How to paint a Nurgle Chaos Spawn (using wet blending)

In preparation for a local painting competition, I have decided to have a go at wet blending.

Introduction

Wet blending is the technique of combining two or more colors on a model resulting in a fine transition between them. You can take a look at this YouTube tutorial. The technique consists of putting a thick coat of each paint on the model, then pulling one into the other at the edges ("blending") while they're still wet. In particular, this is easy to do with two colors, and it's a common technique to have one brush dipped into each paint (hence this is called two-brush wet blending). Besides ease of use, this has the added benefit of being able to switch paints quickly, such that the paint already applied to the model won't get dry before you blend it.

This video convinced me that this is fairly easy to accomplish on a Nurgle model. The painter mixed brown and green to get a necrotic flesh effect. This is what I've tried to do with one of my Chaos Spawn models, originally assembled to be used as a Beast of Nurgle.

(the model on the left)

As you can see, there's a thick layer of primer on the model. I was using a graffiti spray as a primer back then, and sometimes it just sprayed too much paint on my models. It's almost obscuring the details - muscle groups, abdomen, etc, which hurts even more, since this Spawn model isn't very detailed (compared to a Plaguebearer for example, which is full of torn skin, boils, pustules etc.). As such, this paint scheme has the added benefit of compensating for the lack of details!

Getting at it

I selected an appropriate looking brown and green color, and got to work.

Looking back, the green proved to be too vivid. I compensated by blending it as much as I could. You can see later on that I've left a larger green spot on the back, and it's just too bright. I'll have to revisit that!

I usually water down my paints. Remember, however, that I said earlier that wet blending needs a thick coat of each paint? Well, it really does. This is what I got when trying to blend watered down paints:

They just flowed right into each other, creating an almost uniform mix. I washed it off, and started anew.

The second try went a lot better:

And I covered the entire model using this scheme:

I think it came out pretty good, especially for a technique used for the first time. I wasn't entirely happy with the fact that it looks somewhat like a military camo paint scheme, so I decided to add some more details. I started off with a light drybrush using Dead Flesh:

You can spot some of the highlights around the knuckles:

Then I applied a violet wash to some areas, aiming for a bruised flesh effect. I only have black wash on stock, so I used a heavily watered down paint:

I have found that heavily watered down paints have a wash-like effect. If you apply too much of it on the model, it looks bad while still wet, giving the impression of globbing up:

 But once it's dry, this is how it looks like :

Some more Dead Flesh color creates the effect of pus gathering near the eyes and running down the body:

The too-thick primer created some bubbles which I wasn't happy about, but then I decided to pretend they're pustules. Applying tiny yellow speckles to them did the job:

I then wanted to get some contrast on the model by painting the eyes red:

But it just felt off. So I added yellow pupils to the smaller eyes, and a huge yellow center to the bigger eye. This feels menacing and disturbing enough, instead of just a swollen red welt:

Finally, I felt that the pus isn't standing out enough, so I applied some gloss varnish to it. Now it has to be said that this was more of an experiment, as I don't have miniature-paint-quality gloss on hand. I just hopped down to a hobby store, bought an acrylic gloss, and hoped for the best. It isn't really visible on the picture below. The surface is also kind of small, and shadowed, since the model is leaning forwards. If some light reaches it though, it has a bit of a shine.

I'll leave the base for another time, so that's it!