Firstly, I need to apologise to 160+ Blood Bowl enthusiasts, many of whom had flown in from overseas to attend the NAF, and ended up spending the weekend with the “toxic miasma” of my Infestation Nation team.
It all started with Blanchitsu in White Dwarf, which included John Blanche’s numerous conversions of the GW Nurgle Lord. They were utterly horrific, what really made them was the painting style he used – which is probably best described as “organised mess”. It’s totally different to how most people paint most things, with neat edge highlighting etc. I don’t really like the ‘Eavy Metal style of painting for Nurgle, it’s just inappropriate to be that neat, and doesn’t look right. How Blanche paints is a bit like abstract art or cubism – it’s the distortions in form and imperfections that give it the weird vibe, and make them seem so real. There’s a phrase I found on an article that encapsulates this nicely, it’s “painting outside the line”. Normally if you go over the line it looks wrong, but if done right it can look really cool and much more real. I decided my project this year would be to try to copy him, and learn as much as I could about this new way of thinking about painting.
Which Models?
Obviously the Nurgle Lord for the 4 warriors. Blanche also used conversions of Plaguebearers for his “doddermen” and I decided to use similar figures, they looked terrific. I soon found the Beast – it was a model from Cthulu of “The Son of Yog-Sothoth” by Tengu. A big blob with tentacles, no face or limbs. It was exactly what I imagined a Beast of Nurlge to look like.
Converting
To make the figures look like fantasy football players, you need to add some football kit. 40k pre-heresey shoulder pads, with 80s style studs in them, did the trick for the warriors, whilst for the rest of the team it was a WH Fantasy Saurus shoulder pad. The rotters had straps sculpted on, but because they are basically unclothed, there was nowhere for the other end of the strap to attach to. This was a huge problem, until I thought of just putting the straps through “flesh-rings” – metal hoops that go through flesh, just like a nose ring. Some greenstuff and a few tiny jump-rings did the trick. For the heads, I wanted them to be really repulsive, so I tried to make them look like diseased humans rather than monsters, just like Blanche’s doddermen. I used the “rotten” heads sprue from Neomics for the Rotters and the Warriors. Making the 4 Warriors look different was fun, it was a combination of repositioning their arms, and chopping some arms at the elbow, and replacing the lower arm with a WH Chaos marauder lower arm. Their guts were also extensively resculpted to look different, and the marauder arms were resculpted as well. You start by making a hole in the flesh with a modelling knife, and scooping out some plastic. Then you put greenstuff around the edge, and make a mini-volcano where the skin is inflamed. If you want, you can roll a tiny ball of greenstuff and place that into the hole, to make it look like there’s a pustule bursting out. There’s lots you can do here.
Painting the Models
This is where you’ve really got to play. It’s just like cooking – where you don’t measure anything out or make a note of what you did. It’s hard to put a system to this:
1. White undercoat
2. Get a sponge, wipe the paint off, as if you were drybrushing, then use the sponge to make red, then green, then blue splodges over the undercoat. You’ll get some cool shapes.
3. Mix up a very thin glaze of pallid yellow flesh colour depending what skin tone you want. I went for a 1:1 mix of pale yellow and bone, with a splodge of flesh colour to make it a bit more pinky. This has a ratio of about 8:1 water:paint.
4. Glaze over the whole model. Don’t worry about the glaze running into the recesses like a wash, you can sort that out later. After a few coats you’ll see lifelike-looking skin appearing.
5. Dark brown wash into the recesses, followed by a thin wash over the entire model. You should be able to see everything much more clearly.
6. Get a mixture of scorched brown and chaos black, and use that as a wash to make some areas super dark. Only paint into the ridges. This gives them the contrasts that 28mm figures really need.
7. Get purple and green wash, and put a few random splodges of discolouration. Living things are a myriad of subtly different colours, and you need these to make the skin seem real. Whilst an individual splodge of green might look weird if you’re looking at it, the overall effect, when looking at the model and team as a whole, is much more lifelike.
8. Get Ogryn Flesh, and put it into the recesses and darker areas – such as the “underneath” of everything, as if light was coming from above. You gotta be quick in this bit – whilst the wash is still wet, you need to rinse your brush, pat it dry, take a small amount of water, and run it over the edge of the wash, to get rid of the line the edge makes. This will give you a smooth transition from light to dark. Most of the time when you use washes you need to dissolve the edge away like this.
9. Highlight the raised areas by making the same glaze as before, but adding a lot of white. Here’s where using a palette is fun – add some white, put the glaze on the raised area, add more white and glaze other areas. Experiment.
