Plague toad chaos spawn finished

I finally finished these late last week.

I'm really feeling a bit unsure of the results, and I reckon if I was to get another set and start again, I'd probably do it all differently - but alas, hindsight is mankind's eternal curse.  Having said this, I am quite happy with how they've turned out overall. Particularly happy with my use of glazes, which I think have really smoothed out some of the colour transitions in the greens, and also hopefully caused some reasonably grim effects in the mouth areas...

Apologies if you think the colours came out strange due to the flash, but I really thought it was necessary. Without the flash they seemed to be coming out a bit flat looking to my eyes...

On the table top they have already gained a bit of notoriety...

Nurgle chaos spawn conversions (work in progress)

Recently I've been preparing an army list for the Corehammer 'Dark Throne' tournament that's coming up in a couple of weeks.

My army list features 2 units of spawn with the mark of Nurgle. The first of these units is represented by a set of three Plague Toads which I've been working on recently. The second unit is going to be based around the rat ogre models from the Island of Blood set.

Thus far I've managed to get a hold of two rat ogres for conversion purposes. Here is what happened when I had a go at combining them with some bits from the Talos Pain Engine and the Hellpit Abomination...

Plague Toads work in progress part 2

All work and no play makes Tony of Nurgle eager to spread the pox.

So I've done a bit more work on these gruesome little bundles of joy over the past week or so.

I haven't seemed to get any more than a half-hour or so to sit and work on these at any one time, but I think I'm slowly getting there...

Plague Toads work in progress part 1

Just before Christmas I picked myself up a set of Plague Toads from Warhammer World when I went there for the CoreHammer meet up. Uncharacteristically, I've managed to go just less than 3 months before beginning work on them, rather than the much more typical 18 months - 2 years...

I love these models. So unpleasant. Loads of really nice subtle (and not so subtle) touches in these sculpts.  A personal favourite touch is the strange inclusion of an outsized human shaped leg which occurs in the form of a front leg on a couple of the toads. It's gruesome.

I decided quite some time ago that I would like to use these chaps as chaos spawn in my Death Guard army. I think they will fit in nicely.

I've mounted these on trimmed down spare flooring sections from the Cities of Death building kits, and in turn these floor sections have been mounted on 40mm round bases.  I needed to do this to make the models look a bit more convincing. Putting them directly on to the bases just looked weird, because of the amount of overhang.  The tiles added a bit more support from below without increasing the footprint of the bases appreciably.  These lads need to be tabletop legal, after all.

The majority of colouring here has been done with the airbrush. Vallejo black primer and grey primer mixed to undercoat.  This was then oversprayed with Vallejo Russian Green primer. Duck egg was then carefully sprayed on to any areas that I considered to be the underside / underbelly. A rough murky mix of P3 Thrall Flesh, Vallejo medium grey and some unspecified green that I can't remember was lightly drybrushed on to the raised areas.

I layed down a base on the raw exposed flesh areas with a rich, burgundy colour from the P3 range (Sanguine base if memory serves - the label got peeled off!).  The teeth, claws and horns were given a thin coat of GW Calthan Brown. Over all this, I used my "murk wash" to add a bit more depth.

Anyway, below are some pictures of the little I've done so far.