Champion Of Nurgle - Scenic base part 1

Fairly early on in the painting process of the Champion I decided to make a scenic base for the miniature. There are many websites on the internet who sell scenic bases in every flavour you might imagine but I prefer to make my own.
This allows me to design the surface of the base to fit the miniature perfectly, blending the design and concept of the figure with the base to create a cohesive whole. My plan for the Champion Of Nurgle was to create a rocky outcrop, with small pools of ichor added in the corners. I also planned to add minuscule flies and things to the base as an extra detail.

I wanted to make a silicone rubber mold of the base when it was done so I could make resin casts of the base for future use with other Nurgle miniatures if I so desired. Because I planned to make a mold of the base it gave me the freedom to use a sculpting compound that would normally not be suited for basing but that I find very pleasant to work with.
Super Sculpey is a polymer clay that needs to be hardened in the oven and can then be painted or worked on further. It has a tendency to shatter or chip quite badly over time so it's not suitable to use for basing, but it's waxy fine texture is very pleasant to work with and takes detail very well. Basically I would sculpt the base detail on top of a clean plastic base I had lying around and leave it soft. Experience has taught me that the sculpted detail would not be damaged if I poured the liquid mold rubber over the top of it as long as I did it gently.

I started out with simply adding a small ball of Sculpey to the top of the base and flattened it out until it covered the surface and was about three mm thick. I then trimmed the edge so about one mm of the plastic base surface was showing around it.

The next step was to start shaping the Sculpey into a stony surface. I first pressed in some cracks and lines onto the surface with a sculpting tool and then started to gently press down onto the material at certain points to create different levels and slopes.
By gentle scraping the material as well as pushing it down I slowly started to create the basic shape of the rock.

Creating natural texture and surfaces with a sculpting compound is probably one of the most challenging things you could attempt in this hobby. It's not as simple as sculpting a few shards and jagged lumps or glueing a few chips of slate onto a base and calling it "rocks".

One of the most important things to keep in mind is the sense of scale. The smaller the scale of the item you're trying to re-create the harder it becomes to keep it looking right.
This might sound like a daft thing to say but if you look at most miniature manufacturers in the fantasy and science fiction realms you will notice that the heads and hands will not actually be "in scale" to the height of the miniature, but minutely larger. This is done for two reasons. The first is to facilitate the painting of the miniatures and the second is because the way our brain processes visual information. If the hands and faces would be exactly the right size in relation of the height of the body the figures will end up looking "wrong". This seems to get worse the smaller the scale of the miniatures get.

The above example is not going to influence the sculpting of the base directly but another scaling issue will. The smaller the miniature, the more it becomes stylised, in that very small details will not be represented accurately. Individual hair strands will not be represented but the hair as a mass will for instance.
With the rock surface, this also needs to be taken into account. I'd have to keep the ridges, cracks and layers to just the right amount of detail so it doesn't look out of place with the Champion Of Nurgle. The older Citadel miniatures are far more stylised and cartoony than the current releases and I had to be careful to get the balance right. I'm perhaps obsessing too much over it, but these are little details that really niggle me if it's not done the way I feel is "right".

Champion Of Nurgle Stage 3: Fly Head and Mutated Leg 2

With the basic colours in place it was time to tighten up the carapace edges and start highlighting. I re-lined the edges with black where needed and started to bring the top right corner edges up with very fine highlights of Azure mixed with consecutive larger amounts of white. This was a very precise job that I had to redo a few times on some of the plates - cursed bad eye sight again!

I then started to highlight the green part, again by adding Azure to the Emerald Green and using the Azure and white highlight mix as the final edge highlights.
To make sure the two colours would blend into each other nicely I kept topping up highlights and glazes of both colours (glazes were FW Emerald Green and Process Cyan respectively) until I felt I had reached the best balance between the two tones I was able to achieve. I'm not entirely happy with the end result, but then again I rarely am.

After I finished painting the head I immediately felt that perhaps painting it black would have been a better option, but I've done it now and I'll probably leave it as very often a paint job I'm initially not happy with grows on me over time. I am playing with picking up another one of these miniatures in the future and doing it in a different paint scheme, with a brown robe and black fly mutations.

With the carapace finished I painted the eyes Foundry Dusky Flesh and highlighted that with Bright Red Shade and Bright Red Light, then I glazed them with a few layers of very diluted Vallejo Game Color Red Ink (I couldn't find my FW Reds for some reason). It was the first time I had used any of their ink range and it needed a hefty amount of Gel Medium to take the gloss off. It's the only Vallejo ink I have but I'm reluctant to buy any more of it in the future. Disaster averted once again by using my trusty Golden Matte Gel Medium.

Now having "broken the back" of the miniature I went about painting the smaller details such as the tufts of fur, his tongue and the rope belt and pouch with a mix of black and brown ink, which is basically just my way of outlining these sections. I prefer using a mix of paint and ink to do this because the flow aids the process but you don't lose strength of pigment.

I painted some of these details and left others until after I had painted the axe which is the last major surface that still needed working on. In the meantime I had also started work on a scenic base for this little monster.

Champion Of Nurgle Stage 3: Fly Head and Mutated Leg 1

This is the stage where I really dropped myself into it. It has been quite a few years since I painted miniatures, let alone tried to pull off some advanced techniques like I planned to do on the fly mutations.

Following a suggestion by a friend of mine I looked up some image reference on the internet of bluebottle flies and the iridescence of their carapace.
They basically look like oil slicks, metallic with a multicoloured hue. I wasn't keen on actually painting these parts on the miniature with metallic paints, but I did want to somehow bring across that multicoloured quality.

