Death Guard, my Combat Patrol army

After I got my hands on the new Death Guard codex from Games Workshop and reading it a couple of times I got really inspired to start my own little collection for this faction. So for the past couple of months I was "on the hunt" for suitable models to get this project started.

Now I'm not really familiar with the current popularity levels of factions in the 40K universe, but my guess would be that this army is doing really great with collectors and avid players alike. It wasn't easy finding good deals on them or even buying them in store! 

Now that I've collected enough models to field a small force I understand why: these truly are amazing miniatures with tons of cool details on them! 

My HQ choice for this army is a Death Guard Chaos Lord. As I wasn't able to find a specific mini to field him I used the chaos lord that comes in the Blackstone Fortress boxed game. To make him more "Nurgly" I did a simple head swap and gave him one that resembles an insect.

As with all the miniatures for this faction that I've collected so far this one is covered with an overwhelming amount of details. To be honest it makes them quite intimidating to paint!

Wanting to get this combat patrol painted in a reasonable timespan I opted to try out a relatively simple colour scheme and only focus on a few details per model, trying to choose the ones that really stand out when you look at the models on the tabletop during a game.

Mixing Death Guard Green with Lahmian Medium to make it cover the models really smooth was my starting point, painting it all over the mini's in two coats.

A quite heavy drybrushing with Zandri Dust gave me some easy highlights. Using a 50/50 mix of Leadbelcher and Balthasar Gold I painted most of the decorative rims and symbols. 

I found this easy to build kit for a Myphitic Blight Hauler and this gave me a lot of skin surface to experiment on. In the end I opted for a base layer of Fulgrim Pink and washed over this with Carroburg Crimson. This gives it a painful look of diseased flesh.

Zandri Dust mixed with Grey Seer took care of all sorts of bones, teeth and skulls. 

Cloth bits I painted with only Grey Seer and Chainmail I first painted with Mournfang Brown before drybrushing it with Leadbelcher.

After all these steps I was ready for my biggest experiment: Oil washes!

I wanted to try this out for a while now and I must say that it's super easy to do. I picked Burnt Umber and a darker green oil paint, squeezed out a bit of each and started mixing the two together in a bit of artists turpentine until I had roughly the consistency of a "normal" acrylic wash and painted this all over the models in three coats giving each coat about an hour to dry.

Then it was dotting some eyes in with white and painting the lenses on some of the models. On the Blight Hauler I really tried my best to give it a bright shiny look. Using very thin layers of first Warboss Green then Moot Green then Moot Green mixed with white going from dark on the outside to lighter in the middle. Then I washed it with a Hexwraith Flame and Lahmian medium mix.

In about six or seven evenings of painting I finished two squads of 5 plague marines, a Blight Hauler and a Lord. Not bad for a bunch of models that at first made me hesitant to put paint on them because of how detailed the sculpts are!

I've still got some models to build, so this army will be getting bigger in the months to come!