Interlude: Nurgle Plaguebearers (everything went wrong and still turned out okay)

Despite Nurgle being very close with (and sometimes surpassing) Tzeentch as my favorite Chaos god, I've never really painted any Nurgle stuff. I've got an old Great Unclean One from the 80s sitting upstairs which is basically a solid block of green and a handful of old Plaguebearers and Nurgle Chaos Warriors from the same era, all unpainted. That's basically it.

When looking for some Chaos allies for my Word Bearers, I decided Nurgle was it. I like the current Tzeentch line; I love the Nurgle stuff. I daresay that everything they put out for Nurgle these days is some of the best stuff they've ever done. They ooze (pun intended) personality.

So I did 10 Plaguebearers, to see what I could do. And, well, everything turned out wrong so these 10 miniatures took nearly a week of slow stabs at completion and walking off in frustration to do other stuff.

Here's the list of bad things:

• The dreaded NC humidity caused the primer to do that beading up thing, leaving a bumpy texture on the miniatures. It wasn't even that humid out, meaning I have to rethink everything about priming outside in the summer.
• I went with two coats of Athonian Camoshade (GW's dirty green ink) over the white undercoat. It looked awesome, but good luck highlighting the shit, because Nurgling Green was not looking good.
• When I weathered the swords, I went too heavy on the rust. Usually I dust, then capillary action with the fixer, but this time I made a mix. Holy shit, do mixes go on fast and thick. I had to repaint the swords, weather again, and it was still a little thick.
• The bases came out garish. Again, weathering. I think they ended up looking good in the end, but they were really dicey last night when I was finishing.
• I've watched a hundred tutorials on painting horns and I still can't paint them worth a damn.

But you know what? They came out alright. Maybe a little better than alright. Rather than highlighting, I did a drybrush of Yriel Yellow. Despite considering it a personal failure when I eschew highlighting for drybrushing these days, it was a good decision and it came out looking really nice. The Games Workshop technical paints (Blood for the Blood God, Nurgle's Rot, and Typhus Corrosion) really made the miniatures pop.

We aim for what we call "tabletop standard plus" on our table. Neither of us is going to win a hardcore painting competition, but we want our stuff to look nicer than undercoat/shade/drybrush and that's it. This hit that despite major hiccups and I'm looking forward to doing Cor'bax Utterblight soon.