And with this trio of figures, my force of modern Death Guard officially begins! Initiated as part of my Contrast Paint Experiment series after seeing and being inspired to get started on them by what Krautscientist did with his GW sample models, not to mention seeing painters like Wudugast and Ann pound them out for month after month – but even so, they kind of stalled a bit on the desk – I’d planned to finish these in August, then September as part of Squaddie September, but they missed both marks. Now, thanks to the Zomtober Painting Challenge over on Brummie’s Wargaming Blog, I’ve got the first three of my initial half-dozen of the suckers finished this afternoon. For those who are unaware, the Zomtober Challenge is to paint up a Zombie or a Survivor each week and have them posted up by the Sunday.

Thankfully, there appears to be enough flexibility to allow people like me who are more likely to get the zeds (or poxies) painted up in a single or pair of batches to participate as well as allow non-standard Zombies like these Poxwalkers to contribute. So I’ve been able to leverage that into some painted models. Of course, “Poxwalkers” and the new, “horny” design tweak is simply GW’s slight reworking of the previous “Plague Zombie” concept into something more trademark-friendly for their own purposes. So it’s all the same, pretty much.

On the Contrast Paint front, these models are pretty much perfect for the stuff – organic, mutated, discoloured, not-quite-right, and highly detailed. All factors that make the Contrast Paints work perfectly with them while being quite forgiving of the colours looking a bit off or improper here and there. It’s pretty much guaranteed that once the other half of the six I started are done, I’ll be starting on some more, regardles sof whether they get finished during Zomtober or not.

And yeah, since these things aren’t Nurgle Daemons but are instead part of the chaff from the Death Guard, they officially mark my beginning to paint the 40k-Mortal half of my Nurgle forces…