Today I have a special guest article by painting phenom Oscar Lars as he shows off his recently completed Maggotkin of Nurgle army! This army is disgustingly beautiful in all of the right ways. Without further ado, Oscar Lars!
Oscar: I fell in love with the idea of Nurgle through the Lore. The macabre and comical foundation for the sculpts in this army were appealing, but the lore also emphasized a horrible approach to warfare of biological weaponry that makes me gag. Clouds of flies that crawls into every opening of the body, disease that festers so fast it morphs your physical appearance in matter of seconds and boils the size of fists filled with putrid puss.
I wanted to completely realize these aspects through painting the skin and metallics in a corrupted way as well as sculpt my own creations. All this put both my conceptual and technical abilities to a challenge, and I couldn’t wait to dig in.
My first encounter with the Age of Sigmar Nurgle lore was through the novel Wardens of the Everqueen. Torglug the Despised led this great warhost tracking an army of Stormcast who’s mission was to find Alarielle. Through cleaver maneuvers Torglug and his minions manages to ambush the Stormcast once they are escorting a group of Sylvaneth carrying the seed of Alarielle. The book really described Nurgle’s many branches.
There was a plethora of conceptual ideas for an army, but it was the Rotbringers that caught my attention the most. Large, enduring, and disgustingly bloated warriors that the Blightkings are. I wanted to capture the smell of their aesthetic with my paint job, which is why the skin became the first focus for this project.
To paint the skin I began by googling images of rotting and discolored human limbs. It’s not something I recommend at all, but I found it necessary to take a deep plunge if I was gonna to do this army justice. The sculpts of the models allowed for a lot of imagination, but if I wanted people to have the chance of connecting with the repugnance, I needed to have them feel like it could happen to them.
This is why I chose to incorporate a lot of reds, purples and greens around the black rot to emphasize the seriousness of the transformation of the decease. I did not want every Blightking to have the same tone to their skin. So I tried to make several different recipes, some more purple, others more pink. Some sores would be covered in transformation, others would be torn a minute ago. I wanted to emphasize the idea of “the cycle of corruption” both through the skin and through the metals.
In hindsight, the metallics was the most challenging part of this project. I toyed with the ideas of starting either with the rust, adding Non-metallic metals (NMM) on top or with the NMM. I ended up using both approaches. The rust effect was done before the NMM using micro stippling of different browns and oranges consisting of both muted earthy and highly saturated tones. The oxidation on copper and gold was done after the NMM using both micro stippling and watered down paint. When you water down paint, it breaks up the medium in the paint that keeps the pigment together.
It is usually a problem, for example when glazing, but here I thought it would help to add a more random pattern to how the paint would react and create strange patterns as the pigments broke up. The colors I used were mainly blues and teals and a bit of green to add a third element to it. The result of the two approaches really made it clear that starting with the NMM is much easier but way more labor intensive. Luckily I saved the most fun part of the project, despite it also being very labor intensive, for last: Sculpting.
I sculpted my own Nurgle trees after seeing Wilbur Whateley’s (@mr_whateley) fantastic custom made Nurgle trees. His as well as mine were built from Citadel Wyldwoods using tons of miliput, green stuff, and Nurgle bits, mainly from the Beast box.
I wanted to make sure mine wouldn’t be a straight copy of his, so I added some of my own concepts to them. One of those features were the eyeballs. I made spheres in different sizes out of green stuff and once they were completely dry, I cut them in half. I then sculpted the areas where I wanted them to emerge from, adding a fairly thick coat of green stuff and pushed a slightly larger indentation into the surface using the end of brushes.
This is where I added the eyeball to make it feel like it sat in a socket. Throughout the army I had added some more eyeballs, such as on my harbinger of decay. I imagined these trees and creatures where once human and had been transformed into what they now are, forever tormented by the gift of Nurgle.
Tyler: Thanks again to Oscar for taking the time to write this and share his amazing work with us. You can follow him on Twitter here and check out his website here. Oscar is a full time painter and open for commissions, so if you want to field an awesome looking army you can't go wrong with him.
You can scroll through his Instragram here to see some more of his work including some of his commission projects. I particularly love his Nighthaunt!
Until next time,
Tyler M.
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