“He is not disgusting. He is devastating.”
An old god swollen with memory, seated deep in a garden of rot. This Great Unclean One carries sorrow in his horns and slowness in his bones. His body is a map of entropy, where very wrinkle remembers what has been and what is yet to come.
Within his bloated shadow, joy blooms. Nurglings (his beloved children) riot and cackle through the muck, spreading his gifts with delight. They are his heartbeat. He watches them with paternal pride. They are his joy. His little lords.
This is a piece about contrast:
🍄 Slowness and movement
🍄 Stillness and chaos
🍄 Sorrow and celebration
The lore spark is from The Lords of Silence, my favourite Nurgle book. It’s the way the book treats the “little lords”… The contrast between the chatter and innocence of the nurglings and the death guard themselves that set a little flame alight inside me.
It made me want to create a piece that talks about the slowness, silence, and sorrow contrasted with the joy, chaos, and movement of the Nurglings. Something that makes you feel uncomfortable when you first look at it and then draws you deeper as your eye is pulled into the story of the model.
I’ve pulled various bits together form Great Unclean One entries in the Nurgle Wiki, fungal life cycles from my mycelial obsession, and the decaying joy that specifically happens when beetles and insects look like they’re having the time of their lives when they’re breaking down carcasses - funny little things that they are.
To make this happen, I’m still focusing on upskilling and all the rest. But hopefully in a more structured way. Below you’ll find the focus for this piece, some of the mood boards, inspiration, a gallery of progress for the project, and some of the learnings so far. You can expand and collapse the 3 main sections to make navigation a little easier.
This piece marked a shift.
Less shock. More sorrow. Cleaner, but not polite.
Painting it on stream forced clarity. Explaining contour decisions out loud exposed where I was bluffing and where I actually understood what I was doing.
The Nurglings saved the composition. The warmth-in-shadow experiment will return in future pieces. The line studies need another year.