For the holidays and our annual club Apocalypse game last week, Jason and TJ organized a Secret Servitor among a good number of the PAGE 40k players. Everybody was secretly assigned a random person, and painted a character or other 40k model or accessory for them. I was assigned Jason himself.
At first I wasn’t sure what to put together, as he doesn’t play Imperials anymore, and what few traitor Marines he does field are elaborately built and quite unique, so I didn’t have any good bits to throw at a unique model. Then I remembered I did have a relatively uncommon and distinctive Daemon-appropriate model laying around: Nightmaw, from Forge World. I had gotten him to be basically an NPC and/or objective for the Solypsus 9 campaign but never got around to putting him together, so I’m happy to see the model put into play.
This is the final product, my first model painted for 2016:
Backstory
The Nightmaw model comes with an infantry character named Sayl the Faithless, and they have an excellent official story (from Forge World):
Sayl is pre-eminent among the Dolgan tribe, and his rise to ascendancy began with his allegiance to Schalkain the Vile, as one of his seven seer-apprentices. Sayl’s honeyed lies turned each acolyte against the others, and fanned the flames of suspicion into murderous strife. Eventually Schalkain was manipulated into conducting a dark rite involving Sayl and three fellow ‘loyal’ apprentices which resulted in Schalkain’s horrific death at the hands of a daemon beholden to Sayl, while the three surviving acolytes were twisted into a terrible beast known as Nightmaw. Hated and feared, Sayl the Faithless and Nightmaw now march alongside Tamurkhan the Maggot Lord.
I mean, honestly, if you’re going to hang out with a guy named Sayl the Faithless, you’re basically begging to be turned into a Gollum-wannabe…
Painting
Painting him up I used my airbrush quite a bit, spraying the tan underside, green topside, grey rock, and black base rim, starting from a white primer. The blood paint and wash wound up a bit too thick, so coloring details of the claws and teeth were lost, but he looks super gore-drenched. As Jason exclaimed approvingly “Aw, he’s grooossss!” I debated a long while about how to wash the model, and eventually went with Athonian Camoshade over everything. That turned out to be a good call, it tied everything together nicely versus a black or brown on the rock. A couple layers of it went onto key green sections like along the vertebrae to accentuate those details.
I definitely need to switch out my dull coat as he came out shinier than I would have hoped, just like my Terminators did. I was hoping it was a question of spraying too much on them. Some of the green variations are also a bit too subtle, some of the texture and other bits would show up better in photos if they were more overt. The mud brown base got washed too thickly and caught a bit of overspray while doing the rim, so it’s too black and doesn’t stand out from the rim, especially in photos.
But I’m super happy with how the rock turned out. It’s a chunk of pink foam carved up and then coated in liquid greenstuff to give more texture and protect from the primer spray. The base physically also turned out well. I didn’t want to use the stock base because it’s square, a 40mm base would have been too small for the skull collection, and 60mm looked too big. So I wound up Dremeling the bottom off an empty 50mm vitamin bottle I had laying around, which turned out near perfect. If I did it again I’d try to find something a bit deeper in order to pore some resin water effect in there and make a nice little creepy grotto, but it probably wouldn’t change the general look and feel that much.
Overall I’m pretty happy with this guy, and it was entertaining to paint something besides Marine armor.
In-Game
Appropriately, in his debut, Nightmaw lurked by some rocks throughout the Apocalypse battle royale and survived to the end. Quite unlike essentially all of the Kingbreakers. Maybe I should consider more deeply the powers of the dark ones???
