In the Black Sloth Hell, the aelves mourn the memory of their grace, beauty and celerity. A nightmare place, half-remembered from childhood stories the Black Sloth Hell has become their home – there is no escaping it, no fighting it and no resisting the changes that have been wrought upon them.

Where once he rode into battle on the back of a great stag, now the lord of the aelves rides into battle astride a giant snail – his emaciated, hunched form sits atop the filthy remnants of his war banner. Time moves strangely in the Hell and those unfortunate to stumble into the heart of the swamp watch transfixed as the snail slowly absorbs them and they are drawn into its soft flesh. An eternity passes. There are no screams.

The model is obviously based on the ridiculous Horticulous Slimux – I have always loved the idea of a giant snail rider – a fairly common trope in fantasy art – and the Slimux sculpt gave me the essential missing component – the shell. The rest of the snail is made from putty. I also removed the cartoon tree from the back of the shell and replaced the rider (although I do like the rider sculpt and I love his pose). The lord is built from several different Dark Eldar legs spliced together, a Wrack torso and Spirit Host arms. I also used Spirit Host parts for the grasping hands and screaming faces in the snail’s underbelly.

There are lots of different textures which as always, make the WIP look like a crazy mess. Mico flakes that will be leaves, crackle paste, sand paste and PVA glue for the slime.

10 Comments on “Lord of the Black Sloth Hell

  1. Simply brilliant ! I love the rider. The different texture are bringing the whole piece to another level. I would never have thought about it. The snail is amazing. Trust me, being French, I know my snails. :)

  2. I knew something good could be done with that horrible Horticulous Slimux model – I just couldn’t quite picture how it would be achieved. Beautiful work, and very inspiring.

  3. Quite fantastic, and the snail is obviously much creepier this way! I simply cannot understand what GW’s sculptors were thinking when slapping that ridiculous face on the stock model…

    This is easily one of the projects that have been getting the potential of the Age of Sigmar setting right …even before there actually was an Age of Sigmar setting. Fantastic work!

    • Thanks Kraut, good to see you around. My only guess is that they decided that cartoony would sell to a wider audience than extremely gross nurgle – having made some extremely gross nurgle recently I could understand that argument

  4. Just pitch-perfect yet again. I have to say that your Black Sloth Hell elves are probably the coolest Fantasy models I’ve seen.

    The concept of time acting strangely in the middle of the swamp so men can be over-run by giant snails is just a brilliant image.

    It sort of ties in with a vision I had about what the world of the mortal realms should be like: a world cobbled together by ascended mortals with no experience or guidance. It should be a broken world,ragged around the edges of creation. A place where the laws of physics and magic don’t quite work right because it’s a world patched together by amateurs from scraps of the World that Was.

    • I think that sounds like a good description of AoS – the realms crumble in places and chaos leaks through.

    • I don’t know what that is I’m afraid, but sloth is just another word for apathy or lack of motivation.

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *