Nurgle Plague Toads bring a greeting from grandpa

After a short hobby hiatus (work, birthday, family) I thought it was high time to pick up the (air-)brush again and get painting. Aside from the (not quite unimportant) fact that its a lot of fun, I have signed up for an airbrush workshop this weekend so I needed to get the proverbial rust of my painting hands before making a fool of myself there*. After completing a bunch of Gaslands cars I have started working on Skaven and the Blackstone Fortress set. With that in mind, and to keep my distraction levels optimal, I decided to root out these Plague Toads from the lead/plastic/resin pile.

* Now I can make a fool of myself with rust free hands! 

Look at those charming fellows hop!

I bought these three quite some time ago because I wanted to paint along with Kenny 'Yo Dawg' Boucher. In Painting Nurgle is Secretly Easy and Top 5 Tricks for Painting Nurgle he shows how he painted his Plague Toads. As I have stolen picked up quite a lot of techniques from his videos I wanted to follow along with one as closely as possible. It helps that the models are quite cool.

I started out sticking bits of cork to 60mm bases but tossed those aside in favor of this slightly more simple approach. 

An upcoming airbrush course and a need to de-rust my painting hands seemed like the perfect excuse to make a 'gangsta gumbo' while painting along. I'm quite pleased by the result so a big thank you to Kenny for taking the time and effort to make his tutorials.

Painting the cast of characters takes a bit of time, but also raises the anticipation for finally playing Blackstone fortress.

To finish up this shorter then usual post here's my progress on the Blackstone Fortress models. I started out with the Black Legion marines. I also finished the robot (I think) character and four Ur-Ghuls. I have not read the manual yet, so I'm not quite up to speed on the rules and background. The most difficult part so far was deciding on what to do with the bases. After a few (failed) experiments I settled on the black with blue lines idea (stolen from as seen on Warhammer TV). As a gamer who started out in the eighties I'm occasionally awestruck at the tutorials available these days. From time to time I still pick up a technique from ancient White Dwarf issues, but as far as availability and ease to follow along goes, we live in good times. All I'm really missing is a halfway decent dragon model with some interesting AoS rules.