"Depressed Nurgle" - Black Grail - Thralls

"Depressed Nurgle" - Black Grail - Thralls - Part 1

The boons of the Black Grail lead slowly

but surely down the path of utter corruption.

Only very few of the chosen can withstand

the blessings of the Lord of the Flies.

Most are turned into Grail Thralls,

and join the endless legions of empty,

hollowed-out and diseased husks who

must obey the whims of the Black Grail nobles for all eternity,

while suffering the torment

of their countless supernatural infections.

- Trench Crusade Wiki

Hello one and all and welcome back to The Art of Caesura!

Before I start, I want to say Happy Birthday to my mum today, but I'm afraid you're going to hate this post...

Last week I regaled you with photos from our summer holiday. I end the post telling you about the foetid mess that was our fridge/freezer when we got back (it had lost power for several weeks). Well, that proved to be a nice segue into today's post...

Almost 2 years ago, I first started getting hyped for Trench Crusade on this blog. I talked about how much up my alley it was, and I finally took the leap into buying a 3D printer (and going on to start my own 3D printing business) based on by excitement for Trench Crusade. But here on the blog it's been radio-silence, so what gives!?

Well, In the intervening time I have printed every single official Trench Crusade model in existence for all factions. And I have painted one entire faction, which is what we're finally going to dig into starting today!!

I have always been enamoured with Nurgle, I just think that all of the organic surfaces would be (and are) so much fun to paint. Combine that with all the weathering you get to do, and it's a great time all around!

Many years ago now, I had a brilliant time painting my Great Unclean One and then, a few years later, one of the models that I learned the most while painting at Marco Frisoni's workshop (and remains one of the models that I am most proud of) was Nurgle's Lord of Blights. So I have some experience painting rotting flesh, but I had never painted a Nurgle army...until now...sort of.

Nurgle in Warhammer is the jolly god of rot and ruin, keen to bestow his gifts of pestilence upon any and all. The Black Grail (who are actually the topic of today's post, believe it or not) are like depressed Nurgle. You do not want to have anything to do with them, but tough luck, because here we go!

While I don't think The Black Grail will be my "main" army for Trench Crusade (I believe that honour will fall to New Antioch), they are the first Trench Crusade army that I've painted and boy-howdy did I have an awesome time painting them! I used the Thralls to really define my paint scheme for this army, so let's now dive in to exactly what that paint scheme is!

From a zenithal undercoat (spray the whole model black, then spray it white from above), I coated the whole model in a thinned coat of Athonian Camoshade + Lahmian Medium.

Next, I busted out the oil paints! I took a crimson and heavily diluted it with mineral spirits and then poked it on to all the "guts" areas in kind of a quick stabbing action (not really conventional stippling, or at least not with the usual precision that I would use when stippling). I was looking for the paint to organically spill onto the surrounding tissues.

Next, I did the same thing with a thinned violet oil paint.

Because the oil paints can have a different finish to acrylics, I unified the whole model with an all over spray of matte varnish through my airbrush. This would also provide great textural contrast when I would bust out the gloss varnish for certain areas later on.

I took a couple of photos under real daylight, partially because it can be so rare to see in Ireland, but also to show how organically all the oil colours blend together.

I then highlighted all of the maggots, teeth and bones, with Ushabti Bone.

I painted their pants Ironclad Grey (a colour from one of the John Blanche sets)...

...and added in some Ushabti Bone to highlight.

I painted the wrappings with undiluted Snakebite Leather, with no highlights.

On to the metals! To begin Baxter Stockman's fly half, I used Heavy Metal - a lovely dark metal also from a John Blanche set.

With the metallic dry, I coated his fly half with Contrast Black Templar, this gave a nice insectile pearlescence to the black fly.

I painted the fly's eyes Burnt Red.

And then I got into the gore!

I mixed Nurgle's Rot and Nuln Oil together and painted into many of the holes and crevices as well as around the guts.

For Baxter, in addition to the step above, I also mixed in some UHU glue to the Nurgle-Nuln mix and strung some of this slime between areas of the model to really sell the idea that this fly is emerging from this guy.

I then repeated the gore step with Blood for the Blood God + Nuln Oil + Gloss Varnish and popped these into other crevices and gory bits.

And with that, these horrific little guys were complete, as was the foundation for how I would be painting the skin of all of my horrible little Black Grail duders.