Renegade Knight of Nurgle Complete!

The finished Knight. Corrupted and ready to spread the love and decay of the Plague Lord!

Welp, after about two weeks worth of work I've put the final touches on my Renegade Knight of Nurgle. It was a lot of work, but really worth the effort in the end. I do think I've satiated my appetite for conversions for a while, though. 

The head was a third-party piece from Shapeways. And the Mona Lisa is just a nice
touch of weird.

This project finally justified that purchase of the GW skull kit!

The mega melta may not be the optimal build, but damn if it isn't the coolest
looking one.

The banner was made by drawing the design out in Photoshop and then printing it
on custom transfer paper.

The plague censor will count as a power fist style close combat weapon.

The little nurgling is having the time of his unlife!

The billowing smoke really adds to the motion of the model and I'm super glad I did it.

I kept the back pretty simple.

My fingers were numb after cleaning and cutting all these skulls.

I've covered the basic build of the Knight a little bit here. Additionally, I sculpted some billowing filth for the smokestacks using expanding foam on wire armatures. I also made several of the boils and organic bits on the Knight using the same process. Expanding foam is a great tool for doing organic stuff. The trick is to squeeze some out onto some newspaper and then use a wire or some other tool to place the foam on the model. Just don't squirt the foam directly onto the model or you'll be sorely disappointed. 

A basic armature was madly twisting floral wire into shape.

I used some masking tape to fill in the gaps and give the foam a
surface to attach to.

Then foam was added to the frames. The foam expands
as it dries, so keep that in mind as you apply it.

One of the big things people have asked about as I've posted WIP shots on Twitter, is the image of the Mona Lisa on the Knight's rondel shield. I wanted to make the knight feel really Baroque and over-wrought, and adding the Renaissance image really helped tie it together. It was also a call back to some classic John Blanche paintings that have the image. I knew that there was no way I was going to take the time to try and paint it by hand, so I settled on a simpler way - I made a decal.

I grabbed a reasonably high rez image from the
interwebz.

I used Photoshop to scale the image and then printed it out on decal paper. One of the keys to making sure this worked was prepping the surface of the shield and painting it a nice clean white. This was done because any color the decal was placed on would show through. The white mimics the white of the decal sheet and ensured that it would look correct when finally applied. 

I'm super happy with the final result, and I can't wait for my Knight to stride into battle alongside my Death Guard and spread the joy of Papa Nurgle.

Cheers!