Warcry Flesheater Courts "Worms of Paradise"

I felt like making something really unpleasant. Here's the Worms of Paradise, a group of Ghurish Flesheater Courts Ghouls for Warcry.

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The tar fields of Ghur are deep and ancient as seas. The roiling pitch consumes gigantic herd beasts, scavenging carrion eaters, and predating Manticores alike. Nothing decays in the anaerobic environment below the surface, but in some places the sunken animal bodies are so dense as to be crushed into peat. Deep, deep down, the glutted bowels of the tar pits hold the oldest remains of extinct behemoths that no living person has ever seen, compressed by aeons into peat. Here, earth and flesh and rock and bone are indistinguishable. Calcified veins form natural passageways almost wide enough for a grown man to squeeze through. Gigantic intestines wind for miles, creating a labyrinth of leathery hallways. There are even realmgates down here that were swallowed by ancient titans, gates small enough to go unnoticed at their other end but for the charnel stench emanating from them.
And in these blind, black depths there are living things that burrow and squirm like worms in an apple, feasting on the very earth they live in. Those who have minds believe themselves to be in a Paradise, where they want for nothing!

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Praise Nagash for delivering us into the gardens of Paradise here to endure forevermore. Today Wolf Cloak has been maintaining the manna orchards of the Westish regions and clearing the overgrown pathways thereabouts so that we no longer have to crawl to get there. This is good work for the narrow pathways in the Westish regions have been closing up with manna so as to cut off our access to the further Westmost regions of the garden where there is a great abundance of fruit and nectar, praise Nagash. A great pale ox intruded into the garden today and was slaughtered for a feast, praise Nagash. Today a little bird told me that there is a great tower of a noble king about where lays a great abundance of nectar and I have said to the others that we shall make pilgrimage there. There is a long climb upwards through tunnels in the Northish region to make the Uppish Northish Gullet or there is a shorter but narrower squeeze down into the Downish Southish Gullet, either will transport us near to the noble king’s tower for our pilgrimage. Praise Nagash for delivering us an abundance of manna and the peace of this garden of Paradise forevermore.

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These were a lot of fun to make. I got some of the Chaos Beasts from the Warcry box and the new Furies formed the basis for most of the Ghoul conversions. The Furies have some excellent unique poses and a nice gangly body shape. I wanted to contrast that with some unsettlingly human heads to make human-ish creatures that are just monstrous enough to look really disturbing.

Most of the heads came from severed heads from other kits, which tend to have weirder facial expressions than "normal" heads. One shrunken head from a Marauder shield, one from the Goblins kit, one cut from a pair of severed heads in the Zombies kit, and one Zombie head (of the sort meant to be firmly attached to a set of shoulders). All the heads got some green stuff work to add ears, new scalps, and a nose in the case of the Zombie head. The Crypt Horror's head was cut into pieces and reassembled with greenstuff filling the gaps to stretch it into a different distored shape.

The crawling Ghoul is based on the Fury sculpt that's climbing over a rock. The limbs were just about right to translate into a low crawl with a bit of squashing. He ended up on a 70mm cavalry base because the resulting pose was pretty long.

The crouching Ghoul, Wolf Cloak, has a wolfskin cloak made with the optional "double" head from a metal Chaos Warhound. The cloak itself was made from Milliput sculpted over some scraps from other cloak parts. I painted him before I glued him to his base so that I could get underneath him.

The boss Ghoul got a torso from a Savage Orc Boy. I liked how disproportionate it looked with the skinny Fury legs and a tiny shrunken head. It was hard to find arms (and a pose for them) that would suit his leaping pose, and in the end I gave him a single Fury wing (these are great bits). I'm not sure if he's a Crypt Flayer or a Crypt Horror now. Maybe he can ungainly flap around for short distances.

The Crypt Flayer, Angel Wings, gets two Fury wings, and one of my favourite GW head sculpts that turned up in several Middle-hammer era kits as a severed head. The facial features are so clear and the expression is haunting. In painting this one I used more orange shading on the body between the wings to give the impression of the warm light shining through the translucent wing membranes.

The Crypt Horror, Holy Deer, was the last one I built. I first thought of making something insectile, so that the Ghouls look like they accumulate horrible crawling animals into their warband, but in the end I was inspired by some horror illustration on Twitter and made a semi-Ghoul who walks on multiple hands. He has a pair of legs, but they're tucked up at his back and he doesn't use them! I also toyed with giving him multiple heads, but decided to keep it on the understated side to be more lowkey unsettling.

Painting was really fast and I'm very pleased with the result. I wanted to imitate the saturated blue-green/red-orange shading in some of the Warcry illustrations. In this case, there's a global blue-green "light" overhead, and a red-orange "shadow" underneath. It's similar to working with a zenithal shading technique. I started with the faces, since they have the most detail on these models. I shaded the faces with pure black and white, trying to pick out where the shadows from the overhead light would fall.

Once that was done, I glazed the light upper surfaces with blue-green, then the shaded underside with orange-red. I then continued the glazing (not the hard black/white pre-shading) onto the rest of the model. After that, I did more highlighting with pure white – not a colour I usually highlight up to since I think it can look unnaturally stark.

The wings on the leader and Flayer were stippled in warm colours and then had darker veins drawn on in burnt sienna. Throughout I was emulating a few techniques from model painters I admire – Ana Polanscak, Don Hans, and David Soper (apart from merely being one of the best painters out there, David makes great use of global lighting and explains the concepts very clearly on his blog).

Thanks for following! The reception for these on Instagram has been mental – thanks to all who follow me there.

Edit: gonna add a shout-out to Nicholas Tregidgo, whose awesome original take on Flesh Eater Courts inspired this project!

Hek