Geigor Fell-Hand

This was a fun little project that I painted as a gift for a friend.

Sculpted by Darren Latham for the Burning of Prospero box, Geigor Fell-Hand is my first ever Space Wolf (only taken me 24 years to get round to it!). Loads of cool details on this: wolf pelts, armour trim, plenty of weapons, gems… I particularly enjoyed painting the face for some reason – I don’t recall ever painting a mini with sculpted eyebrows before, but it was great!

I aimed for a fairly ‘Eavy Metal style with true metallics and lots of edge highlighting. I believe that technically heresy era Space Wolves are supposed to have a neutral grey armour but I wanted to paint it closer to the 40k scheme, so I ended up with a kind of halfway house with a bluish grey. I took inspiration from an old ‘Eavy Metal masterclass by Neil Green and went with red hair and yellow trim rather than the blond and red from the box art.

I added some damage to armour in the places where it was most likely to occur: more on the front than the back and plenty around the lightning claw and the bottom of the boots. Not many opportunities for freehand on this mini, but I was at least able to paint his name onto the claw!

High Elf Sea Lord

This post has been updated with new pictures 24/05/17 after I made alterations to the base.

At long last I have completed the base for my high elf sea lord! I’m very pleased to have this project finished.

This miniature dates from the dark age of GW communication 😉 but I’m reliably informed that the sculpt is by Martin Footit. Admittedly I am biased but this is a great mini. Just the right amount of details while leaving some opportunities for free hand. I imagine that he is shouting because he has just spotted some dark elf raiders off the coast of Ulthuan.

I went with non metallic metal on this mini, mostly because I thought it would be more fun than true metallic on the helmet and the trident blade. I kept the colour scheme quite simple with only minor alterations to the ‘Eavy Metal version. I’ve painted some texture on the inside of his cape and picked out some individual hair strands and threads on the end of his sash.

I usually favour quite a minimalist base but I really wanted to have this guy overlooking the sea, so I had a go at modelling it. Overall I think I did ok, but I’m sure it’s not the finest example of this kind of scene.

I sculpted the waves with green stuff and then applied layers of water effect after painting it (Vallejo still water). After many experiments I found that a very small amount of white paint added to Vallejo transparent water gel made a fairly convincing foam, so I carefully applied that mix on the wave crest and around the rocks. The seagull is actually included on the skycutter sprue, which is a really nice touch so I had to use that too! Unfortunately it has made the piece horrendously fragile…

I’m still looking forward to seeing what GW do with the high elves in Age of Sigmar. Elves of all flavours have been conspicuously absent so far (apart from a couple of shady characters in the silver tower), but the game is nearly two years old now. Surely it can’t be too much longer?! C’mon guys, don’t make me sculpt my own again!

Blood Angels Terminator Librarian

The librarian is now finished! Since the last update I painted the axe, went back and touched up the armour (particularly some of the transitions on the red shoulder pads that I wasn’t happy with), painted the gems and spent a little more time working on his face. Oh, and the base. 😉

For the force axe I base coated with black and then applied area highlights in two stages using a mix of turquoise and white (about 1:1 and then with more white added). I then painted on the lightning using a brush with a good point and applied some glazes here and there until it looked right. Unusually for me I didn’t use the maximum colour saturation (unmixed turquoise) at any point. The miniature is already pretty colourful and I didn’t want to overdo it.

I’ve glazed some more purple and blue tones into the shadows on the face, as I wanted to convey that this guy isn’t super healthy and the psychic ability is taking a toll on him. I’ve painted some veins around the temples to emphasise this too. For some reason I’ve struggled to get the mouth looking right on this miniature – in the end this was the best I could do!

I thought long and hard about adding some damage to the armour. Having spent the time getting to a point of shiny perfection I find it very difficult to then do something that will detract from this, and I’ve bottled out of doing it in the past. On this occasion I came to the conclusion that damaged armour would suit the somewhat stressed-looking face better than a factory fresh suit, so I took a deep breath and plunged in! Here’s a picture of how he looked before:

I’m happy with my decision and it was good to push myself out of my comfort zone. That’s two new things on this piece, since I had never attempted textured freehand before either. 🙂

I built the base out of ureol modelling board, plasticard and a couple of brass etch pieces from forgeworld. It’s quite simple, but that is very much my style – I’m still having headaches over the high elf sea base at the moment too, and I couldn’t handle having two difficult basing projects on my plate!

Overall I very much enjoyed this project. It’s a great sculpt by Ed Cottrell for the best space marines chapter 😉 and hopefully I’ve done it justice!

You can find earlier work in progress here:

Part 1

Part 2

Part 3