[PLOG] Urithani'men Mourkhuyl'kyndar Arhathalau

[Calisson]

Final look goes well. Choice of colors very unusual but effective, good job!

[Ilmaestro]

Love the colour choice of your Kharibdyss, I think it really contrasts nicely with the pale flesh on the elves. Wonderful start, can't wait to see more!

[Shadowspite]

Quick update. I'm trying out my new wet palette while painting some Darkshards:



So far it does seem to make painting quicker and easier, since I don't have to thin anything and even white paint no longer goes all thick or grainy on the brush when painting multiple models at once. I do worry that some of my paints might end up too watery, though (a couple of my Vallejo paints were very thin and transparent when I got them). Time will tell.

You might also be able to spot my old sorceress on palanquin. I have finally gotten round to doing her base properly, but I may also repaint some parts of her to fit better with my army's current colour scheme. I have shamelessly stolen an idea from Darkprincess and put some acrylic crystals on her base, painted with purple ink. I'll upload a proper photo of her once she's finished.

[Shadowspite]

Some female Marauders for my Chaos army:


They are a kitbash of parts from GW Daemonettes, Dark Eldar Kabalites and Wyches, Chaos Warriors and Marauders, and Mantic's surprisingly excellent Succubi, as well as quite a bit of greenstuff (most of which is round the back, so not visible from this angle, but I'll take more photos once they're painted). There's also a Sisters of Slaughter whip arm and a Chaos Charioteer helmet in there.

I still need to finish the paint-job on those Darkshards...

[Malys the younger]

Those look pretty brutal!

[cultofkhaine]

They look great! Good Sisters of Slaughter as well!

[Shadowspite]

Darkshards are done. Can't believe it's taken me over a week to finish them.




The red-lacquered effect on the plate armour was done by painting the armour with metallics as normal, then giving it two coats of GW's new gem paint, Spiritstone Red, followed by painting some Druchii Violet shade into the recesses with a detail brush. This is much easier than my old method, which required multiple glazes with three different inks, and gives a similar enough end product that both can be used in the same regiment without a problem.

[Malys the younger]

They look pretty awesome. I like how you incorporated shields and the cloaks are a nice touch.

[cultofkhaine]

Great work - those extra bits add quite a bit to the look of them, well done!

[Shadowspite]

Thanks for the kind words, everyone!

Here's a minor update on my Chaos girls:


The important one is the middle one, who is the converted driver for my new Gorebeast Chariot, made from Daemonette, Wych, Sister of Slaughter and Chaos Warrior parts, with a crest from Spellcrow Miniatures. She's in a slightly strange-looking pose because she's going to be leaping forward eagerly, with one knee up on the chariot front rail like she just can't wait to throw herself at the enemy. Her empty hand has been drilled out and will be holding chain reins attached to the gorebeast.

The other two are Avatars of War minis that I will be using as a Marauder unit leader and a Slaaneshi Sorceress when not playing in my local GW store. I'm still debating whether to give the Marauder leader a shield.

EDIT: I don't know why the image is coming up so huge...

[Shadowspite]

My first four Marauder women are finished:
LINK

Gods, those leather straps are fiddly to paint! And all those bloody buckles!

With the second group of four (and the charioteer, whom I'll probably do as part of the same batch), I will be painting them inside-out. That is, skin first, then leather, then armour, weapons and shields. Trying to paint the skin and the leather straps after the armour was finished, as I did with these, was a nightmare. I think I must have spent more than half my time touching up mistakes. I've gotten too used to painting heavily-armoured minis like Chaos Warriors and most of my Dark Elves, where it makes sense to paint all the metal parts first because they're 90% of the model. That technique does not work with these half-naked girls!

Incidentally, the reason why they don't all have the same weapons is that I have two units of Marauders: one with hand weapon and shield and the other with flails. These female Marauders will be split between both units.

EDIT: It's doing it again! Why does the forum blow the image up to about 1.5 times its original size?
EDIT2: OK, just follow the link. My photography skills are bad enough, but enlarging the image that much just makes it all blurry.

[Amboadine]

Link followed and appreciated. Nice job.

[cultofkhaine]

I agree with Ambo - they look great!

[Shadowspite]

Thanks!

I will say that the detail on the Mantic Succubi is not quite as sharp as GW's newest plastic kits, although it is easily as good as GW plastics were a decade ago (which is not at all bad!), and a box of 20 costs less than a box of 10 GW plastics. The plastic is clearly polystyrene (since polystyrene cement glues it no problem), but it seems a little harder than the GW version. The amount of flash/mouldlines is about the same as GW plastics, although the moulds are not as well-designed as GW so that the mouldlines are sometimes in awkward places (the newer GW plastics tend to have most of the mouldlines running along sharp edges or in places that are not visible once the model is assembled, making it not strictly necessary to remove them).

You'll notice the Succubus legs have tails attached, and with some of the variants they're difficult to remove without needing a lot of resculpting. For Chaos Marauders, it's obviously fine to have a few with tails, but I would not try to use the Succubi as the basis of (for example) Sisters of Slaughter. I think it would just be too much work. Unless you only used the legs with easily removed tails. Which I suppose at Mantic prices (competing with the stupid price of the Witch Elves/Sisters box) you totally could. The heads also have tiny horns, but they're pretty easy to remove.

Of the four painted Marauders, I left the tails on three of them. The one with the flail has a piece of (somebody else's) flayed skin to hide where I cut the tail away. She also had to have the straps on her right leg resculpted with greenstuff, because the tail curls back and reattaches there.

