The Great Washed (in Agrax)

Chaos Cultists! This brave band of cannon fodder has served the Thousand Sons well in their debut battles, so it would be criminal to keep playing in their base coats.

Let's whip out the Liquid Talent and get started!

These are some great models, monopose notwithstanding. I'll spare you the duplicate ones, you'll just have to take my word that I painted ten of them (go me!)

When I first decided on Thousand Sons, I knew I wanted Cultists. Tzeentch is a very cult-ish type of Chaos God, after all, and I always like to have a 'baseline' unit in an army, to properly show up how big the superhumans really are by comparison.

(by a stroke of fortune, they also seem pretty useful in-game: filling up detachment slots, holding objectives, screening the good stuff etc.)

However the existing models, with their gas masks and breathing tubes, seemed more suited to Nurgle (sigh ... does Nurgle have to get everything?)

At first I toyed with the idea of fitting autoguns to Kairic Acolytes, but sanity prevailed and I decided to stick Acolyte heads on existing Cultists.

I wanted to keep the colour palette muted, to contrast against the gold-and-turquoise brilliance of the Rubricae, but still favouring blue, rather than green or red. So the clothes were a variety of greys and browns: Skavenblight Dinge, Mechanicus Standard Grey, Dawnstone, The Fang, Incubi Darkness, XV-88, Balor Brown and Dryad Bark.

I tried to keep the colours as randomly applied as possible (it's hard to keep things consistently un-uniform, I imagine it would be much quicker painting a block of troops all the same), and then liberally washed it with either Agrax Earthshade or Nuln Oil.

The one standout was the Cultist Champion, who got a whole trenchcoat, and even some layer highlighting to boast of. The coat was Celestra Grey, washed with Drakenhof Nightshade, then layered back up. The epaulettes and lapels were Ahriman Blue, with Nuln Oil.

I must have been thinking of Spike the vampire's trenchcoat when I gave him the peroxide blond hair, but now I'm uncomfortably reminded of Tommy Lee Jones' character in JFK.

"Who need a Magic Bullet when you've got a shotgun?"

So that's half the Cultists finally done. Hopefully the next batch will also see some paint before they next hit the battlefield.

"Monty, you terrible cult!"