After Blood Bowl proved to be a great game to us, the next logical step was to paint the big guys. The first one after the essentials was the Troll - I actually got interested in the whole game because I liked this particular model!
At first, I wanted to paint him blue like the Stone Trolls of old, but then I thought he would differ too much from the rest of his team, so I painted him green for some uniformity's sake. Still, I tried various greens together with some ivory colors on different parts of his skin to make him more interesting and I think it turned out pretty good. That, together with the blue back-plates, clothes, armor parts, the goblin, some leather and spikes, made for some really interesting painting process.
Chompa is one of the very rare smart trolls - well, relatively speaking, at least. He can use simple words (he even gives interviews!), is capable of some strategic thought and gets his salary like everyone else. One could think that this makes him an effective and focused Blood Bowl player, unlike other Trolls, but that’s unfortunately not true. After becoming a star, Chompa found himself with more income that he could use simply for food, so he got into interior design - his cave is really an eclectic wonder to behold. The trouble is, he is thinking about new wallpapers and carpets so much, he can still stand still in the middle of a match, completely unaware of the carnage going on around him - so functionally, he’s not that different from a typical troll! Of course, he punches and throws goblins also as well as other trolls, so his position in the team is safe (as well as his salary!).
Some zombie batches are still left to post - this time, some Skaven. I didn't have any spare ratmen bodies in my bits collection, so these were all bought specifically to be used in the Legion - mostly for a bit of diversity and completionism. Being non-humans, it was difficult to zombify them, as I couldn't just change some bits around, so their conversions are rather simple.
The wolf-rat was bought near the end of the whole project, when I was looking through ebay for some last miniatures to fill some space - and someone was selling it cheaply. It's not only an interesting piece by itself, but it's also a Forge World model used as a lowly zombie filler - another thing to take off my bucket list, I guess!
Ratmen crawl underneath all the Old World and they sometimes resurface even in such forgotten places as Varsavia. Their clashes with the vampires are not very common, but their soldiers, as frail as they are, make it into the zombies’ ranks too. Once skaven launched a more organized attack, bringing with them strange rat-wolves - beasts specializing in forest combat. Sorin'sVilks countered them quite effectively and brought them down with numbers - since then, one of such creatures accompanies the zombie horde.
It's been some time since I finished painting my Blood Bowl teams and since then both me and my wife got into it very much. We got the video games, learned the rules, tactics, leveling schemes and generally got much better in it. Thanks to that, we also noticed that the basic team found in the box were somewhat lacking, not having the optimal amount of some useful players, like Orc Blitzers and Black Orcs. Thankfully, I had a phase when I wanted to start collecting an Orcs & Goblins army - so when I was back in Poland I looked through all the unused boxes in search of some new players to recruit.
Black Orc Blockers - those were easy, I just took some bodies from the Black Orc Warriors (Arboyz) box. Unfortunately, all the minis that are used in Blood Bowl are slightly bigger, so those old Black Orcs were actually smaller than normal Orc Linemen from BB! To fix that, I gave one of the Black Orcs longer legs, while the second one got a bigger torso. As for the Blitzers, I built them out of Savage Orcs - they have more dynamic poses, so they fit quite well. I just took off their weapons and glued some bits on them.
EDIT: Painted versions of those Orcs can be found HERE.
And something for the Dark Elves too. The team is not painted yet, but I am working on them at the moment - I bought them because my wife really liked their playstyle. She tried them out in the video games first and there she had a player that really stood out - Torles the Unlucky. He was injured several times and had some significant disadvantages, but she kept him on the team still - both because she has grown fond of him and because he still had some useful skills. Seeing that, I decided to kitbash a tabletop model for poor Torles, preferably on a wheelchair, but still able and eager to play and score! Thankfully I have a lot of Dark Elf bits, so it was much easier than expected!
