Pestilential Painting: Plague Burst Crawler Part Two

 Welcome back to the Vectorium, and the blog's 250th post! This week's hobby time has been spent with Papa Nurgle's servants once more. I've laid down most of the base colours on the Plague Burst Crawler:

 The tank is looking very clean at this stage, so I'll need to spend some time washing and weathering the Beastie.  I like the pitting and corruption on the hull as Nurgle's grip takes hold but I was quite surprised by the lack of fleshy icky bits compared to most Death Guard models (there are a few tubes on the plague spewers.

And I am looking forward to getting the Crawler onto the table top and to start shelling stuff with the Bombard. The new Death Guard Codex arrived in the post this weekend and a quick scan tells me that the big ol' gun looks nasty; a S8 D2 Plague Weapon means it will be wounding Marines on 2s, re-rolling 1s (insert evil cackle here!).

There are plenty of reviews available covering the new rules, but I'll touch on the stuff I like and think looks good in coming posts as I go through the list building process. 

The Death Guard utilise a lot of characters to support their Infantry and Daemon Engines. There's a new HQ accompanying the Codex release called the Lord of Virulence. He seems built for close up combat, bearing a twin nozzle plague spewer, and a plague weapon variant of a power fist. 

Doh! Major mould line to remove!

Regardless of how effective (or not) the Lord is on the table top, I'm looking forward to painting him. He's got a lovely cape made of guts and skin, so I guess that compensates for the Crawler 😜

I've also built a Helbrute, the Chaos equivalent of the Imperial Dreadnought. The 9th edition Codexes have introduced the concept of "Core" units (basically the nuts and bolts squads which can receive HQ buffs), and the Helbrute is a Core Vehicle so I'll be interested to see what difference that makes. 

I have built and painted many Dreadnoughts for my various Imperial armies, and I was surprised by how different the Helbrute kit was to construct. There's a lot of options and I've gone with something simple; Multi Melta and Dreddy Fist. In previous editions this would be a WTF combo, but with 9th edition smaller boards, and the buff to Multi Meltas to have 2 shots I'm hoping this guy will do some work.

I've built this model straight out of the box and I'll have to remove the generic Chaos Iconography. If I build another add some Death Guard bits to Nurgley him up!

 Thanks for reading; stay tuned for more progress on the Plague Crawler and my initial thoughts on the Death Guard Codex.