Regular readers will know that my output is often sporadic, but has seen a slight increase in recent days. Well, this is due to it being half-term this week, and me being a teacher, I can spare an extra few moments to write up articles for fellow old school Citadel enthusiasts.
With an increase in spare time, painting will swiftly follow, surely? Well not so for me, not in the first part of this week anyway. I had hit one of those ruts that all painters find themselves stuck in from time to time. I just couldn't find the motivation to pick up the paints and get the chaos warrior that has sat on my desk for two weeks completed.
Thankfully, I got over my painter's block on Tuesday and have managed to get quite a few miniatures finished off for my Warhammer Bestiary project. If you are coming to this post fresh and wonder what I mean by this, its simple! I am attempting to paint a single model for every entry in the WFB3 Bestiary using old school Citadel lead only.
The first miniatures to share, in order of the Bestiary, are the Chaotic humans. Here we have a couple of mid '80s Realm of Chaos models. I am not sure who sculpted the warrior, but the sorcerer is one of Jes Goodwin's classic Chaos Sorcerer range.
Starting with the warrior, I chose to paint him up in traditional (for RoC, anyway) Slaaneshi colours as my embryonic Pleasure God old school army needs all the help it can get. As you may know, pastel shades are the order of the day here and the best way to produce those is by adding pure white to any base colour. I didn't really want to go all out on the pink front, so restrained the colour to the breastplate and went for a blue colour scheme for the rest of the armour. I added horn and gold here and there to act as spot colours and used black to suggest a dark leather boot on on of the model's feet. The weapon was just a Bleached Bone job with rust effects created on the blade using old Citadel inks. This model was really a paint by numbers exercise as I have painted quite a few chaos warriors in my time and this one took no real effort.
The sorcerer was a different matter. Here I didn't want to go down the road of any particular god but was inspired instead by the crazy multicoloured chaos schemes of the mid 1980s, with particular reference to the original Chaos Sorcerer advert which can be seen here. I noticed that the sorcerer's head was covered by some kind of facemask and a jester's hood. The colour red immediately sprung to mind here and I decided to offset this tone with white, using grey to create the depth. For the rest of the model, I just painted a bit here one colour and another with another. I played around with the colours until I was happy with the way they had been spaced out. I used red to line the edge of the robes to build some continuity with the jester's hood. I feel that the result works really well, don't you?
On reflection, I found that the purple of the sleeves was too starkly highlighted and felt that they needed bringing down a little. Instead of just repainting them I opted to experiment with a heavy glaze of the base colour (Imperial Purple) first. After this glaze had dried the purple had a far more subtle and warm look so I left the model as it was and concentrated on the base. This type of technique is certainly something I would like to experiment with in the future and something I recommend you try out when you are highlighting cloth.
The shield on the chaos warrior was another one of my by the book jobs, though I chose green to match with the shoulder pad. I have written several articles on how to paint faces like this and instruction can be found
here. The only thing I did differently was to paint the eyes red and dot them with yellow while the paint was still wet. Once dry, I added a line to act as a pupil and used a tiny white spot to create the look of reflecting light. I was not entirely satisfied with the result so I will have another go with it on a future shield.
As regular readers will know, I have been working on my textile painting technique as it had been a shortcoming of mine throughout this project. I was pleased to discover that the Warhammer Third Edition Bestiary includes a section on EVIL warriors and sorcerers, so I would have a chance to paint a more conservative robe here. Yes, that is EVIL. Demonologists, necromancers and so forth, though I didn't want to walk the brightly coloured route of the model above, nor did I want to tread the street of the 'uber-black' necromancer type either. As a compromise, I opted to paint the model as a hedgewizard and suggested that he was evil by using purple paint and ink washes on his skin. This was a method I used on the evil warrior too.
The evil sorcerer is my personal favourite painted model in this series so far. I feel like I got the face, hair and clothing right here and it really is rather surprising to compare the quality of the result with miniatures I produced last year. A project as varied as this certainly helps improve your skill and I heartily recommend such an endeavour to anyone.
For the evil warrior, I choose a old Paladin model that I had lying around in a draw. I wanted something unconnect to chaos, for this model would represent an evil man, rather than one who had sold his soul to the Ruinous Powers. I quite liked the idea that he was a fallen knight too. I went quite John Blanche on the hat and boots, using natural tones based on cheetah fur before using white and black dots to give the impression of markings. I struggled with the silver plate armour though, and the gold is rather lack lustre too. So I have found myself a new target for future work, painting gold and silver across large flat spaces on a model. Thankfully, I am now armed with advice from the Greatest, Fraser Gray, and I plan to base with yellow when I paint gold in the future.
I chose purple as a spot colour for the gloves and scarf on the warrior. Purple is a royal colour but it tends to have a whiff of deceit about it too, well for me anyway. The shield was a touch up on an old Paper Tiger design from back in the late '70s and you can find a tutorial about how to achieve such a shield
here. I added a gold shield rim to help tie the shield in with the rest of the model and washed over the entire design with a chestnut ink glaze. This aged the 'look' of the shield and gave the model and aura of experience I think.
In addition to the four models shown above, I also painted up a couple of new beastmen for the very slowly developing Slaaneshi army I am building. The blue fleshed model was painted first in about thirty minutes and employed very few colours. The flesh (and fur) was just a light blue basecoat worked up through highlights in stages of additional white. The horn was Bleached Bone drybrushed with white. The belt was a simple leather brown with a Bleached Bone highlight. For the chainmail, it was silver mixed with black base with a silver highlight while the club was created with a little red being added to the belt basecolour, and again highlighted up by adding Bleached Bone. Upon reflection, I am quite pleased with the result considering how little time I actually spent on it. It is easily the quickest paintjob I have produced since by 'base and wash' days, circa 1988.
The second beastman took me longer, about two hours. The fur was drybrushed up using the same mix as I used for the first beastman's belt, only I added the final highlights with brush before using pink and brown ink to build up an impression of the boar like mouth and nose. Pure white was used to highlight the teeth. Drybrushing with a final highlight via brush was used to complete the weapon too. With the edges of the axe blade having a pure silver line added to it. I feel these kind of touches make a blade look suitably sharp.
The gold scale mail was completed using my usual method. Using Imperial Purple (again!) I quickly highlighted up the leather bands that hang from the beastman's girdle and used gold dots to pick out the studs on the end. I used exactly the same pink mix (red with white paint, 50:50) to work up the girdle itself, adding a touch of white each time to draw out the detail. Another nice result here with this beastman, with some nice rich colours and took little effort to complete.
And so here I will leave you. Half-term draws to a close and I feel like I have got over my slump. Next, I need to turn my attentions to the tropical forests of Lustria as I tackle '80s Lizardmen. Right, I better get basecoating!
Orlygg.