The seat and the wheels are out of plasticard, the rest of the chair is either sculpted or taken from a Dark Elf Noble on a Black Dragon kit and Torles himself is mostly made out of Corsair bits. Skeleton shields were used on the wheels for the manual propulsion - with corsair spikes for extra menace. I also added a flowing dragon hide on the back of the chair, both to tie him with the rest of the team and to give the model a sense of speed.
As you could already see in one of the previous posts, I bought Shadespire and started assembling the teams that came in the box. Besides those two, I got the Sepulchral Guard too, of course - I am collecting undead after all! I liked the miniatures so much, I would get them even if I wasn't planning to play the game.
Ever since I saw the previews of this band, I wanted to paint them in my usual patinated color scheme, like all my other WFB wights. But, on the other hand, I wanted to integrate all my Underworlds bands into AoS setting somehow. So I came up with my own little land in Shyish which would be a twisted reflection of the Old World - set in the Mortal Realms, but also still vaguely connected with everything that I invented for my WFB army. Now I could paint the same patinated armor and yellow freehands, like always! I actually painted them parallel with the Grave Guard, but seeing as they are more special and not a horde, I added additional layers of shadows and highlights, which took some extra time.
All in all, I enjoyed painting them - now I need to finish the two main bands and try out the game!
Vechernya is a land in Shyish, ruled by a plethora of warring princes, tsars and dukes - but held together by the influence of the local god - the Withered King. He survived the Wars of the Dead, but since then remains in a weakened state, slumbering, beneath the notice of Nagash and his Mortarchs. Still, he affects the land by forcing his dreams into reality - dreams of a realm otherwise forgotten, perished in the bygone times. Although the inhabitants of Vechernya have free will and progress through their own histories, their lives and events tend to reflect the Withered King’s memories - trapped unaware in cycles of deadened existence. Even death isn’t a release from it, for dead Vechernyans are known to raise from their graves - all to continue one of many existences lingering in their god’s mind. One of such groups of undead is the Kiril’s Retinue, roaming the land, wishing to rejoin their old unit and leader. No matter how many are destroyed, new ones always seem to come and group together. All of them are driven by the same purpose, one they often cannot completely recognize as their own, yet still hopelessly following the Withered King’s dream.
Not long time ago I wasn't feeling like painting, but I really wanted to build something. I looked a bit through all my boxes and found some Putrid Blightkings. I bought them about 2 years ago to accompany my other Nurgle model - Haralamb Gudvanger. They have lots of bits and are big and bulky, everything that I wanted at the moment.
My concept for them was to make them similar to Gudvanger - they are supposed to be failed replacement bodies for him. To achieve that, every single one of them has a covered face and some kind of horns. Any Nurgle iconography was scratched off - though I left any fleshy disturbances, they fit very well both the concept for them and the 'The Thing' motif I am trying to push with this faction. I got another Johann from the Giant kit, so that the central one here could hold him by the neck, screaming and handless. Their bases have also some depressed areas to put some grimy puddles there, another thing to tie them together with the flesh-stitcher. There are 6 of them instead of the usual 5, because I wanted to have a 3x2 block of them - I bought one additional torso to round up their numbers.
I heard many good things about this box and I wasn't dissapointed - it was a lot of fun to work on them. Every single one is distinct and interesting, there are no guys who are only there to take space and I could build probably another 6 of them. I had similar feelings when I was working on my undead ogres. I think I will get another box of those to build players for a Nurgle Blood Bowl team!
Back to the zombies! I am not posting this next batch because I don't have anything else to post, but rather that I want to be done with them at last!
The whole idea about those guys started with the one holding a scroll here. He was supposed to be a champion of one of the units and I was trying to come up with an idea to make him more interesting. Putting up a pointy hood with bleeding eyes seemed good enough. Then, when I was expanding the horde and I needed even more bodies, I started covering their heads with such hoods to keep the theme. It was especially useful on some bretonnian bodies, as those robes and coats are more difficult to damage and zombify than Free Company bodies, for example. Then I came up with a backstory for them, how they were blindly hunting undead, heretics and witches, not really bothering with trials. Not only it gave my horde some asshole victims but it also made one of them perfect to accompany the Pain Tree.
