Army Inspiration: What's yours?

As you'll know from my last couple of posts, I'm working hard on expanding my Nurgle Chaos Space Marines to include a couple of extra Plague Marine squads. It's been a long while since I converted the first three squads, so hopefully these newer ones will come out looking better. Here's the first squad I completed in mid-late 2007:


My painting, green stuff skills, not to mention my camera, have improved since then, but you get the idea of how they look.

Anyway, I wanted to blog a little about how I arrived at the look at finally settled on for these marines, and what inspired me to do them this way. There's inspiration aplenty in Codexes, rule books, Black Library novels to inspire, but I took my idea from elsewhere.

I wanted my Plague Marines to look like devotees of Nurgle, his most loyal followers, and I thought a monk-ish look would suit them. There was a couple of things that inspired me for the look. The first was unsurprisingly Skaven Plague Monks from the Fantasy range. I liked the hooded and cowled look these models have.
I wanted a more deathly rotting look to them, and so drew influence from the Spanish zombie movie The Tombs of the Blind Dead from 1971. The zombies in this film are undead templar knights and have a really distinctive look compared to other zombie films:
Filthy, rotting, cowled, monk-like, these were a strong influence on the look for my Plague Marines.

What was the influence for your army?