The Visarch

When I first saw the Triumvirate of Ynnead I knew straight away that I’d end up buying it. I’ve been a big fan of the Eldar since I started in the hobby and I seem to remember that the first White Dwarf I ever owned featured them quite prominently. (Complete with back banners and goblin green bases!) I love what Jes Goodwin and co have done with all three miniatures in the new box – they’re definitely right up my particular aesthetic street!

The ‘Eavy Metal paint job on the Visarch is pretty special (Aidan Daly’s handiwork I believe) and I referred to it often during the painting of this piece, but I wanted to try and put a unique spin on the piece.

I chose to paint the helmet and parts of the armour black to try and make him more menacing, and the fiery sword is intended to be a nod towards the old Avatar of Khaine. There’s absolutely no good reason for this in the 40k background as far as I know, but I just thought it looked cool! Of course, the danger in having such a colourful sword is that it can draw the viewer’s eye too much. I’ve tried to balance this with the eyes and the gems but I’m not sure I’ve been wholly successful.

This was one of those projects that sat in an unfinished state for many months, so it’s good to finally clear it off my desk! I had to park it for a while due to all the commissions I’ve been doing recently and I was struggling with the armour anyway. It turns out that it’s very difficult to make all that embossed detail work with my painting style. It’s a tough miniature to paint anyway – sub assemblies are definitely the order of the day! I’m trying not to think too much about the Yncarne right now…

The Visarch is for sale, so if you’re interested in acquiring him then drop me a line and he could soon be travelling through the webway to you!

Sold, sorry!

White Scar Primaris Lieutenant

The new 40k box set Dark Imperium has been out for quite a while now, so it was high time I painted one of those shiny new primaris space marines…

This will be my last painting commission for the foreseeable future, so it was great to be given a very open brief to work with. After a small experiment with painting white armour on my version of Drazhar, I was keen to paint a whole mini in this style. The lieutenant is my favourite miniature from the new starter set, so after a little visit to ebay I was all set.

I bought a few Warcolours paints (specifically the blue grey set) after seeing various painters raving about them, and this seemed like an ideal opportunity to try them out. They have a gel medium and are certainly a bit different to work with than my customary citadel or reaper paints. The drying time is noticeably slower, which does make blending easier and suits my painting style. It did catch me out a few times when glazing though – I’d return to an area I’d glazed only to find that it hadn’t dried fully and end up messing up the previous application. I got the hang of it eventually!

I’ll be picking up more Warcolours paints in the future as and when I need to replace existing supplies. I really like the bottles they come in too! I’m not sure I’d buy another full set like the blue grey set though – I found the tones too close together for my painting style and ended up only using blue grey 1 and blue grey 5 plus black and white on this miniature (although this was also partly to avoid making the white armour too blue). In future I think I’d be tempted to buy the lightest and the darkest for each colour, plus the tone with the greatest colour saturation.

The base coat was 1:1 blue grey 1 and white. I tried airbrushing it but I pretty much suck with an airbrush and I didn’t feel the paint was going down very smoothly because I got the consistency wrong so I switched to a good old massive brush to finish the job.

After that I just applied my standard techniques, highlighting with more white and shading with the darkest blue grey shade. I used 1:1 blue grey 5 and black in the deepest recesses.

I wanted to go with true metallics rather than nmm for the details but I thought the sword blade would work better with nmm so I painted everything else in this style. Overall I’m quite pleased with how this mini turned out, as I was definitely concerned about how well the white armour would come out!

Vampire Lord and Dragon Maiden in 15 mm

It has been a while since I completed any 15 mm sculpts so I’ve been really keen to get back to it. I enjoy the sculpting, but the best thing for me is that I can paint each miniature in a relatively short time before the inevitable boredom sets in and other projects start to look more alluring!

I decided to exploit one of the advantages of digital sculpting and modify my existing 30 mm files to make shiny new 15 mm figures. This kind of thing appeals greatly to a lazy git like me!

(It should be noted that the process is a bit more involved than simply hitting scale 0.5 in blender, since this would result in details that would be too small to print successfully and would be out of proportion with the rest of my 15 mm range.)

The original dragon maiden is here. I’ve made some improvements to the face for this version, and I went with a different colour scheme.

I also went with a different colour scheme for the Vampire Lord. This guy is pretty big for a 15 mm figure – he’s actually more like 16.5 mm to the eye. I’ve made some changes to the face vs the 30 mm version after I realised that I hadn’t exaggerated some of the features enough.

You can buy these two miniatures as a set on Shapeways. The price (as ever) is higher than I’d like. Unfortunately these two miniatures use more resin than my average 15 mm which makes them more expensive under Shapeways’ pricing formula.