The tree idea came to me when I noticed that I have those cages from the Giant kit and I was wondering what to do with them - and then I decided to just hang them on a single tree, also using one of those hanged zombie torsos really as a hanged zombie torso. The twins, on the other hand, were an interesting way to use two extremely similar Flagellant bodies and two multi-ended whips I bought some time ago.
After finishing the horde I kinda regretted that I didn't get that Frostgrave Cultists box to really make a lot of them. Maybe I'll build and paint them as living humans - they would make good villains for my vampires.
When von Greifens still lived in Bretonnia, white hooded cultists with red emblems were their common enemy. The local nobles, not wanting to engage personally in the vampire-hunt, founded a group called ‘The Order of the Lady’s Tears’. It was composed mostly of younger peasants - desperate ones who couldn’t hope to inherit the land. In exchange for every found and/or executed vampire, undead, witch, etc. they were recompensated with money. They still had to pay all the taxes and undead weren’t as easy to be found, so they soon started hunting just about anyone disagreeing with them, forcing confessions, burning people - all to get their enterprise going forward. Vampire activity actually waned because of their hunts, so the nobles didn’t care about a few burned peasants. After moving to Varsavia, von Greifens were happy to run away from those thugs, but they were coming after them still with every small Bretonnian crusade that found itself in the land. They make zombies just as good as anyone else.
Yet another living addition to my collection - a vampire hunter! I always liked this model, but only recently I realized that it could get discontinued by GW at some point - so I decided to order him from the webstore at the earliest occasion. He will complement my undead very nicely. EDIT: GW indeed stopped selling him in august 2019.
Painting him was interesting to me because of two things. First one, I painted him from start to finish in a single day - something which I didn't do for a long time. Nowadays I work on several projects at once and they are all spread out over several/many evenings, but for this guy I wanted to try being more focused - thankfully I had a free day to do such experiments! Second thing, I tried out some new techniques - like wetblending the basecoat, making later shading and highlighting much easier - or painting 'fake' scratches on the leather instead of leaving it as smooth as the sculpt itself.
I inteded him to be from the Ostland province of the Empire - and while he indeed has some black and white clothes under his cloak, they are kinda lost on the finished piece and way too similar to each other - something which I noticed especially well on the photos. I will have to work on those two colors some more in the future.
After Sir Baranowski’s escape, Kislev authorities finally learned that all the undead in Varsavia weren’t just rumours. But before any organized action could be made against them, the boyars wanted to collect information. They already had informants there, but recent events proved them to be ineffective. To remedy that, a vampire hunter from the Empire province of Ostland was brought. He was to gather information about the undead, look for ways to divide them and make their un-lives in Varsavia difficult - mostly by dismissing false myths about Vampires and informing the locals about real ways of fighting this menace. While extremely competent, only time will tell if his extremely dry and serious conduct (as expected of an Empire citizen) won’t discourage the locals and make him just another weird outlander spewing ‘western nonsense’.
A weird update today - not really something new, but rather more of something old!
Grave Guard from GW were the reason why I started collecting Vampire Counts a long time ago. I got my first, 20-wight strong unit of them pretty quickly and it was thanks to them I got the idea of making my army Slavic-oriented and started using the popular patina/verdigris color scheme. Only later I noticed that 20 Grave Guard wasn't that much - and pretty often I had to proxy them. After that, I started buying more boxes of them, planning to expand my unit sometime. And now, 5 years later, I have finally painted all of them - and my big bad death star of 50 wights is complete!
During those years I expanded the Slavic theme in my army, so when I was building these guys, I made a lot of pointy helmets for them. Some of them turned out rather crazy high - but I still have yet to decide if such exaggeration is good, or if I should tone it down next time. Like the old unit, they also have different blades on their weapons (swords from the Skeletons box), because I never liked the original ones. The painting side of the whole project was, of course, the same as 5 years ago, only this time it was probably much quicker and tidier.
