Oh, man, this one feels good to share. Years ago when I started my Death Guard army I picked up the Lord Felthius and the Tainted Cohort set, and while I did the best I could with them for the time and where my relative painting ability was, for a long time they ended up benched either because of the changing 9th edition unit composition and the Tainted Cohort no longer being fieldable stand-alone, or because they just visually really fell behind a lot of my more recent work. With the two small Plague Marine batches I did recently, I wanted to get over the last big hurdle in my Death Guard pile of shame and give these a new lease on life.

With the benefit of hindsight, repainting Felthius and his filthy lads, I appreciate how damn good these sculpts are. While I’m a big fan of non-monopose stuff for Eldar that I can play with and customize, the benefit of monopose or ETB Death Guard models is that there’s so much detail and bits of flesh and bone and slime baked into each of them and paired with some decently dynamic posing. Dynamic for Cataphractii armour, of course, but still. I approached these with the mix of sponging, stippling, and then the regular base-layer-highlight formulas that have been my standard for Death Guard up to this point. While I think I overdid it on some of the stippling, I’m quite happy with the result (and that these are finally out of my pile of shame.)

As usual, the Marine-to-Nurgling ratio is strong, and I skewed it just a little more by inserting a “Nurgling” included in a bits lot that I got a hold of that totally isn’t a 3D-printed Baby Yoda. The idea struck me and it was too funny to me not to use, especially adding a little bit of foliage to Felthius’ base that it could be munching on. Felthius has always seemed like an eerily cheery model and I thought this naturally added to his weirdness. They’ll be getting reinforcements, too, so that I can finally field them in 10th and my revived 9th Crusades – more on that to follow!