Greetings, reader! I’m Kenny, twin brother to Chris of The Unrelenting Brush. I set myself a rather intense hobby goal to undertake in a short and set time and thought it might be fun to share the process with you all, just in case anyone might be as masochistic as me.

On this, the final Sunday before returning to your day-job after Christmas, some might consider you mad for choosing to undertake a mad hobby dash on what should be the final day of rest. However, you cannot spell “gratification” without “Great Unclean One”…sort of. Maybe.

Anyway, I’ve set myself a goal to construct, paint and complete a Great Unclean One in a single day as a last “hoorah” of my hobby-filled holidays. Below I’ll explain how I went about doing this with progress updates, tricks, tips and any inevitable mistakes that may fall into place. This’ll be fun - hopefully!

Plan and Prepare

When tackling such a large kit, it’s important to prepare yourself for the work ahead. Do you know the loadout you wish to go for? Are you considering any magnetisations? What about sub-assemblies? It’s better to answer these questions before you start getting stuck into the kit as else you stand a higher risk of confusion, mistakes and frustration.

On this occasion, I am opting for a static loadout currently. This will be for the Great Unclean One to be wielding the Doomsday Bell and Plague Flail. The only other options/customisations for the kit are the numerous Nurglings that can adorn the model and its base, but I’ll tackle those at the end if time permits as they are very much a nice-to-have.

Something else that helps massively is having a reference for when it comes to painting. Fortunately, I already have a painted Great Unclean One along with a Rotigus Rainfather from years previous. I can keep these two at hand to better gauge the paint job I am after (to be consistent) but I can also look at those models and any details that I feel may be important to address on the new build, or possibly ignore if they feel superfluous for my goal.

Anywho, let’s get crackin’…

07:00 - Kick-off

After a solid night’s sleep, it’s time to leap out of bed, do some stretches, grab some breakfast and a coffee and get started with the build. Let’s do this thing!

Again, knowing exactly what bits I want to use from the kit will keep me apace here as I’ll need less time to sit and think about how I want this model to look and feel once it’s completed.

08:30 - Building Complete

Tremendous progress this morning! In a mere hour I’ve got the body and head built and ready. Now I move onto the weapons. 30 minutes later, the build is complete! With the flail left off as a sub-assembly that I’ll paint separately. Below, you can see the new addition alongside my precious Great Unclean One builds.

I have clipped out some Nurglings from the kit, as well as gathered a couple from other boxes that I have laying around.

11:00 - Primed

After running some errands and conducting an emergency raid for appropriate spray paints from my brother (thank you!), The Great Unclean One is primed, with his Plague Flail ready for metallic drybrushing - which should save me good time as opposed to conventional painting. I’ve also popped some Nurglings into proposed points for the base, should time permit. It’d be such a shame for the Great Unclean One to be on his lonesome!

Now, the only issue is, I’ve forgotten how I painted my last two mighty daemons of Nurgle…

12:15 - Airbrushing, Issues and Washing

From here I fired up the airbrush and started coating Screaming Skull on the hulking beast's more prominent/raised areas. Unfortunately, disaster struck as it would seem my airbrush was clogged from a previous session and proceeded to splat Screaming Skull out from the cup and all over my desk.

Grumbling as I went, I cleaned up the Screaming Skull, gave the airbrush a quick deep-clean and realised that this was actually a blessing. The Screaming Skull was too light and NOT what I used on my last two kits. I swapped over to Karak Stone and this was far closer to the desired colour.

After a general filter of Karak Stone over the model from a zenithal angle, I began the painstaking selective wash of thinned Agrax Earthshade into the very prevalent creases and folds. This took a while, but is important to give depth before the next stage.

I also used my airbrush again to give a bit of Bugman’s Glow to the edges of the larger wounds/openings to ensure they looked nice and raw as painting would continue. At this point, lunch beckoned me.

14:15 - Some Base Layers and Drybrushing

Once the wash was dry I then started filling in some base layers on what I knew would benefit from the drybrush to come. This included some of the fat layers within some of the larger wounds via a coat of Averland Sunset, along with the toe/fingernails that were given their base coat of Corvus Black.

Finally, it was time for the drybrush stage! For this, I got a make-up brush that I’ve had boxed for years for just such an occasion. I gave it a moderate amount of Screaming Skull, brushed off around 90% of the paint onto a bit of kitchen towel and then began drybrushing as if my life depended on it. This helps to blend the washed areas in with the higher areas that weren’t washed and provides a wonderful sense of depth. I made sure that this caught onto some of the fatty areas painted yellow previously, giving them a preliminary highlight.

I switched to a smaller drybrush brush to make sure I could hit the areas that were tougher to reach, such as beneath the chin and under the arms. Eventually, this step was done and I decided to start painting proper! The first step was to give a little life to the monster via his large, singular eye. I used a very small brush to paint the eyeball itself white, before using a small “dotter” to give it a black pupil. Voila!