Wight warriors are the most effective undead troops in Varsavia - but that amounted to nothing in the face of innumerable hordes of zombies and ghouls available to the vampires and necromancers, the wights’ rivals in the land. Zlyshko wanted to bolster his forces ever since he was raised, but finding the right tombs was difficult, especially if he had to stay beneath his ‘allies’ suspicion. Only when Daremnych joined him, they could strengthen their forces with new warriors - all of them skilled, clad in heavy armor and wielding the cursed blades of the ancient Varsavia. With this new host, they could start openly fighting for their rightful place in this realm.
One day I got an idea about converting some Stormcasts. Not wanting a full army, I decided to get a Warhammer Underworlds: Shadespire box. This gave me 5 khorne guys, the second warband from that set, so I had to think what to do with them too! Finding them too golden and ornate, I decided to turn them into much simpler, gritty, Viking-inspired barbarians.
The first thing to do was to get rid of their weapons and replace them with low-fantasy ones - either finding something from my bits box or sculpting them from scratch. Next one was the worrying lack of facial hair amongst them. I understand that GW maybe wanted the leader to stand out a little more with his glorious beard, but that was not enough for me. I replaced two other heads with Chaos Marauder ones, they worked like a charm here. The remaining two got some hair sculpted. Finally, I simplified their armor and got rid of any Khorne iconography, replacing it with a single rune in some places. Fluff-wise I want them to worship Khorne in their own way, unaware of the 'mainstream' cult. They will know the Blood God under a different name, use different symbols, but still believe in the importance of spilling blood and piling skulls for the skull throne.
I must admit, this colored plastic is handy when showing conversions, it's really clear what's the original substance, what's kitbashed and what's sculpted.
And I'm finally back to the basilisk. Like I said in the WIP post already, here I am going with monsters that are in no way usable in my army, but they fit the theme. Perhaps I will find some use for them later! Here I am starting with a basilisk - a GW cockatrice converted a bit to resemble a rooster a bit more.
When it came to painting, I also decided to reference roosters - the idea was to make it really just a giant snake-chicken with crazy eyes. That's how I chose the colors for the feathers, beak, face and the mane. The snake parts were then painted to resemble a viper commonly found in Poland, with a characteristic zigzaging pattern. When it came to wings and skin I had to think of something - so I referenced the colors I already used and made an organic pattern to make it a tad more interesting.
It was nice to paint a well-sized monster like this, not too small and not too big - but damn I don't like painting wings!
If asked about a basilisk, most Varsavians will tell you that it’s a snake-rooster about the size of a housecat, whose famous petrifying gaze will cause only slight numbness at worst. It’s a rather common pest. Only an unfortunate minority will tell you about a giant monster capable of easily tearing an armored man to pieces and easily petrifying anyone for long enough to be hauled back to the nest to be devoured. That is the Great Basilisk, a scourge that has been terrorizing Varsavia for many, many years. Wise men tried to deduce how it came to life - some say a beast like that is born once every 100 years from an egg laid by a rooster, while others say it’s just a chaotic mutation of a normal basilisk. No matter what’s its origin, this basilisk just appears from time to time to wreak havoc around the countryside, attracting foolish heroes to die while trying to kill it. Even those trying to turn its own gaze against it with mirrors discovered that the beast is simply immune to its own powers and can still use its beak and claws to tear and rend. Until someone manages to kill it once and for all, both villagers and armies marching through Varsavia have to factor in the possibility of a great basilisk attack.
This week a small intermission - a wargaming wedding gift!
I visited Cologne this year - and before going there I asked a friendly Carpe Noctem user living nearby if he wanted to meet. He told me that we couldn't hang out normally in the city, because he would be busy having his own wedding at the moment, but he would be happy if I would come to the party. So, by pure chance, I got invited to my first German wedding - one that was horror themed too! It was only logical for me to make some undead-related, wargaming present for him and his wife. I choose zombies because I became kinda known for them on the forum, that would make it more personal and because they were simple enough to do them on that rather tight schedule.
