Armies on Parade - Mortarion's Death Guard

Welcome to the final post of my Death Guard series of posts. It's taken far too long to post this up as I struggled for the longest time with how to go through the photos, get them all tagged etc etc. In the end I've pretty well figured I'd just cheat. To those of you that are visually impaired, my apologies - the photos are less well annotated than I usually aim for. The reason is just the sheer number that I've chosen to include. The intention is to give folks a sense of how the project progressed through the pictures. I will however front weight this with some of my thoughts.

This is my second ever painted 'army' and the first where I've 'fully painted' (ie painted all the models I have and intended to paint). I know I will pick up a few more models for the army (I'd like to have one of each model available and maybe enough to run three crawlers, haulers and drones - I may even grab a few of the Forge World models). We'll see how far I go with that given I don't actually enjoy playing the army / game all that much!

I have of course painted up the contents of multiple board games as well as numerous 'teams' from more skirmish scale games so much of this process wasn't particularly new to me. What I really discovered in this process was how much I enjoy painting a large volume of models once I have really ironed out the steps to keep things streamline. I often struggle with the latter stages of painting a model as I fundamentally loose interest in it but painting like this - each completed model comes with it's own little endorphin hit and you often finish 5-10 in a sitting. The flip side of this is that the process has to be really down for this to work well. If you're not sure what to do with various parts of the model then you're in for a bad time.

The enjoyment also benefited from being a side project for me for most of the year. Although I certainly hit something of a crunch mode towards the end. Much of the time I was just doing a bit here and a bit there. Particularly the airbrushing which was often a way of filling extra time / using extra paint while working on other projects.

So there was a ton that I enjoyed about this project but what about the other side of the coin? Well Rhino's are straight up boring to paint. I'm super glad that I put some texturing on them in advance and the preshading helped make them look a lot more interesting in the end but they're just big and boxy with a bunch of annoying detail. Similarly Mortarian was a challenge. I was scared of not doing the sculpt justice, and left him too late in the process. I got him done in the end and am pretty pleased with how he came out eventually.

The really big thing that I disliked and the only part of the project I don't feel turned out particularly well was the display board. You can see some photos of it below and it was an interesting experience. The original intention was to make it a permanent game board to fit with other boards I intended to make later on. It didn't turn out that way and although I learnt a lot, it came out bulky, heavy and not particularly well finished. Unsurprisingly (especially with the international move) - I ended up chucking it shortly after the competition.

- Raggy, signing out