I decided to paint the areas black and then highlight them in three colours, dark blue, green and purple. By concentrating on the edges of the carapace and leaving the smooth central areas almost black this should give the impression of depth. The plan was to concentrate the different colours in set areas on each piece of the carapace, blue at the top edge, green at the bottom left edge and purple at the bottom right. I was also playing with giving the whole area a coat of gloss varnish afterwards, but had not decided at this stage.

This paint effect was very daunting to me. I've mentioned in a previous post that my eyesight is going a bit and it's sometimes quite hard for me to see very small details. Because of this I decided to do an initial few highlights of Vallejo Dark Prussian Blue mixed with increasing amounts of Azure just to get the basic blue down and to help me see the details better.

I wasn't too worried about the gaps between the armour plates at this stage because I planned to line them in with black before the final few highlights.
It did become apparent to me that doing the carapace in three colours  was perhaps a bit too much so I decided to drop the purple from the plan.I added the green colour to the plates using Citadel Emerald Green (an old colour) ready for the highlighting process.

The next stages would be to start highlighting both colours on the head and leg. I was planning to do this using the same highlight colour to mix into the green and the blue, the afore-mentioned Vallejo Azure. I also started to play with the ideas for the scenic base.

Champion Of Nurgle Stage 2 - Robes

Choosing the colour of the robes was not as straightforward as you might think. I had already decided the mutated head and leg would be painted black so even though I was playing with a very dark brown or black robe, I decided against it.

Stubbornly I went with a mid/light green colour. This could potentially cause all kinds of problems due to the risk of the miniature starting to look overly "chalky" with two of the main colours being highlighted up to an off-white tone.
This is a personal bugbear of mine and the main reason why I'm not a fan of the internet favourite "NMM", but more on that later when it's time for the weapon stage.

Painting the robe fairly light would mean to effectively use ink glazes and keep the tone deep while still retaining colour strength and keeping the highlights smooth.
I started with a basecoat of Foundry Forest Green Shade and mixed highlights with Phlegm Green. Deliberately keeping the highlighted areas broad and leaving little of the basecolour showing gave me a solid colour base to add further highlights.

Before highlighting the robes I gave it a quick glaze of of a 50/50 mix of FW Inks Burnt Umber and Emerald Green with Gel Medium added. I basically mixed enough of this on my palette to last me throughout the rest of the stages.

I sometimes make up large amounts of certain ink mixes if I use them a lot and keep them in empty pant pots, like my trusty "Flesh Ink Wash" mentioned in the previous stage. It's a great way to speed up the painting process and is particularly useful if you paint units. When you only paint single figures (like me) it can become a little too easy to just grab the same old trusty colours and you end up repeating the same colour schemes and tones on all your pieces - something I actively try to avoid.

The highlights were applied with a mix of phlegm Green with a dab of white added. At this stage it was imperative that with every consecutive lighter highlight stage a green ink glaze was applied to make sure the miniature didn't end up looking like a chalkboard crayon. The glazes were applied with a size 0 brush and diluted heavily with water.

Diluting inks and paints can be a tricky business, the acrylic binders that hold the paints together can only take so much before the pigment starts to separate from the liquid and you end up with a yucky, unusable mess on your palette.
Unfortunately there isn't a set formula to follow, since all manufacturers of paints and acrylic inks use different pigments and ratios of pigment to binder. Best thing to do is to learn through trial and error. When I buy a new colour or new make of paint I will always do a few tests to see "how far it will go".
A good rule of thumb is that paints which are heavy with pigment such as whites, light greys etc will not be able to be diluted as much as darker colours or colours with a more translucent quality, which tend to be reds, yellows and greens mostly. If I have one colour that cannot be diluted to the amount I might sometimes need I will go out and buy similar tones from a different make in the hope that they will. This leaves me with enough choice to either grab a good opaque paint or the equivalent that can be diluted for glazing. Variety is the spice of life they say.

With the basic skin-tone and robes finished I have started to plan out the rest of the miniature. The head and leg are up next and after that the axe. I will add the dirt, grime, pustules and assorted nastiness as the final stage after I've finished all the detailing.

Champion Of Nurgle Stage 1 - Skin tones

I'm not a star at blogging, but this little corner of the web is going to be a record of my miniature painting efforts. I've been flitting in and out of the hobby for decades but have lately picked up a brush again and found to really REALLY enjoy painting the "Oldhammer" style miniatures from the mid 80's to early 90's. A particular favourite of mine are the sculpts of Jes Goodwin, especially the chaos champions. The strangeness of the designs combined with the crispness of the execution made them a firm favourite, even over 20 years since they were first released.

I picked this Nurgle champion up on Ebay for a few pounds and am really enjoying painting him. The brush strokes are still a bit rusty but this is the progress so far:

I have painted the skin tones in a fairly neutral, slightly browned tone. Using Foundry Tan and then mixing highlights with Vallejo Beige Red. Every 2 highlights or so I added a very thin glaze of a pre-mixed "flesh tone ink" I made with some Golden Acrylic Gel Medium added.

The inks I use are FW Artists Inks and the above mentioned mix is made using equal parts Burnt Umber and Lemon Yellow, with a small dash of Purple Lake added. 

Whenever I use ink for glazes or washes I always add Acrylic Gel Medium to bind the mix together, reduce the risk of colour separation and keep the ink from pooling in glossy pools. 

I'm a little stubborn and stuck in my ways, so my techniques will seem slightly odd and old fashioned to many people. I generally prime miniatures in grey or white for instance, instead of the more popular black. This last example is mainly due to the fact my eyesight is going somewhat and it is easier for me to see detail on a grey/white primer miniature covered in a subtle wash of a brown tone.