This Saturday I headed ninety miles up the road to Vanguard Wargaming in Bristol, for the Epic UK Winter Warmer. As always, a deadline is wonderful for getting painting done and I was prompted to make another Defiler and to get more paint on the existing models.

Defiler Seven

I started off with a couple of ideas based on Plaguebearer torsos on top of machines but ended up with no torso at all on the final model.

Most of the components. All four legs got pinned due to the small contact area where they would attach to the plastic. Helped, as always, by having the appropriate equipment!

For a 'head' I ended up using the autocannon turret from a 15mm wheeled GZG drone. To raise up the position (and get three legs attached to the base) I stuck a beetleback Warlord Titan head on the base, with the three attached claw feet being glued into holes drilled in the base and head.

Defiler Painting

This was a good opportunity to go for a more organic-looking paint job than on the other Defilers and vehicles in the force, with lots of use of green/yellow/brown glaze mixes and some reds. Before the wash over the metallics:

After wash:

Although I'd hoped to leave the Titan head like this, it made the model look too unfinished so some highlighting was added and the eyes painted as jewels. Also the claw-legs got edge-highlighted with pure white to make them look like harder material.

With an old placcy Rhino for scale:

In theory this one's done apart from painting the back tank to look like it contains liquid.

Other Stuff

While I had models in the good lighting set-up, it turned out that there were a bunch of models painted in 2013 that hadn't been photographed in their current state!

Defiler group-shot, note that some of these have had washes over the metallic areas and some haven't.

Contagion Engine artillery:

Death Guard Havocs:

Plaguehound with Rhino for scale, 'Step on the gas, it's right behind us!'.

I also managed to get the second Plaguereaper superheavy mostly painted and the first one more finished, but haven't had time to take proper photos yet. Anyway, here's the group shot from the tournament, more tournament photos to come in a separate blog post...

Ian