Nagash / Avatar of the Death God - WIP

Painted version can be seen HERE.

I started working on my Nagash mini in the beginning of September 2015 and it was my biggest project to this date. I wasn't very happy with GW's design and I wanted to convert somehow, making him similar to my wights and maybe a bit Slavic too. The popehat had to be removed and I wanted some parts of him to be covered with bones - that last part was inspired by Nito from Dark Souls video game.

The subassemblies were done in the same way as Duncan showed on the Games Workshop tutorial for building Nagash - I really recommend that.

I started by doing a rough draft of sorts - plasticine was used to simulate bones covering him (it did a mediocre job doing that). Then, pieces of paper were used to make a spike crown for him - which would then create only a silhouette of a pointy helmet. Folks at Carpe Noctem helped me at this design stage, sharing their opinions and observations - such as those bones on his robe being similar to linked sausages...

Out of all that deliberation came out this sketch. He got a cape (which would be made to look like pieces of flayed skin) and bones were then on top of the cape. His hat got a full-blown onion dome and the number of spikes surrounding it got smaller. This would be the final draft and the real conversion work would start.

I started with the base. I didn't like the fact that his spirits were sort of 'sliding' around the ground - the mini looks neither grounded or floating that way. The fact that there are skulls and skeletons in the ground wasn't helping. The solution for that was to put the spirits in the cracks in the ground, as if Nagash's floating spirits were raising the dead buried there, ripping the whole landscape apart in the process. I did all that by surrounding the spirits with pieces of cork and then easing the transition into the rest of the terrain with some milliput.

After that, I filled all the free cracks with skeleton parts to get that 'dead are being raised in his wake' effect. But the spirits themselves were still rather badly connected to the ground and the base was still showing in the cracks. To remedy this I started pouring watered-down PVA glue into the ravines - it would stick in the crevices the most, filling them in the process. After MANY, MANY layers of it I finally got what I envisioned - a flowing river of spirits.

Nothing was deemed 'too much' for this project so I made some additional Slavic-themed decorations for this base - gamayuns! The heads are taken from High Elf Sisters of Avelorn and the rest was sculpted. They would rest on wooden greybeard sculptures on the front of the base - which seemed a bit too empty for me.

Another idea was to put some small Slavic idols around Nagash to push the Slavic feel even further. I followed a tutorial I found on CMON and copied the original to get 8 of them.

After all of that, I had the base ready. The pieces of cork are included in the picture because I was using them to sculpt the bark on those tree stumps below - you can find the whole tutorial describing the process HERE.

The only piece that was missing was the cape. I started with making a rough base for it out of greenstuff.

And then I covered it with more greenstuff to make it look like small pieces of flayed skin. On that, I glued a writhing mass of skeletons from Wargames Factory - all to make a necromantic impression of a thick fur cape.

With that done, the conversion part was finished. Well, almost - I had to add some more skeletons connecting the cape with the armor, but that came later, after painting some hard-to-reach parts. While making those photos I noticed that I completely forgot the sword sheath! It was too late for that, so I had to accept him as he was.

This was in late October 2015.