WH 40k- Chaos Daemons - Bloodthirster? Keeper of Secrets?

After three months without a day off and no real time to work on anything, I started to get frustrated. Besides the joy I get out of it, painting also provides me with an outlet for all the irritation I build up managing my employees and dealing with irrational customers.

I knew it was past time to work on something when little irritations seemed major problems, so I pulled out an Ultraforge model I had been tinkering around with for the past year, sat down and pretty much finished it...6 hours later.

I'm actually rather proud of this model.

If you haven't checked out Ultraforge you really need to do yourself a favor and look at some of their sculpts. They are cheap for their size, all resin, and amazingly detailed.  I had picked up the Tree Woman as I felt it would make a good alternative to Games Workshops Keeper of Secrets. The official model is hideous.  Slaanesh is supposed to be the Dark God of excess, desire etc. He's the only evil God to look beautiful. So beautiful he can entrall any mortal with a glance. 

Why then does his greatest minions look like a cross between a man, woman, crab, horse thing?

Starting off, I chopped off all the extra tree limbs and branches that were...branching out from her body. Then I started smoothing out all the jagged cuts I left behind and removing the small amount of flash that was left on the model.
I wasn't sure if this was going to be a Keeper of Secrets to start with or a Bloodthirster, so I ventured into the world of magnets for the first time.
I drilled out a couple holes in the shoulder blades to place some demonic wings I had on hand along with a spot in each arm.
The model came with alternative hands that are holding wooden knives? Eventually I want to model her holding gigantic axes rather than knives so I went ahead and magnetized them all.

 This was also the first real time I worked with modelling putty to fill in holes and work in some extra details.  Sadly I tore up big chucks of the model as I tried to fit in my magnets for the first time. The holes were too big. Detail was lost. The dremel missed it's mark.  I'm not sure if those are common first time mistakes, but all 3 hit me at once. On a large expensive model at that.
To fix my mistakes, I had to learn how to use putty quickly. If you want to do a decent job at molding putty with very little effort, get some shaping tools. They are cheap and they helped a newbie fix some pretty nasty mistakes.
You can't even tell where my mistakes or magnets are, that's how easy they were to work with.

Hmm...you can see in this picture that one of my magnets didn't lie completely flush with the arm. I'll have to go back and fix that at a later date.
I started off painting her the same as all my previous Khorne daemons using purple/pink as the main color. It was going great until I finished the base coat and it was pink. Overwhelmingly pink. PINK.
It really was nauseating how much there was on the poor model.

The pale flesh tone at random intervals ended up looking much better than expected at breaking up all the pink. It's vaguely sexy while creepy at the same time.
I had a blast using the GW washes on the model, in case you couldn't tell from looking at it.
Sepia shaded the flesh while red and black shaded the pink.

Slight highlights to brighten the edges of her "skin" and she was pretty much done.

I stuck her on an extra Trygon base since nothing else came close to her size. She is a big girl.
She looked so lonely though on that large base, so I had to add something to spruce it up.
I was going to add a few casualties to the base, body parts littered around, but it didn't seem very cinematic.
Not sure where I got the idea of having the Greater Daemon rescue a lesser Daemonette, but it looks good.

I modeled the Daemonette to look as if she was kicking away the Marine in an attempt to escape. Her claw is trying to shear the boltgun in half and her mouth is screaming in rage and fear.
The Marine doesn't have a care in the world. He's knocked the Daemon down, has her pinned under his foot and boltgun and chainsword ready to eradicate her evil from the galaxy.
Too bad he didn't look behind himself or notice the pentagram seared into the dusty landscape.

First attempt at a "lava" effect which really needs more rocks and large flat areas to be effective. The little raised portion of the ballast/sand really aren't tall enough or large enough to give it the fiery brimstone look I was going for.
I may have also been a little heavy handed with the yellow in an attempt to show a glowing light.

Over all this may be one of the best models I've painted to date. It's definitely showing much improvement over my other Daemon models and I started work on those barely a year ago.
If this keeps up, I may be getting ready for more advanced painting techniques like blending or Non metallic metals. Woo!