A Year in Miniatures 12: Deathshroud Terminator

Since I started thinking about the stories I want my models to tell, I seem to be accumulating a lot of homebrew factions.

A little while ago* while searching for inspiration as to how to paint some death guard, I set myself the challenge of avoiding the colour green. After playing around with a few combinations, I found a reference image of an abandoned ship, its white paint chipped and scratched, revealing rusted iron beneath. A few more experiments with chipping medium and I had my scheme and concept pretty much down. All that said, I’d like to introduce The Abyss, a Death Guard warband specialising in aquatic and submarine combat. More precisely, I’d like to present Dagon Gyradus, the first test model for the army.

(I devised a whole naming scheme based around sea monsters, Dagon is an honorific given to the Abyss’s Deathshroud Terminator squads, while Gyradus is the individual’s name, He is of course named after a pokemon, because I was running out of actual sea monsters…)

This was my first time using chipping medium and I have to say it produces a wonderful effect. The one challenge it did give me was trying to maintain definition between the armour panels since the contrast between adjacent plates tends to be a lot less than the contrast between the chipped and unchipped areas on the plates. I’m not fully happy with the result as shown here, since taking these photographs I’ve gone back in and added a lot of blacklining, which helps a lot. I’ll grab some updated photos when I’m finishing up the rest of the Deathshroud squad.

Conversely, I’m very happy with the purple worms and tentacles. They’re not that much of a feature on this model, but some of the other Death Guard figures feature them very prominently, and I’m looking forward to how they’ll look on those. It’s based on some photographs of purple octopodes I ran across while looking for reference images of shipwrecks, and I’m probably going to add some blue rings to the more tentacle-bedecked models just to make the inspiration as obvious as possible. If I ever start keeping fish, I might have to give The Abyss a really good coat of varnish and use them as tank decorations…

This model is actually serving as a test for two different Killteams. One, obviously, is going to Death Guard team - since I’m already committed to painting up a bunch of Nurgley Astartes and plague zombies, it makes sense to make sure I’ve got a valid Killteam build in there somewhere as that’s the game I actually prefer playing. They’re probably not going to surface for a while though, I’ve already got plenty of projects on the go, and I shortly intend to take a break from Games Workshop miniatures and try out a few other ranges for a bit. The other Killteam is a commission, and you’ll be seeing what we’ve been up to in that direction very soon!

I actually finished painting this lovely chap weeks ago, but circumstances conspired to prevent me getting photographs and doing this write-up until recently. Regardless, I’m now one miniature behind on my Year in Miniatures plan. Not that I’m particularly concerned about that - something about having a 10-strong Killteam almost finished makes me feel like I’m probably going to catch up in the near future!

Next time: hopefully that other Killteam assuming I get it finished in time!

16/ 06/22
Weeks Elapsed: 24
Miniatures Finished: 23

* “A little while ago” in this case meaning around the time I was finishing Abaddon the Despoiler. Which, since he’s not on the Year in Miniatures list, means it was some time in 2021…