10. Griffon Sepia is an excellent colour for flesh – you now can add this just like Ogryn Flesh, but over larger areas, and where the skin looks too pale and unrealistic. Remember to use water to blend the edge.
11. This is where it started getting messy. Paint the pustules yellow, then put orange in (less gloopy than a wash) over then, then finally put a dark (black or brown) wash over some. It works better with some in black and some in brown, to make it different and lifelike.
12. Get some dark browny colours, and paint a line of dribbling pus down from some wounds.
13. Get an old brush, chop the bristles flat along the top. Stipple Dark Flesh in some areas, normally around recesses. You can also stipple an ink, and many other colours. Use your imagination. It’s Nurgle. Paint outside the line.
14. Get Crimson ink, and put that on any areas that seem to be bleeding / inflamed.
15. Get all your washes and inks, open all the caps, put them in a line and go to town. Use your imagination. It’s Nurgle. Paint outside the line.
16. This piece will probably look a bit dull after this, so mix a light flesh highlight to pick out some raised areas to contrast.
Painting the Base
This was 4mm plywood with holes drilled in. I used cheap large tubes of acrylic paint, but you could also use poster paint if you have some. What I did was:
• Undercoat white. The best thing to do is paint thickly and let it dry, to cover the wood grain.
• Get PVA glue, and apply it liberally over the white base.
• Mix up all the browns, reds and oranges you want on your palette.
• Get a mega-brush (not one you’d use to paint figures, but a large 2cm wide one), and splodge the colours onto the base. The PVA glue makes them slowly ooze into each other, and creates nice patterns. The base should be very gloopy.
• Mix up some thin brown+black mixture, and paint thin filaments of this colour into the base, whilst still wet. The PVA-paint gloop will drink that in, and it’ll create some nice marbly effects over a few minutes. It’ll ooze like a creature – so what you see after applying the paint isn’t what you’d get 15min later.
• The rest of the base can be finished with sand/grass, in order to make it look plausible.
The Smell
I had 4mm plywood with holes in for the models. I had a nice piece of ash to put that on. When you place the ply on the ash, you’ll see the ash through the holes in the ply. When you put the models in them, the height of the GW bases is less than 4mm, so they look like they’ve sunk in. You need a way of lifting them up. Any coins will do – but what I used was a 1cm wide neodymium magnet glued into the middle of the hole. This was because I’d glued a 1p under all the bases to add weight, and 1ps are magnetic, and allow the models to stick to the magnet. However, this created cavity under each model, all around the 1cm wide magnet glued in a 25mm hole. It was in here that I put pure butyric acid, found in goat’s milk, parmesan cheese and the large intestine. It is also the main constituent of the smell of human vomit. It was an acid, so would have dissolved the paint, or maybe evaporated. These cavities were the perfect delivery mechanism. I wasn’t going to experiment at home with butyric acid (I just moved into a new house, and I have a wife that I have every intention of keeping); so in the car park just outside, I took the pipette, dunked it into the bottle, and squired a couple of drops around the magnets in the 25mm holes.
The Effect
Upon entering the hall, someone remarked there was a smell of vomit, like someone had been sick that night. As I’m sure that had actually happened given the tales of Friday night at the Orchard Hotel, that was not unexpected. However, the commotion was starting. Lycos’ face twisted. Geggster said “I wonder what’s that smell”. I lifted Infestation Nation towards them, and they realised it was the Nurgle team. That was the first strange look of the day. The smell really was quite something – not a “that’s cool, good idea for a Nurgle Team!” kind of smell, but genuine revulsion. Appropriate for a Nurgle team – I imagine an Orc Team would smell bad, but not so bad that 1/6 blocks you’d withdraw your fist, or that being within 3 squares means you can’t catch properly. During game 2 the Umpires came to give the team an official warning – if they were still smelly on Day 2, I’d have to use a different set of figures for the team, instead of Infestation Nation. Probably the first team in the history of the NAF to be threatened with expulsion from a tournament for being too smelly. They stayed for Day 2, when they didn’t smell as bad as I sprayed air freshener on them. In addition I sprayed some deodorant before each game, which I thought was wonderfully thematic – the Nurglies spraying themselves with Dove in the changing room before the game, so the oppos would be happy to play against them and wouldn’t refuse the fixture!
Thanks everyone for a great weekend, again I’m sorry.
And after all that, Sandwich (esteemed winner of the Stunty cup) still forgot they had Disturbing Presence! What more do us Nurgle Coaches have to do??
Stig