"The Sultan of Stink" - Great Unclean One

The Great Unclean Ones are Nurgle’s mightiest daemons.

Towering over their enemies, these living hillocks of rotting flesh

lumber across the battlefield swinging their rusted weapons,

vomiting streams of filth and unleashing diseased magics upon the foe.

Hey Hey Hey! Welcome back for more on The Art of Caesura!

Thanks again for everyone who has stuck in for the past few years of The Art of Caesura! Last week we celebrated the blog's second birthday, and what a party it was!

This week we're picking up right where we left off. We're devoting an episode to the Lord of Contagion, Forge World's Great Unclean One - in all his glorious, gruesome detail!

I'm going to mostly let the pictures doing the telling for this one (after all, they're worth a thousand words an all that), but I do want to provide some curation to the feast of festering you're about to tuck in to.

While it has totally been Nurgle's day in the sun these past couple of months, I'm not a massive fan of the pale cartoony greens that the official studio painters are using. I wanted to have my Greater Demon grounded in more earthy tones. Thus, the base colour I used (under several layers of Agrax Earthshade and Nuln Oil) was Ushabti Bone. This also acted as the highlight, dry-brushed on to his bulbous boils once the inks were dry.

Once I had a nice skin tone of inked Ushabti Bone, I used focused washes of Biel-Tan Green and Druchii Violet around his gaping wounds to give the look of gangrenous bruising.

I realize in retrospect that I should have used my diffuser (read: white paper bag) on my lights when taking these pictures, especially the one above to really show the contrast between the glossy exposed fat, and matte skin.

I was going for a rhinoceros-like skin to imply that while he is basically a humongous sac of pus, his resilient hide would still take some getting through.

I could scarcely believe the level of detail on this model until I started painting it! Every wound has several layers of frayed, necrotic tissue that themselves have different textures!

As the hide got darker and darker with my successive washes, I only washed the exposed adipose tissues once, with Seraphim Sepia before picking out the details (maggots) and giving them two layers of gloss varnish. The technical paint Nurgles Rot also made a good showing...

Look at this little cutie (above) dangling from his daddy's intestine. If you look carefully, you'll see my second favourite detail on this model: the tiny hand of another nurgling scrambling out of his grandpappy's guts (near the top of the intestines. For the intestines I painted them a mix of Altdorf Blue and Mephiston Red and mixed a bit of Screamer Pink in for the striations before a heavy wash of Druchii Violet, and the essential heaping of Nurgle's Rot.

Doesn't he just look thrilled to be here! His eyes are Scar White with gentle washes of Drakenhof Nightshade and Carroburg Crimson.

This shot was mainly meant to be demonstrating the lovely collacine of maggots squirming around his mouth and tongue. Speaking of his tongue, it was painted the same as his intestines, but instead of a Druchii Violet wash, it received a Drakenhof Nightshade one before the "lick" of gloss varnish.

While we're in this neck of the woods, his sword was Leadbelcher with Typhus Corrosion and Ryza Rust. The "sharp" edge is Runefang Steel.

The sculpt has such an impressive attention to detail, I was amazed by the mass of tumours on his back, they really looked like something horrible bursting out of his flesh.

Well, where did you think Nurgle's Rot came from...

This next one is actually my favourite of His festering wounds. I really love the maggots in the wound and actually went to the bother of inking their little segmented bodies (with thinned down Drakenhof over their Scar White) and painting their heads black. Y'know, just to make them even more adorable!