Monday 30 June 2014

Ellen Degenerate: Lord of Chaos

With Bring Out Your Lead! 2014 fast approaching, I find myself preparing, like you.

Painting.

As the more regimented of the readers of this blog may have noted, the posts have been sporadic and a little too spaced out. The sort of thing that happens when one is tackling real life: two year olds, family holidays and heroically ambitious company growth plans despite ridiculous cutbacks.

And if you thought the posting was suffering, well the past three months have produced absolutely no painting at all. Not a jot. No pots opened, no brushes laid out, no figures even undercoated, or cleaned. Not even been sniffing the glue.

But inspiration comes, as it always does.

Enter Ellen Degenerate. Don't recall the name? Go ahead and follow the link. There's time.

Now as you will see, the good lady is a good and powerful lord of chaos. Someone not to be trifled with, by all accounts. But how do you model a sinister and powerful chaos lord, when they're afflicted with one of these:


Providence is afoot, because it just so happens that Don Hans, slavering scion of Nurgle that he is, decided to paint an ostrich man, which goes to illustrate the point:



Interesting? Yes.

Disturbing? A little, yes. Mainly due to the paint job, actually.

Chaos Lord? ...er.....no.

And it was this conundrum that stopped me from working on Ellen. I had worked out what she might look like when I produced the epilogue of the last battle report played out on this site, which helped with the overall idea, but I was still stumped for a candidate figure.

I needed something frail, like an elf, but still full of power, as only a chaos lord could be. Likewise, something suggestive of the mind-shredding madness that is only millimetres away from engulfing her strained and anxious mind.

All along she was just sitting in front of me. I'm talking about 3 years now. Before I'd even written the first line of her first appearance, the candidate was waiting before me.

The Dark Emissary.

It is one of my favourite figures of all time - a candidate for so much. It could be dark elf sorcerer, some kind of chaos thing, a necromancer - it's even a good candidate for a grey seer. And also for Ellen Degenerate.

What I didn't do was take a before shot. But, you look like you're into finding things out, so you can google that and see what a normal one looks like.

In essence, I've not changed much at all. I toyed with different heads and I was on the very verge of replacing her staff with the daemon sword she has. In the end, I just gave her the neck, which twists over her back before returning under her left arm and positioning her head beautifully in the centre of her chest.

After three years in incubation, I give you...




...Ellen Degenerate:




A shot considering her armoured neck (she is blessed with fused chaos armour, you see). I tried to keep the colours bright, as she is an elf after all, and I suspect Slaanesh people are big on colours. In hindsight, I should have rounded the armour plates more, as I ended up trying to paint that in some sort of crustacean shell pattern.


I also tried to get the whorls and spirals to glow. I might revisit this after BOYL, depending on my mood, my painting schedule and my eternal enemy: real life.


A quick note about the camera. It's new and frustratingly shares nothing in common (y'know, like the user interface) with my old one. I took lots of shots which seemed okay on the camera screen, but were just useless for the blog - so, apologies for the light and the comparatively few shots.

Now I am clear to start working on her terrifying retinue - being comprised of Teacake, the chaos goblin and Sirrell Tonjon, the chaos dwarf.

Candidates have already been selected...

6 comments:

  1. What a bit of frustration can do to a woman. Not quite the lovely elven maiden she used to be. I'm sure she will cause great mayhem and destruction in the realms of chaos where she definitely belongs. Have fun at BOYL, sadly I won't be able to make it this year.

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  2. Good work, very nice indeed.

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  3. Just read your previous post on Ellen Degenerate - so amusing! Was laughing out load. Great job with actually building her as well.
    A cool thing with the older Beastman (C27 and C38) like the Ostrich is that they do have proper mutations.
    /Hans

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  4. Yep, gotta love this! Great work.

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  5. Cheers chaps - I'm hoping she'll have a long and fruitful life...

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