Painting rotting flesh

How I painted wings for a Demon Prince of Nurgle

Written by Ańa

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It must have been in 2008 that I painted two commissioned Chaos Demon Princes of Nurgle in that pre-heresy color scheme (white armor with green decorations). At the time everybody used winged Demon Princes for Warhammer 40.000, so these had to have wings, too. So I used wings from Heresy Miniatures B’hakoth model, converted them and painted in a disgusting Nugle way. But this only started the series of questions how I painted these rotting leathery wings. To avoid responding to every question separately, I created this tutorial showing how to paint wings for a Nurgle Demon Prince.

Here’s the first wing. It’s more or less finished, and at this point I decided to take pictures of the process of painting the other wing.

Generally I don’t try to analyze or organize thoughts clouding in my head in any logical way… (otherwise I might decide that if I don’t know where to start, I should not start at all )
I prefer to go all ahead instinctively… to keep my thoughts busy (especially to keep my left hemisphere busy, so that it doesn’t disturb the right one ) and to start painting… and to hope the rest will be fine somehow.
What I did first was outlining the shape of the “skin” which remained on the wing.
I think it wasn’t a bad choice because in case anything had been wrong, I still could correct it easily, because this light blue color would be easier to cover than red.

The blue color is probably a mix of P3 Coal Black + P3 Menoth White Highlight / Vallejo MC Ivory 918 (you can use any of the two alternatives).
The remaining surface was painted with Vallejo MC Woodgrain (transparent) 70828.

The next photo shows the wing during application of highlights to the skin:

Hmm, I didn’t finish it and I started shading the border between “skin” and “under-skin”.
You can see how unsystematic I was (that proves that the wing was created by Chaos ).
I also added a stich on the “skin”.

I returned to highlighting the “skin” and modified my concept for colors.
Even the previous photos shows that I added darker decolorations of a green shade (it’s a glaze of P3 Coal Black + Vallejo Smoke Game Ink). The same color as the skin on the final color of the demon’s arms.
I also added some light blue by highlighting P3 Coal Black with white (P3 Morrow White).

That’s more or less what my painting of the demon prince’s wings was like.
Total chaos can sometimes make painting even more enjoyable, and sometimes can only make it more difficult.
This time it was ideologically necessary.
And that’s what the wings looked like in the end (I only painted some chipped paint on the green arrows later.):