Starting a Nurgle Daemon army and a scracth built Beast of Nurgle.

Hi everyone,
I haven't forgotten about the blog. I've been busy with family, friends and roleplay over the last couple of months.

I've done some bits and bobs of hobby work, but nothing that seemed that blog-worthy...
Until now...

Last week I had a friend coming over for a few games of our often waylaid Warhammer escalation that we had started. After looking at my current forces I realised that I wasn't feeling the drive to work on any of them at that time. So I looked through my hobby supplies to see if I could knock together a quick 500pt force of something different. I found some unopened boxes of Deamons, so I grabbed the book off the shelf and came up with this:

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:Daemons of Chaos 500pt list:

1 Herald of Nurgle, lvl 1 wizard.

20 Plaguebearers of Nurgle, full command, banner of swiftness.

1 Beast of Nurgle

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Here are the Herald and unit the of Daemons:

I know, nothing exciting. They're pretty much stock with a couple of minor conversions. I played around with some textures and stuff on the bases, which I'm hoping to paint in a warped swamp style.

The main problem with my list is that I didn't actually own a Beast of Nurgle. So I had a look through my bits-boxes and scratch built one. For once I remembered to take a few pictures as I worked.

Here are some step-by-step images of how I created my Beast:

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1. The armature:

I used a Carnifex head and carapace I had lying in my bits-box. I used a heat-gun (donated to my hobby tools by my lovely other half) to soften and bend the edges of the carapace around the head. Then the pieces were attached to a bent wire, I used tin-foil to build up the bulk of the armature and mounted it all onto a 40mm square base.

2. Fleshing out and main details:
I used a thin skin of green-stuff to bulk out the miniature and to provide a better surface to sculpt over.
Using more spare Tyranid parts, some ammo feeds which I used to create the flesh sacks and tentacles of the beast.

I removed the horns from the head and carved out some holes for the eyes I wished to add later. The stingers were from some spare Lizardman parts I believe and the tongue was a Skink tail.

3. Detailing:
Green-stuff was used to blend the different pieces together. At this stage I also started to sculpt some of the larger details like the open wounds/ruptures in the flesh and the exposed innards.

I had made a press-mould from the skull pits on my Realm of Battle boards, I used this to create the details running down the back of the beast.

Steel ball-bearings were used for the new eyes, I went for three in a similar pattern to the Mark of Nurgle.

4. Final details and finishing:
At this stage I just blended all the pieces together, sculpted finer details like folds in the skin. added pustules with green-stuff and balls from a water filter. Then liquid green-stuff was used to smoothly blend and bring it all together. I added a plastic Nurgling whilst I was basing the miniature too.

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The miniatures are in a semi-painted state right now, I'll post a follow-up when they are a bit nearer completion.

That's all for now, take care.