After this, I used Flesh Tearers Red contrast paint into some of the smaller open wounds to make them look freshly scraped. Seeing these colours come together on the model got me very excited to jump further into the thick of things. Onwards!

15:00 - Tentacles…

So. Many. Tentacles. This model is slathered with tentacles, both big and miniscule. I’ve gone through and caught all of these (hopefully) with Bugman’s Glow. The plan will be to wash these later with a dark red to look sore and likely drybrush back up to a pink.

From here, it’s a lot of little things. I’m going to buckle-in and get ready to metaphorically break the back of this massive task.

17:50 - The Home Stretch

Goodness gracious, where has the time gone?! I’ve been so enraptured with painting this thing that I almost forgot to resume the updates!

Well, the final leg is definitely nearing its end. I’ve managed to tackle most of the remaining elements to a point that I’m happy with them. There are some areas where the drybrush didn’t quite mask the wash, which is a shame. Nonetheless, I’m going to persevere and see if painting the details can distract from the few niggling issues I’ve picked up on after staring at this thing for 10 hours.

Guts and gross bits - Screamer Pink, washed with Druchii and highlighted with some Screamer Pink mixed with Bugman’s Glow.
Mouth tongue…thing - Bugman’s Glow, washed with Reikland Fleshshade, re-highlighted with Bugmans Glow mixed with Kislev Flesh. The end of the tongue got a second wash of Reikland, whilst its tongue was painted Death Guard Green, capped with some Death Guard Green mixed with Corvus Grey.
Horns - Painted with Dryad Bark, with the intention to drybrush them black towards the tips.
Fatty Layers - Washed with Seraphim Sepia.
Cheeky little maggots - Painted with a couple of rough coats of Screaming Skull, washed with Seraphim Sepia.
Rear loincloth - Khorne Red
Doomsday Bell - The handle is painted with Bloodreaver Flesh, whilst the trim was painted with Balthasar Gold and the silver painted with Iron Hands Steel. This all needs to be dirtied up, followed by the pommel/butt of the bell to be drybrushed with a Mechanicus Standard Grey for a stony look.

21:15 - Finishing Touches

Mercy me, my poor back! Let it be said that posture is important when painting for long periods, so don’t neglect your bodies, folks.

Anywho, the new addition to my Maggotkin of Nurgle army is just staring at me, almost 100% completed - I’m waiting for the texture paint to cure. Once that’s done, it’ll be time to drybrush it and glue on the Plague Flail and then that’ll be the job done. The last few hours have been spent on the Nurglings that I decided to push through and include. They include a few littering the base for decoration and one that sits upon the Great Unclean One’s shoulder hiding an unsightly seam/gap. Final images to come…

22:00 - The Great Unclean One Emerges!

That’s a wrap, folks. My third (and final, to be clear) Great Unclean One is completed! I started at 07:00 this morning and have stopped just shy of 22:00. Excluding drying time and periods I had to tend to “real life stuff”, I reckon the painting took me around nine hours total. I think that’s quite fair for such a centrepiece model.

Would I do this again? Perhaps, for the right model/kit. What that would be is anyone’s guess at this point. All I know is, my Thricefold Befoulement is ready to lay waste to the Mortal Realms amidst the sound of titanic wretching and giggling Nurglings.

The Next Day - Lessons Learned

Having spent the night looking back at how I approached this mad dash at hobby progress, I felt it apt to assess what went well and what didn’t so that I might learn something for my next hobby sprint.

In terms of what went well, considering that I somewhat rushed a few parts of the project in order to meet my self-imposed deadline, I’m very happy with the results. There’s suitable detail, colour and contrast to the model that I can call myself pleased with the final look. There are a few things I might go back to and touch-up sometime down the line, but I’d have no issue fielding this guy on the table as is. I also definitely saved time and headaches in some areas, such as sub-assembling the Plague Flail and knowing pre-emptively how I’d build the kit. You’d be surprised how much time can be spent perusing a kit, looking through rules and considering the options, all of which takes time from getting the model built and painted.

For things that went less-than-ideal, there are a couple. My early issues with my airbrush definitely cost me time in cleaning the airbrush itself and tidying the mess it made. In addition, not being prepared and having the sprays before-hand also cost me time that, whilst spent doing other things, could have given me more time and breathing space to prevent the need to rush. I can see the cost of this, a few areas not quite highlighted enough to pop, some areas where wash has pooled that I didn’t spot in time to fix. Generally, and some might say unsurprisingly, preparation is key. No matter how prepared you think you are things can (and often do) go wrong that will potentially impede your progress. If I’d gotten the spray paints before hand and suitably cleaned my airbrush, I would likely have had a couple of hours to spare which would have been spent elevating the paint job further.

Well, that’s it! Thanks very much for reading and witnessing my journey and spiral into further hobby madness as I set myself these bizarre and frantic hobby goals purely because I can.

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Hobby Sprints - A Great Unclean One in One Day