Lord Octavius Kal-Mazog & His Retinue

Here is Lord Octavius Kal-Mazog, in all of his fully-painted splendour (or what-have-you).

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And so, the odyssey begins (or "began", should I say, as I am writing these parts of the blog in retrospect). These models were the first Death Guard models that I attempted, and I felt the need to lay some ground rules at this point.

Obviously, the colour scheme of my warriors would be established here, but so would my tone. The Death Guard models, whilst lovely and quite literally oozing with character, also hover quite close to the infamous Goof Rubicon. A small amount of exaggeration and heroism in a model is cool and characterful, but too much turns them into caricatures and figures of fun. A number of the Nurgle Daemon models (I'm looking at you, Sloppity Bilepiper and Horticulus Slimux) are particularly guilty of this, and whilst they have their own charm, of a sort, it was something I was hoping to avoid with this army (at least in general).

Exhibit A in the case for the prosecution was Lord Felthius - the named character who comes with the Easy To Build Blightlord Terminator box. He's a Lord of Contagion (I guess?), but the head that the model comes with is pure Goof Incarnate, and I wanted shot of it, quick-sharp.

And so, I opted to use one of the Chaos Space Marine Terminator heads, which I thought looked to have a suitable amount of gravitas. Of course, his serious expression is somewhat undermined by the gloop attached to both his scythe and the weird plague censer-style thing he is holding aloft... But we can't have everything, hey?

I followed the same approach with one of the Blightlord Terminators. It was tricky, because the heads that came with the box are designed for specific use with those bodies, but a little trimming and gouging helped me to sort them out.

The other important element that needed sorting out with this unit was my colour scheme. Death Guard Green was the specific paint that GW came up with to use with these chaps (which I think is just an updated version of the old Death World Forest paint), but I wanted something a bit brighter.

My Sons of Gorgax Chaos Space Marines army were supposed to (at least in narrative terms) be the fore-runners to these chaps, and so I made a decision to essentially use the same colour scheme - albeit one that was perhaps made a bit brighter. I used Vallejo's Heavy Khaki, which is a light green colour - a bit more vibrant than an olive tone - alongside their Rust paint from the Model Air range. These were the two key colours I used for the Sons of Gorgax, and I thought some continuity would be nice.

With that previous army, though, I basecoated in the Heavy Khaki, did the trim, used a Xereus Purple spot colour for any pteruges or other fabrics, and then applied an overall wash to the model to dirty it up. With these guys though, I did the same basecoating process, but used Screamer Pink, rather than a purple colour. It's one of my favourite GW paints, and I thought it would offer a nice contrast to the green. I then applied a liberal, all-over wash of Agrax Earthshade before then building the colour back up in layers. Y'know - the way you're actually recommended to!

I used Ogryn Camo as a highlight on the green armour, whilst I used a 2:1 mix of Rust and Vallejo Steel to highlight the metallics. The Screamer Pink was highlighted with a mixture of Pink Horror and varying mixes of the two, along with some added Ushabti Bone.

For the fleshy areas, I used Rakarth Flesh, highlighted with Pallid Wych Flesh where necessary. The boils were painted using Ungor Flesh, laid over with a glaze of Bloodletter, topped with subsequent thinned-down bits of Ungor Flesh and a variety of yellows.

I had to decide upon what to do for my bases, too. I wanted something that would be easy enough to replicate across my whole army, so I didn't want to do loads and loads of scenic additions. In the end, I opted for sand bases, painted in Vallejo Medium Grey, washed in Agrax Earthshade and then simply drybrushed with Vallejo Light Brown. The plan was to maybe use some cork to create scenic bases for the characters, but this chap was big enough already - plus there were some moulded rocks built into his sculpt, so...

Anyhow, here are the rest of the Blightlord Terminators from this batch - Felthius' Cohort, as they are technically known. They were fun to paint - so much so that I ended up with something of a Death Guard problem...