Anyway, I'm glad they came out well. I still need to get the rest painted, but that won't be today, as I have too much real-world stuff to do.

[Shadowspite]

We've had thunderstorms all day, and the light hasn't been good enough to paint. So I spent some time converting a Chaos Lord instead. Behold the Golden Queen!:


Well, she will be golden eventually... The goal was to make something that is (1) obviously female, (2) at least somewhat Slaaneshi, (3) still heavily armoured, and (4) has the right weapons to represent this warscroll. Plus I needed to use that cool-but-sort-of-ridiculous Chaos Charioteer head on something.

FYI:
Head and trophy pole are from the Chaos Chariot kit.
The helmet plume is also from that kit, but was cut and repositioned (and partly resculpted with greenstuff where it joins the helmet) so its direction matched the cloak.
Daemon-spear thing is from the Chaos Knights kit.
Sword is from the Chaos Warriors kit.
Arms are from the HE Shadow Warriors kit.
Torso is from the DE Kaballite Warriors kit.
Legs and cloak are from the DE Archon kit.
Waist sash is greenstuff, with the trailing ends taken from a Silver Helms shield.
Extra skulls on the base are from a bag of 100+ resin skulls I bought on ebay.

[cultofkhaine]

That's an awesome kitbash, great use of bits - I look forward to seeing it painted.

[Malys the younger]

That's an awesome kitbash, great use of bits - I look forward to seeing it painted.

Agreed, stunning model!

[Shadowspite]

I just finished the other four Marauder women this morning, as well as the driver of my Gorebeast Chariot:






Next on the to-do list are the rest of the Chariot, my new Sorcerer and a Hellflayer.

EDIT: I just realised I've forgotten to tidy up the edges of the Marauders' bases. I'll go do that now, but I'm not going to re-do the photos. I may take a photo of all eight of them together, though...

[Amboadine]

Nice job with the grey skintones. Could I ask which colours you used?

[Shadowspite]

It's actually not grey. I don't know whether it's my camera or your monitor that makes it look grey to you. It looks a bit more grey on my screen than it does in reality (and incidentally the turquoise bits look a lot more blue than they really are) but it's just supposed to be a dark brown skintone you often see in Africa and southern India. Something like this:


Anyway, I started with a basecoat of Vallejo Model Color Burnt Umber, then highlighted in four stages by adding increasing amounts of GW Rakarth Flesh to the Burnt Umber. The final highlight was approximately half-and-half.

My Chaos army wanders all over the Mortal Realms in search of their missing god, and they will recruit anyone who is both physically fit and attractive enough and has the right degree of amoral hedonism to serve Slaanesh (and by 'recruit', I really mean 'enslave' initially...). So it makes sense that they have a wide variety of skintones.

Here's a photo of all eight of the Marauder women together:

[Vulcan]

The skintones in that first set of pictures looks very grey to me too. That last picture shows the browns much better.

[Shadowspite]

Yeah, seems like it was the lighting. The weather has been pretty changeable here (typical summer in the North-East of England), so some of my photos are in mostly natural sunlight, others almost entirely artificial light. That affects the colour balance quite a bit. I have noticed that the turquoise bits (like the shield with the peeling cover) look much closer to their real colour in that last pic as well.

Of course, I know what colour everything is really, so I think to an extent I'm seeing the photos like they should be rather than as the rest of you are seeing them. The skintones look brown to me because I know they're brown.

By the way, If I were painting dark grey skin, I would do it the same way but with GW Eshin Grey (or GW Dark Reaper for a more drow-esque blue-grey) in place of the Vallejo Burnt Umber, perhaps also with some GW Nuln Oil painted into the recesses. My desert Wanderers, when I get round to painting them, are basically going to be Tiste Andii Fremen, so I will most likely use that method for their skin.

Oh, and I should have mentioned that all the mixing was done on a wet palette.

[cultofkhaine]

They have come out great - very well done!

[Shadowspite]

Thanks! They were pretty fun, both to kitbash and to paint. I will be doing more eventually (I still have loads of Succubus and Daemonette bits to use up), but in future I will probably paint the shields separately and stick them in place afterwards. Painting behind the shields was really awkward!

[Shadowspite]

Quick update. I have been building some new Chosen of Slaanesh to bring my existing unit of 12 up to an AoS Matched-Play-appropriate unit of 20:



The four on the left are ready for painting. The two on the right are waiting for some shoulder pads. There's also another one on my main workbench that I forgot to photograph.

Here are the 12 I converted and painted a decade ago, for comparison:



(Yes, I know the standard bearer's armour isn't highlighted! )

And here's the guy who will be the unit leader:



The old unit champion with the flayed-skin coat will be relegated to acting as a generic Chosen. The 'new' guy was originally meant to be a Chaos Lord, but that position will now be taken by my Golden Queen conversion, freeing him up to lead my Chosen.

I am still painting my Gorebeast Chariot. But I have also made a scenic base for it:



The strange white blobs are acrylic crystals cut in half, the cut side painted white, and then glued with that side facing down (the white makes them look like they're glowing from within). They will eventually be painted with purple ink. Credit has to go to Darkprincess for this idea.

The eviscerated Witch Aelf is an Avatars of War Vestal of Nemesis. I bought a box of these a few weeks ago, thinking they'd convert into cheap Marauders or Slaanesh Cultists (or, heck, even to use as actual Witch Aelves that aren't £35 for 10), but they're pretty crappy quality. All they are fit for is casualty models, so that is what they are doomed to be...