Painting a Plethora of Plague Monks, Part 1

I've been adding to the Clan Pestilens contingent of my Skaven army, and the bulk of it comes in the form of plague monks. Two 40-man units should be sufficient. That's four 20-man boxes, and a fifth box of 20 can be combined with all of the spare censor flails to make 20 plague censor bearers. But they're waaay down on my to-do list.

This post, in two parts, will show the process I used for cranking out 80 models.

 

 

Assembly

I didn't do anything fancy when building the models– Just straight assembly, no conversions other than the command models. I built half of the models with staff and sword, and the other half with two swords so each unit would be visually distinct. But I can still combine them into a single mega-horde if I need to.

To speed up the assembly line painting, the models were glued on strips of foam core. Each strip has one body type so, as I go down the line, I can hit all the same colors and details where the tails and belts are concerned. The arms and heads are varied, but the staffs and swords are grouped together.

 

 

Building the Bases

I used as many regimental bases as I could, and planned out the units as 10-man wide horde formations.

 

 

The double bases were made by gluing two 20mm bases on a strip of thin styrene card and trimming around the edge.

 

Now for the speed basing– I attached the bases to a board with double-sided tape.

 

They were painted with wood glue, and covered with fine ballast.

 

Once the glue dried, I added a few dabs of thin Zap-A-Gap to seal down the sand.

 

 

Note: Normally, I just super glue the sand right to the base. Super glue ensures that the sand will stay on permanently; sand attached with white or wood glue tends to scrape off over time. But applying a huge swath of super glue agitates my sinuses. The wood glue does the job of holding the sand and then a couple drops of thin Zap will spread over the sand and add more permanence.

Painting the Bases

I sprayed the bases with black primer and then gave them a dusting of Model Masters Light Earth spray.

 

 

Over this, I drybrushed some P3 Gun Corps Brown and then GW Screaming Skull. Using a 1-inch brush, I was able to paint them in one large swath.

 

Finally, the edges of the bases were painted with GW Castellan Green.

 

Once all the paint was set, I glued some static grass to the tops.

 

That's 80 finished bases. Painting them in this way was much faster than trying to drybrush around the feet of all the plague monks.

 

All the monks are ready to go, I'll show you how I speed painted them in part two.

 

'Til next time!