Tribune Ixion Hale

My latest commission paint job is Tribune Ixion Hale of the Legio Custodes. This is a Forge World Horus Heresy miniature that can only be acquired at events and at Warhammer World.

I’m famously not a big fan of resin miniatures, and I’m really not sure what madness overcame me when I agreed to take on this commission. Ixion Hale has an insane amount of fine detail, and the client wanted full nmm so I knew I was in for the long haul! This is the first Forge World miniature I’ve painted that has been digitally sculpted and I have to say that it did improve the experience somewhat compared to the last time. It’s still a complete pain to work with compared to plastic though!

The colours were quite carefully planned and agreed before I started painting. In the end this commission took more than a hundred hours of work. I switched to using the current citadel line for the gold nmm: base coat of 1:1 balor and mournfang, highlighted with balor and bone, shaded with doombull and black. I did take some pictures during the painting so I’ll try and post some step by step on this piece when time allows. 🙂

Drazhar, Master of Blades

Update: I’ve been getting a lot of requests to sell copies of Drazhar via Shapeways. While it’s very flattering, I’m sorry to say that I won’t be doing this. Drazhar is very much Games Workshop’s IP and putting aside the legality of it, I wouldn’t feel comfortable selling my version when a miniature already exists. And no, I won’t be selling my .stl either!

During the process of painting the Archon commission I was perusing my Dark Eldar codex when I came across a great bit of art depicting Drazhar, the mysterious champion of the Incubi.

Unfortunately the existing miniature for Drazhar is very old (released in 1999 as far as I can tell) and doesn’t quite capture the character, presumably due to the limitations of moulding at the time. I therefore set out to try and make my own version armed only with the reference picture and my very limited sculpting skills!

As usual, I used Blender for the digital sculpting. To help me get somewhere near the pose I learnt how to rig a simple model and then played around with it until it felt about right. I intended to scale Drazhar to be similar in size to the new Eldar Visarch, but in the end I don’t think I made him quite slender enough and I don’t think the proportions are quite right.

I had to make some changes to get something that would print ok at Shapeways, mostly by reducing the amount of spiky parts and hanging pieces. I also reversed the grip on the swords to something that felt more natural to me.

Happily one of my loyal customers was keen to have a copy of the finished sculpt painted for his collection so we came up with a colour scheme that is fairly close to the original model. I particularly enjoyed painting the helmet – I don’t often get an opportunity to paint white armour so that was a nice challenge. The main colours used were incubi darkness and kabalite green for the armour, liche purple and magenta for the cloth and other details, and moot green for the glowing green details.

I’m looking forward to painting a professionally sculpted miniature for my next big project!