Because she wanted to, Red painted a Lord of a Contagion model from the new Dark Imperium box for a friend at the local gaming store.
With a lot of the Horus Heresy stuff coming out, I have been reading up on a few of the Primarchs, and if I had to pick favorites it would end up on Mortarion. So, the Dark Imperium box containing Death Guard and the rumor of Mortarion himself coming out shortly really had me thinking about putting together my very own Death Guard army.
The husband, of course, had a bit of a different idea and wanted me to stick to my Eldar, so I opted to paint a model for a friend whose birthday was coming up.
I probably spent the most time on the Lord’s distended belly. I ended up gathering a number of disturbing reference pictures to work off of, but it still did not turn out quite the way I wanted. Flesh tones can be some of the most difficult colors to work with, and no matter what I did, I just could not make it seem very lifelike. Part of this likely stems from my inability to stomach enough photos of open wounds to get a decent idea of what colors to best use, but even the bruising, which I had the most references for, did not come out appropriately. Looking at it now, it appears that I really needed more red, or just more practice. The one thing I am quite proud of, on the other hand, are his intestines – specifically the two loops hanging out.
Anyway, the model really helped hammer home that starting a Death Guard army, while it might be fun, would be incredibly time consuming. My propensity for painting one model at a time is made all the worse by the large variety of appearances these marines take on, so I will just stick to my Aeldari for now.
I know you say you weren’t happy with the results of the belly, but I think with the gloss coverage on it that it looks quite squishy and icky. I would call it mission accomplished myself. 😀
Thank you. 🙂
Maybe I spent too much time staring at it. I was hoping to provoke the same gross-out reaction that I got from a number of other minis, but the reference pics may have made me too used to looking at nasty body things.