Scratch building a Feculent Gnarlmaw for Warhammer: Age of Sigmar!

Heyo! So my LGS Warhammer crew has begun to collect and prepare for playing Age of Sigmar. I have always preferred fantasy to sci-fi so of course i took the opportunity. I looked through my possible options ranging from ogres, slaves to darkness and others and decided to go for the maggotkin of nurgle. My criteria were simple: I wanted a low-model count army with weird rules and cool spells i could rely on. Nurgle not only gave me sick damaging spells and not just debuffs, but also daemon summoning (true summoning since its from outside your army list!!!) and an actual Damage over Time effect in a wargame from disease counters, something i have been wanting for a loooong time. 

After building my list I decided to challenge myself and make a nurgle army almost entirely out of kitbashed, scratch built or 3d printed parts. My main reasoning is that I know i have the skills and creativity for it and I wanted my army to feel like its unique to me. So I wrote up some lore (might post it here or somewhere else on spacehey) and decided to go with a misguided plague doctor-themed cult who seek to cleanse disease but only ended up making things worse. With fetish animals of ravens and rats, i got started with what I got first, the key pieces for my feculent gnarlmaw. Its a daemon tree that spews out plague and disease to anything around it and in my army, the cultists made an effigy to morrda from which the daemon took hold and slowly grew into a ravenous tree monster. 

The piece on top is 3d printed and the piece below is a monster from those D&D pre-painted miniatures blind boxes. I had already taken it as it was suitably demonic enough for the army. 

After gluing them, i used milliputt to make some bells by stretching the putty over my paint pots, flaring the edge, using a round modelling tool to make this hammered effect and carving nurgle's symbol into the bells. The rings were done seperatly and glued afterwards. 

I then added branches from my dead basil plant to make it more tree-like (along with reinforcing the cheapo wizkids plastic), filled gaps with more mill putt and added texture paste on the floor for that muddy swamp look I'm after. I also cut a historical mini in half and glued them to the "tentacles" so it looks like the tree just eviscerated someone. I also added branches on the ground to imply roots and some skulls because its always nice and the original gnarlmaw had them. I also tried out making snotty goo on a few branches using a piece of plastic and some slightly dry mod podge. 

And there it is completely done and painted! I used speedpaints and drybrushes mainly to get the effects I wanted and used nurgle's rot and blood for the blood god (the only GW paints i used) for the fancy effects. It ended up really nice with a suitably dark and blanchitsu style which is what I wanted. 

Overall it was a nice taster into how the rest of the army would be painted in terms of techniques and colors. Its nice to experiment and go hog wild on a mini to get your confidence up for the mainline stuff. I'll update y'all when the rest of the army arrives but 3d printing is not fast if you aren't the one doing it. 

Hope this helped ya out in your own projects! This was Mickio, signing off.