Bar-Zhagg’s Grot Slaves

The dawi zharr Daemonsmith Bar-Zhagg has been on a slave capturing mission in the Painted Spires of Efengie.  He and his enforcer Druzgul have managed to collect 5 grot slaves and 2 squigs to accompany them on their quest in the damned city of Shadespire.

All of the actual comversion work on this warband rests on the shaman and the enforcer, who were polymorphed into chaos dwarves!  For Bar-Zhagg, i replaced his head with a tomb kings skull I had lying around, which became a helmet.  I built up his hat with green stuff topped with a shield from some marauder horsemen, and decorated it with an extra bit from a forge world daemonsmith.  I also covered his feet with boots, built up some glove cuffs at his wrists, and of course sculpted his beard.  

Druzgul's head originally belonged to Magore (of Magore's Fiends), but mine was certainly not using it anymore :P.  Also, on both of them I tried my hand at some chainmail for the first time.  Druzgul got it on his sleeves, while Bar-Zhagg got some over the tattered cloth on his back (it's easier to see the chainmail in the painted pics later).

I got a lot of questions/comments/concerns on the chaos dwarf facebook group (Age of Sig Zharr) about size comparisons.  I think they come off as a little bit frail among other chaos dwarves, especially Forge Worldones, but you can see here that they are similar in size to the 6th edition (?) dwarf warriors kit that I have used as the basis for many of my chaos dwarf conversions.

So here is a finished Druzgul.  I've gotten very excited about painting fire lately.  I've discovered that the secret to bright, magical looking fire is to just not have any shadows.  It seems obvious and easy, but what I did was lay down a very solid layer of Yriel Yellow, and then brighten it up to Troll Slayer Orange.

I sculpted the chainmail after seeing this tutorial (which I have shamelessly stolen from pinterest).

I used the blue of the dwarf beards and the yellow of Druzgul's fire as my colors to tie the warband together.  Because of the differences in coloration between the dwarves and goblins, that was something I gave a lot of thought to when figuring out how to paint these guys.  So all of the mushrooms are blue and yellow, Snirk's potion is blue, and the fletching on the gobbos arrows is blue and white.  I've also included a close-up of Snirk so that you can see the cuts I painted on the goblins' skin.  I wanted to somehow show that they were slave grots and not happy healthy grots, so I went with cut marks like they've been being whipped and beaten.  The cuts are Khorne Red highlighted with Cadian Fleshtone.

Finally, here's the man of the hour.  I think if I could go back and do things differently, I'd have given him a less gobliny staff, but what's done is done.  I'm pleased with how the hat and helm came out.  His beard is pretty extravagant, and probably should have been shorted on the sides (it seems kind of flat at the bottom, which doesn't strike me as super realistic).

And at last, you can kind of see the top of his hat here, and the chainmail on his back.  I don't think my chainmail turned out great, but I'm pretty pleased with it for a first attempt.  I think as a warband, these guys have turned out alright, but I'm not as thrilled with them as I have been with some of my others.