Putrid Blightkings: Death Guard Terminator Conversion Finished

A fell wind blows...

The year is already well past the halfway mark, and up until this point, I have not shown any progress of one of my favorite projects I started last year, my Blightking/Death Guard terminator conversions.  I am happy to say that the first of my Death Guard terminator conversions is finally complete! Now that the first terminator is finished, I thought it would be a good opportunity to talk a little about how I went about the conversion and my thought process. Also with a little luck I will be showing you completed versions of the other two Death Guard terminators in the coming month!

The biggest hurdle that I needed to overcome to finish the first of the Death Guard terminator was figuring out how to complete his torso armor. Due to the size and bulk of the Blightking bodies, fitting any armor over them was difficult. To overcome this, I ended up cutting a Cataphractii terminator body into multiple pieces and carving each piece to roughly fit on top of the Blightking’s torso.  While this was not too challenging, it was quite time consuming, and paved the way for the true challenge of using green stuff to fill in the sizable gaps, and ultimately bring all the separate pieces together. While reshaping the terminator’s armor I decided to fashion the left side to look torn and mangled, allowing more room for his bloated and swollen power fist arm. While mentioned in previous posts, it is worth saying again here that all the greenstuff work was greatly facilitated through the use of Royal Sovereign Colour Shapers. These vinyl/rubber tools make smoothing out and shaping greenstuff much easier.

Now that the conversion is completed, I am amazed how much of the original Blightking model is hidden.

As a nod to the classic Nurgle/Plague marine esthetic, I decided I had to add some extra exhaust ports or smoke stacks on the model’s back. After looking around through all of my plastic kits, I realized that I could create exhaust ports using the little censer found dangling from the backpacks of the Skitarii Rangers from the Adeptus Mechanicus (finally a use for all the censers that I trimmed from the backpacks of my Skitarii, ha ha). I shortened the Skitarii censers with an x-acto knife and trimmed a little notch into the side of each of them to seat on the terminator’s back. With the exhaust ports glued in place I went back with greenstuff and added a few attachment cables to the ports.

One of the most substantial parts of the conversion was fitting pieces of terminator armor around a Blightking body. 

While I wanted to leave the one arm missing its shoulder pad to showcase his bloated physique, a terminator would not really be complete without at least one domed shoulderguard.  In another nod to classic Nurgle design, I wanted to have some vicious bone spikes erupting from the thick pad. To do this I trimmed some spikes off of one of the Blightkings’ shoulderpads and glued them to a standard terminator shoulderguard. Then I went at the shoulderguard with a pin-vise and an x-acto knife to make it suitably scarred and pitted. In place of the shoulderguard on his left arm I added three metal spines protruding from his shoulder.

I am pleased with how tiny his combi-bolter seems in relationship to the hulking monstrosity that is his armor.

Next to s Scion, it is clear how cyclopean the terminator is.

While the completion of the first Death Guard terminator has been a long time in coming, I think the results were well worth the wait! Now that the conversion is complete I am busy trying to decide on a color scheme for when I paint the model. Since the warrior heralds from the mighty Death Guard legion I think I want to remain pretty faithful to their white and green color scheme. Due how ancient his armor is I will need to make sure it is heavily worn and battered by the elements (and rot and decay!). Any thoughts or suggestions on the painting scheme are welcome! Finally, I am happy to say that I have been making steady progress on the other two Death Guard terminators remaining. So with a little luck you will be seeing more of them in the coming month.

- Adam Wier