I have been meaning to get around to a piece that is really weathered, and Nurgley, I actually bought five dudes to make a min unit of Avatars of War Nurgle Chaos Warriors guys, and I've got heaps of cool ideas for painting them. Initially when I bought them I planned on entering them into Crystal Dragon... yeah, that didn't happen. Too many cool other things, and painting a unit these days is bloody hard work!
Finishing the Reaper dude, I was kind of on the fence about what I wanted to paint next. I was keen on Luz, and I want to try and finish her for the CD, which is in under three weeks, but I've really only got 1 week to go, as I will probably be painting a Judgement miniature in the leadup to the Kickstarter, and hopefully having it down for display at Cancon. So that is the last week I think!
But I was not feeling like building a base, or gap filling on Luz yesterday, I just felt like painting something easy, and fun, and interesting. I bought a number of busts recently, the captain anatomically correct that I started on this blog was one that has hit the brakes, as has Daenerys, although she is a technical on rather than a boredom one.
One that I did have lying around was the Zombie Knight, a model from Tartar Miniatures. I bought it for the very simple reason that I like undead, I like rusted shit, and this dude was both of those, and I wanted to paint it.
I went into it not thinking about bettering myself, or achieving greatness, just wanted to paint an interesting rotting face, and play around with leather texture, rustiness and blood.
So here is the step by step!
I tried wetblending in some colours but I forgot something Raffa talked about which was wetblending over primer doesn't work. Part of my biggest issue I think I have been having recently is not painting over a smooth and even basecoat. This continued the trend.
I tried highlighting over this, but I started too light, again because I didn't do a smooth basecoat. It was looking quite washed out and difficult to judge how the contrast was looking.
So to see I put on some of the brown, airbrushed, and realised it wasn't looking too bad, but I wanted to add more saturation, and colour.
So my next stage was actually to do a number of airbrush passes with a thinned down glaze of Yellow ink and a GW air colour that is sort of like a yellowy goblin green. It was ultra diluted, took a number of coats before the colour began to change, but as you can see between the two last shots, it had a dramatic effect. From here I started adding more colour into the shadows, and painted the eyes and blood.
Couldn't decide what colour to paint around his collar, I ended up with kind of a teal green but it was meant to be more black green, I just couldn't quite get it there. It needed to be something that wasn't way out there in colours as this is not a colour heavy piece.
Really added some orange here, rust, pigments, dried blood, more shading, and overall just added more warmth which contrasted to the slightly cooler face colours.
And that is the finished dude, metallic areas highlighted, more blood that I had left to congeal on the palette, and just little tweaks here and there.
It was an awful lot of fun, and the freedom to not be chasing perfection every time I paint something is actually almost an addiction. I think the next few models I paint it is important that I actually really drill down and focus on getting better. Ultra smooth blends, really deep contrast and intelligent colour choices. That is the goal!
Both Zombie Knight and the Reaper of Egypt are now available for sale on my Models for Sale page.
Cheers
Trent
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