Plaguebearer with Icon and Blue Slime

Part of the plaguebearer command squad, the icon bearer often has a central role in my daemons armies. Being high toughness with the feel no pain special rule makes plaguebearers a high priority to hoist a chaos icon high. Indeed, since the new daemons codex came out, if I chose to field chaos icons, plaguebearers are my first pick in mixed armies to hold a chaos icon (although I do sometimes use a chaos icon with horrors of Tzeentch as well).

This plaguebearer was a bit of a painting experiment. As with the majority of the rest of my plaguebearers, I painted the plaguesword in a virulent, un-natural blue colour. To go with this blue-ick, I thought it might be neat if I could have some blue slime on the chaos icon, instead of the usual greens and yellows that traditionally go hand-in-hand with Nurgle miniatures.

The blue is achieved with a base coat of electric blue and a deep blue inking. This is complemented with some minor highlighting in places and a slimy-looking blue tongue in the plaguebearer's mouth, suggestive of the inner toxins that the minion of Nurgle has. I'm particularly pleased with the "glistening" quality that the blue slime has -- achieved without using varnish. The spokes of the icon were base coated in bleached bone, inked in chestnut and gently highlighted in gold in random places, suggestive of rusting and oxidation of a metal. The skulls (sort of embedded on to the metal spokes and attached by the blue slime!) were drybrushed in dheneb stone, inked black and highlighted progressively lighter.

The plaguebearer himself was done in traditional green colours: goblin green basecoat, green inking, green highlighting, gryphonne sepia washes of the legs, bum and face, highlighting in dheneb stone and cream on the face and a careful hand to pick out the eyeball and nails with a treble-zero size paint brush. The trickiest part was blending the horn in with the rest of the colour tones, this took a few washes of sepia and a bit of experimenting with different blends of bleached bone and dheneb stone.

As well as the plaguebearer, there is a mal-formed nurgling lurking on the base of this miniature (sitting on the foot of the plaguebearer in fact!). I use the word mal-formed as the Nurgling's arms are tentacles, he's missing an eye and he looks like he has a plaguebearer-style horn ... not quite the picture of a mini-Great Unclean One we're used to, but appropriately Nurglesque! The nurgling has received a deeper inking of green so that his skin colour is subtly different from the plaguebearers. The one good eye is picked out in white (again using the trusty treble zero paint brush) whilst there seems to be a stream of snot coming from one of his nostrils, here picked out in bleached bone. This close up also shows some of the sepia wash that was applied to the plaguebearer's legs: it looks a noticeably different tone of green / brown than some of the other regions, suggestive, perhaps, of wading through dirt.

Overall, I'm pleased with the result here. I was worried that the blue slime aspect would just look plain odd. But somehow, I think it blends in with the overall theme of the miniature very well by providing a good accent without dominating it.