Anyway, the point is that I actually managed to get a couple of projects finished up at the weekend.
One of the main problems I had getting back to painting was that there was a few pieces I'd ALMOST completed, but weren't quite done. And I wasn't really sure what it was that I needed to do to finish them off. I mean, I'm no expert or grand master at this, far from it. But still, even for one of my meagre abilities there is a point where you sit back and say "Yeah". And these next few pieces, despite the assurances of those who saw the work in progress didn't seem to me to be quite there.
And, as it turns out, needed very little work to edge them over the line of tolerability.
First up is my long awaited first foray into the architectural arena, in the form of the tower from Battlemasters. One of the oldest bits of scenery I had actually. I'd done it up in a primitive fashion back in the dark distant days of my youth, but I felt like having another go at it. Whilst the assembly necessitated an alarming amount of filling to deal with all the gaps in the joints, the obvious major addition is the big honking dragon skull attached to the front. Now, the original tower had a rather nasty bit of molding on the front for a banner. Or maybe it was actually meant to be a buttress carved to look like a badly molded banner, I don't know. Point is I didn't like it, and back in the day covered it up with this big chunk of lizard cranium salvaged from an old Mighty Max playset. This time around I resolved to do it a bit more properly. Aside from filling in all the gaps this left me with the issue of actually attaching the skull in a way that didn't just look like it had been glued on. So, I set a couple of hoops into the stonework and constructed some ropes out of... Rope. Well, garden twine. But the principle remains valid. These were then coated in superglue to seal down all the myriad wispy bits, and once undercoated the painting could begin.
I'm sure you'll be shocked to hear that this involved getting a really big brush and drybrushing lots of greys over the stonework.
The skull itself was simultaneously straightforward and kinda tricky. I mean, it's a skull, right? We all know how to paint bone. But I guess I'm just not used to working at this scale. Even now I can't help but wonder if I should give it another ink wash, maybe a thin black / green to make look a bit mouldier?
The next issue was the Specters. These come from Black Tree Designs Fantasy Armies range. I'd seen them ages ago, and thought they looked pretty sweet. But they weren't very high on my list until I found the range of Nightmare base inserts from Black Cat Bases. Once I saw those then I knew what I had to do.
Assembling them was pretty easy. Just pin the Spectre and then use green stuff to blend him into the features of the base. Painting was a little trickier. I decided to use a purple basecoat, and then build up green highlights over the top. I figured that would look kinda wrong and unnatural. Which it does I guess. I sat on these guys for ages though as I really wasn't happy with them. They weren't as bright as really wanted. In the end an extra highlight in bright green / yellow seemed to do the job. It's entirely possible that anyone who saw them before wouldn't really notice the difference, but I think it's an improvement.
And of course we can't have undead kicking around without a necromancer, can we? Here we have Mhorgoth from Mantic Games, mounted on a larger Nightmare base from Black Cat. Now, it is of course an established fact that I have a peculiar affinity for the Necromantic arts. However you may not be aware that another thing I have a peculiar affinity for is creepy faceless dudes. It's been a peculiar fascination of mine for a long while. So imagine my delight when I found a piece that combines the two. Now, getting him assembled was a bit of a chore, as it did involve an awful lot of grinding, filing and hacking away to get him into a good position on the base. The base and dodgy energy bits were painted in much the same way as the Spectres above. They are all meant to be part of the same set. For the wizardly part the main oddity was in how I approached the flesh. I wanted him to be rather..... Not right looking. So rather than actually painting his skin like skin I gave it a base coat of white, and then skipped straight to the flesh ink. This made him come out kinda cold and dead looking. Which rather the point when you're a necromantic faceless mage.
And you know what else wizards need? Spellbooks! A big pile of them. All animated and ready to kill you. The Book Golem from Black Cat Bases is, quite obviously, all kind of awesome. It's one of those things you look at and wonder why no one has actually done it before. So anyway I had to give it a go. I suppose the main issue here is in all the individual books. Whilst obviously a bit fiddly the real question is in the number of colours used. I elected to go for mostly brown and threw in a few others just to break it up a little. I think if you tried to do every one in a different shade it might be a bit much, but who knows really? I do seem to favour a palette that is not exactly overly showy anyway. I picked up a sepia ink wash, primarily to try out on this boy. The effect was generally pretty good I think, if a little uneven in places. Maybe I should have mixed in a little brown as well to get things darker? It does look a bit more uneven in the picture than I'd though, but then that's often the case when you can look at it 5 times as large.
The final entry to the weekends minor burst of productivity is a Baluchi Zombie, also from Black Cat. I basically just picked this guy up because he had no jaw and I thought that looked cool. I tried to paint him up to look dryer than the average zombie. He has a sort of desert vibe about him, so I figured that he should look dessicated rather than rotting. Practically this involved avoiding the standard green hued flesh and no splashing crimson around the damaged areas, as one is often wont to do when painting reanimated corpses.
All in all I'm generally pleased with these, although I can't quite shake the feeling that some of them still need... something. But I'm not massively sure what, so I guess whatevs. Maybe I just need to have a break from fantasy stuff for a bit and have a go at something a little different?
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