Plagues of the Caribbean: Lord of Plagues #1
Part One: Basing, Converting and Inspiration!
Rotspot 2025 and the Preamble
The Lord of Plagues is a model I’d intended to paint for ages. Not least, because it’s a great sclupt that perfectly captures the Nurgle aesthetic. And because it’s astonishingly cheap for a Games Workshop model.
The opportunity rolled around with one of the contests run by the Golden Demon-winning Richard Gray on his Discord - Rotspot 2025! These contests seem to be running a couple times a year now and the standard is astonishingly high - as a learning opportunity, to see how some incredible painters tackle the same model as you’re trying to, I can’t recommend them enough.
Unfortunately, I started this one pretty late. The contest had been running for months and I only had about 16 days left from start to finish. Originally, I'd written it off as simply not being feasible and planned not to enter but I woke up one morning with an idea fully formed - The Drowned!
From the start, I had a few clear things in mind. The armor would be based on a few pictures of rusted old anchors dredged up from the sea - so no NMM here, just pure green-tinted rust without any of the original metal left. Some barnacles were also a must have to sell this concept. Likewise, I knew I wanted to do the ‘horns’ as something closer to lobster or crab claws, just because I thought it would be quite different to how most people would approach them.
The octopus was the other element that was clear in my mind as soon as I saw the ‘eyeholes’ on the original model. My intention had been for this to be a bit of a question mark on the model - is the body controlled by this sinister octopus thing or has he just wormed his way into the head/helmet of the otherwise still-alive blightlord? I was thinking of the old Warhammer Fantasy Tamurkhan lore with the maggot thing being the actual entity that is Tamurkhan. Unfortunately, after I’d finished painting, it honestly just looked more cute that anything else and I didn’t have time to redo it, so I think that element was kind of lost.
Basing and Converting
Starting with one of Taro’s plinths, the base was constructed pretty simply and very quickly. I drilled a small hole into the plinth and glued a length of paperclip into it, then built up the rock formation by spearing layer after layer of thin cork board (of varying sized chunks) onto it. One thick coat of Vallejo’s European Mud basing paste later and voila - coral rock formations!
The wavy sand was done with Milliput and a thick sculpting tool. Originally, I’d intended to actually build it up by gluing actual sand down in layers but I needed the patterned surface to be quite dramatic to sell the underwater feel. In the end, I simply sculpted it and added the ‘sand texture’ later by stippling like a madman at the painting stage. This is something I’d like to do more of going forward - keep the sculpting work, which I’m not very good at, as simple as possible and use paint to texture the surfaces.
Conversion was pretty minimal, due to the time constraints. I filled in some of the holes in the armor with Green Stuff to give a bit more space to work with and then used Green Stuff again to add some barnacles - simply rolling up a ball of putty, then stamping them out the middle and ‘crimping’ the edges with a cocktail stick. The starfish stuck to one of his arms was added to fill some empty space, and was just a case of building up the shape and cutting away what I didn’t like a few times over.
For the octopus, I lost a few days having to build it up bit by bit and then wait for it to cure repatedly which was… slightly stressful within the timescales. The final touches to the base - the tentacle and the shell - where both made by simply rolling out a length of putty thinner at one end, and twisting it into the right shape.
The final touch was the seaweed/kelp plant, which I wanted to add both thematically and to help balance the height of the base on both sides. This was incredibly easy - I just cut a section off of a cheap plastic aquarium plant. Once primed and painted, it looked perfectly fitting.
Some Reflections
The coral rock formation worked out great and I’ll use that again in the future. The paperclip running through the middle also makes it surprisingly robust. It lost a bit at the painting stage as I had to resort to drybrushing more than I would’ve liked due to time but I’m still pleased with the end result.
Simply sculpting the sand on was a far better approach than trying to do it with ‘army basing’ techniques of PVA and sand. This was inspired by some of the basing I saw people doing on the Discord and previously for some competition pieces and I absolutely get why now.
The barnacles worked out okay but were a bit rough around the edges at painting time. I had to add a lot of small detail with the brush to try to make them not look terrible and blocky - see the WIP picture below this for an example of this. Need to take more care with this in the future; you can only fix bad sculpting with brushwork up to a certain point.
The octopus worked out fairly well, from a sculpting point of view, but I wish I’d spent some more time on him at this stage (and also later on). I should’ve made it look more like a demonic Nurlge hybrid and less like… well, a cartoon octopus, honestly!
A final thought here, which is that these community-driven contests are an incredible way of upping your game. Even before I laid a paintbrush on this guy (and there’ll be a lot more of that in part two), seeing how other people were tackling the model pushed me to do a few things outside of my comfort zone in how I would normally approach a base. These paid off in a huge way and it’s comforting to see the improvement, even as comparison to some of those finished entries threatens to bring it crashing down again!