Nurglings

Last summer I got a box of nurglings for my birthday. It was the gift that I had not asked for and I had no idea I needed it and it made me super happy.
And now I have painted them!

I really like them, and looking at the lot and the pictures I made they give me this ‘school class picture’ vibe. They look like a bunch of teenagers who have to stand closer to each other to all fit in the frame and are determined to drag the fun out as long as possible because when this is done you have to get back to class and behave properly again. And we most definitely do not want that!

Let me start by saying that I do not play Warhammer, and I am not interested in starting to play it. Probably because I do not know how it is played, mainly because all my non-working/sleeping time is already overloaded with hobbies (and adulting stuff but we do not talk about that). I do really like the mini’s and I think they are very suitable to use in tabletop RPG’s. So I started asking some of these boxes for my birthday.
My daughter just went to the GW store and took what she thought I would like.
Awesome kid, she knows me better than I do apparently.

While I really like the WH mini’s and currently oogle the Age of Sigmar stuff online a lot, I always am rather intimidated by their complexity. The details, the vibe that is already very present in the bare plastic figure and the sheer number that sometimes is in a box. Not to mention the size of some of these things!
Painting them nicely feels rather challenging to me.

When I saw the box my first thought (after omg this is so cool) was ‘how on earth am I supposed to paint this pile of creatures?’. But as it turns out, they come in little rows that you can glue together after painting. Very convenient!

I have the same with most ‘normal’ D&D mini’s, to be honest, but those are usually 1 figure with lovely details and not half an environment around them. Or an army. And most of them do not pop-up in my searches for images for inspiration looking like… well insanely gorgeous paint jobs created a huge community of super-awesome professional painters. With the WH mini’s you see a lot of those.

So, when I start to paint any WH mini I look for inspiration online, say to myself ‘I got this, I do not need to be that good and I do not want to be that good because I already have a job, I just want pretty table-ready minis’.
And that is what I did not exactly do with the nurglings.

I wanted these to look a bit better than ‘chucked speedpaint at them’ but I also did not want to spend weeks fussing over them. I just wanted to paint them a bit better than my usual stuff. So I googled some more and found a great ‘How to Paint and Base Nurglings‘ by The Brush and Boltgun.

I did use some different colours, because they use Citadel and I use a mix of brands, but I wanted to use some different colours anyway. I did follow all the steps and learned a lot about not fussing too much and just paint. Which is a lot easier when you have the steps explained to you. I forgot to make pictures between the steps, I should really do that next time.

I did not base my nurglings. Basing is when you decorate the little black plaque the mini stands on. Basing does enhance the look of the mini, but I use them for tabletop games and I want to use these in more than 1 type of terrain. It always feels a little odd when a mini is used deep in caverns where the sun never shines and has little grassy fluff around his feet.

I used the following colours, and in this order:

primer:
* Vallejo white primer

bodies:
I used 3 different colours as the base colour for the bodies to make them not all look the same
* Vallejo Dead Flesh
* Vallejo Bone White
* Vallejo Glacier Blue
Then I used a dilluted contrast paint as a wash
* Citadel Contrast Volupus Pink

wounds & mouths:
* base colour: Citadel Evil Sunz Scarlet
tongues and intestines:
* base colour: Citadel Emperor’s Children
* wash: dilluted Vallejo Ink Violet on wounds, mouths, tongues and intestines

Then I painted the teeth, horns and eyes: base colour: Vallejo Offwhite
horns – wash: Vallejo Sepia wash
eyes: – wash: Armypainter strong tone (to get a nice dark rim around the eye)

The also have boils, bumps and weird things:
base colour: Citadel contrast Iyanden Yellow
highlight: Citadel Flas Gitz Yellow

There are a few that have drips coming from their mouths, and one single nurgling has a load of barf. I gave that a basecoat of Vallejo Livery Green and then the basecoat and hightlight like the boils.

And last, but not least, I painted the little thing they stand on in chocolate brown.

After glueing al the bits together and giving them a little base to stand on all that is left to do is get them some D&D5e and F-AGE stats and set them loose in my campaigns.