step was to basecoat all the other areas with the appropriate colours. The shoulder pauldrons were stippled with Death Guard Green, the flesh areas were painted with Rakarth Flesh and the zits, slimy and gribbly bits were painted with Ironrach Skin. The rubber undersuit areas and pipes were painted with Skavenblight Dinge, the boney protrusions with Morghast Bone, and the gun cases with Corvus Black. The wood was done with XV-88, leather with Mournfang Brown and the Cloaks with Gal Vorbak Red. Finally, the metal areas were done with Iron Hands Steel and the Bronze areas with Runelord Brass. Again, I've not bothered to be perfectly neat and tidy here. The focus has been on getting them done quickly, rather than going for any showcase quality.
Once all that is done, the next stage is to do an overall wash to shade all the colours and to tie the composition together. In the grimdark style, this is often done with oil or enamel paints but I wanted to see if I could get the effect I wanted with acrylics. I made up a mix of Athonian Camoshade/Nuln Oil/Agrax Earthshade in a 2/1/1 ratio and washed this over the entire miniature and you know what? I was actually well pleased with the result.
Once the overall wash was dry I applied extra washes to some of the other areas, to introduce some variety into the colours. The tentacles are given a wash of Drucchi Violet/Carroburg Crimson mix, sores and boils get a mix of Drucchi Violet and Bloodletter. while these mixes are still wet on my pallette, I mixed a little Blood for the Blood God in with them and started applying them randomly, wet-in-wet over all the skin areas, adding touches of water to let it flow a bit better where necessary. Finally, some Nurgle's Rot was added into the mixes and this was applied as a glaze over all organic areas, leaving them with a lovely, grotty sheen...
The final stage is to stipple the armour with Grey Seer again. This stage is probably unnecessary but it really does finish them off nicely, giving the armour the look of having been painted and repainted over and over. You'll notice some stuff on the base in this photo too. This is Extra Course Pumice Gel from Golden Artists Colour. It's a transparent medium that has these hard crystals in it. The plan is to use them as a base for a sort of mud effect. I dunno if it's going to work yet, and it's going to take some experimenting with I think, but I've got plenty more miniatures to paint yet, before I need to do the bases.
So, there we go. I'm happy with the way they look as a unit and they only took me two hours each. Result! At this rate I'm actually going to have a functional, fully-painted army by the time I can play some games against my friends!
Thanks for reading!
-Stu
*I actually asked Max Faleij about it at Warhammer Fest the year they were released. What a nice chap.
