I put painting these off forever. I think it was about two years ago that I got the Kill Team starter set box, courtesy of my grandfather for Christmas, and split the box down the middle with Kinpatsusamurai. He got all of the neat terrain and Starstrider stuff, and I got what I really wanted out of that box – 23 Gellerpox Infected miniatures. And as excited as I was to get my hands on them, they sat on my pile of shame for the last two years or so staring at me and judging me silently for painting everything else when they were right there. Finally, since I’m trying to finish off my pile of shame and had run out of other projects to procrastinate on, I bit the bullet and got to work.

One of the reasons I think I avoided these so long is that to even paint the Mutoid Vermin half, which is about 16 miniatures on its own, the models were all of very different shapes and were going to involve drastically different color schemes. I didn’t want to paint just batches of four at a time because that felt too small, but batches of sixteen were daunting, and it could hardly be called batch painting at 16 because all of them had such distinctive base colors. In the end I went with all sixteen at once, and tore off the band-aid so to speak. And what I found under that band-aid was disgusting and wonderful, as Grandfather Nurgle intended.

What I went with in the end were yellows for the wormy ones, teal for the ticks, and something around my usual Death Guard schemes for fleshy bits and insects when I got to the last two groups of four, since they were pretty close to things I’d already done before with Death Guard. The rest, especially slimy bits, skulls, teeth, and gore were all things I was a little more comfortable with, so once I got to that stage these kind of flew along the rest of the way. It was one of these projects that I dragged my heels on for a long time, but once I actually got down to it, they weren’t so bad – and just feeling that and registering that is making it easier for me to tackle more procrastination projects.

In the end, one of the many ironies of this project is that I finished these just in time for them to be shelved into Legends as part of Warhammer 10th edition, where they’re (to my knowledge) currently still unplayable. I can’t blame GW for that one, since if I’d gotten off my butt and painted these sooner they could have been useful as part of my Death Guard. In the meantime however, I’m keeping them as pieces for generic sci-fi tabletop adventures, especially things like Space Station Zero, and they work as nice generic creepy-crawlies amidst Warhammer 40K terrain. If I ever get to build a bigass Deathworld permanent table (a bucket list dream at this point) I’ll have lots of things to populate it with. I might even try and pick up some more.