Welcome to the Garden of Nurgle weary traveller. Grandfather Nurgle can relieve you or your aches and pains if you merely succumb to this blog post and read on and pledge yourself to the Plague God. His Harbinger of Decay is a prophet and he has seen your ascension to Daemon Prince. Come and accept his putrid gifts.

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I’m so late to the pestilent party with the Harbinger of Decay. Games Workshop sent him to me back in June as part of the Dawnbringers Maggotkin: Phulgoth’s Shudderhood box set and I knew I wanted to paint him up and add him to my Maggotkin collection. But sadly I was committed to painting all the Warcry sets. It’s only in the past week I’ve had the chance to paint this gorgeously grotesque sculpt. Sadly this set of 8 miniatures is no longer available to buy online, but here’s hoping he gets his own individual release soon.

My finished Harbinger of Decay in all its rancid glory.

I’m a neat painter. I like painting between the lines and doing nice blends with tidy edges. This approach doesn’t really work with Nurgle. Slapping washes on, drybrushing, airbrush overspills and generally flicking paint at the model can product some incredible results for Nurgle models and extremely quickly… but that’s not me. I like to paint it neatly and take my time. So to get the Nurgle feel across on my models the colour choices have to do all the heavy lifting.

Mounting the model on a cork makes painting the underneath much easier.

The Harbinger of Decay is a pure joy to paint with lots of detail layered upon each other. I really recommend drilling into his feet and supergluing straightened paper clips into the hooves and then pushing the paper clip ends into a large cork. This gives you the most access to painting underneath the model and getting to all the different bits of detail hanging down beneath the horse.

Showcase: Warcry Rotmire Creed (incl. painting guides)
I used my Rotmire Creed colour scheme on the Harbinger of Decay. Use the link above to find their paint recipe card or check out the bottom of the blog post where I’ll post it again.

Check out my Lord of Plagues, this was a test scheme for the mortal part of my Maggotkin of Nurgle collection. I really liked the “baby poo” colour for the armour as it looks disgusting, but it’s too harmonious with the other colours on the model. It’s all a bit beige overall.

I didn’t want a beige Harbinger of Decay so I decided to switch the armour colour to a more traditional green. I used the “baby poo” brown colour for some of the fabrics so it still ties in with the Lord of Plagues.

Here’s my recipe for the Harbinger of Decay’s green armour.

These are the colours I used on the Harbinger of Decay.

Do you like the Harbinger of Decay? Do you think Golden Demon will be swamped with this amazing sculpt? I can’t wait to see what the pros can do with it.

Garfy's Get a Grip - now available on ebay