Thankfully I managed to finish it on time and we arrived on the party - where not only the married couple and other youngsters were dressed as zombies/vampires/cultists/witches, but also most of the uncles and aunts! A cake had a graveyard decoration on top with a bloody red inside, the snacks were little cookie 'fingers', drinks were red, the decorations were cobwebs and skeletons. In front of it all, a tent was organized - with a grisly escape game! Now that's some dedication, no wonder that the guy collects also undead miniatures! The present was a perfect fit into all that, they looked almost exactly like that.
Continuing with the ancients, here we go with the second liche. This one is a model from Frostgrave - I found it when I was looking through their range, looking for something fitting to incorporate in the Zombie Legion. With his pointy hat/helmet and ragged robes, he was perfect as another liche - I didn't have to think long about buying him! The painting scheme is the typical one for wights/liches - and while Mertvet was interesting because of how much fabrics he had on him, this one has just the right amount of clothes, bones and metal parts and I think he turned out pretty well.
The second one of Daremnych's lieutenants was Belomor - an eager Varsavian priest that tried to convert some chaos tribes to his indigenous beliefs. He was found and saved by the Great Priest just when he was about to be sacrificed by the barbarians. After that, he quickly took faith in the Death God, the one that spared him after his old gods ignored his pleas. Soon enough he proved to be one of the most fervent members of the cult - spreading the faith however he could, by force if necessary. He was also known for always maintaining a kind, fatherly attitude, even while burning the villagers one by one to make an example for the rest. Killed during one of such spectacles and only now raised, he wants to show the unbelievers that he went too soft on them the last time.
And now I can show Daremnych with both of his lieutenants/disciples together. Now my wights have some magical support!
Long have I wanted to have a unit of Cairn Wraiths - the least used and the least popular 'Rare Unit' from the 8th edition Vampire Counts armybook. They were just way too expensive for what they did - but I still wanted to get them, for the sake of completionism at least. Using the same character Cairn Wraith 10 times wasn't an option, I didn't want to hunt for all the oldhammer instances of them and I couldn't find a good base for converting/building them too, so the idea was waiting in the backlog for years. Then GW released Grimghast Reapers and I knew those are the ones I was looking for! Still, some conversions were in order - thankfully I already had an idea in mind.
I didn't want to have a full 10-ghost unit of grim reapers, because I find that a bit silly, so I decided to replace the blades with axes. Cowls and blinded faces were also a little weird, so I replaced them with normal skulls and Slavic pointy helmets, adding some cloth around it too. That made them more similar to real warriors rather than angry farmers - while still keeping the fantastical theme pretty strong, so all was good.
Then I had to mount them on bases. That was a problem because they were designed to stand on loose 32mm rounds, rather than on tightly packed 20mm squares that WFB cairn wraiths used. To make it work I converted them completely first and only then began mounting them on bases, moving, switching and adjusting them together. I found a good configuration but that not only required cutting some ghostly strands and bending others but also left many of them standing very off-center on the bases. To remedy that, I had to immediately magnetize them and build a tray for them - without it, only 2 of them are able to stand upright! I like them like that, though - they stand so close to each other, they blend into one ghastly mass, like a Wild Hunt of some sort. Only after seeing them like this I decided to add those branches on the ground - both to reinforce my forest theme and to hide their connection points a bit.
As promised, here I am going with more wights - or in this case, liches, disciples of Daremnych. This one here is a gorgeous model from Otherworld Miniatures, bought a long time ago, finally painted. He was something different in this typical scheme of mine - there was just way more clothes than metal, so I couldn't just drown it in verdigris! Still, I think it worked in my favor in the end - I got lots of space to paint freehands on, the red robe reinforces his image as an evil wizard and patina got used only as subtle, yet effective accents.
Immediately after being raised, Daremnych started to look for his old lieutenants - to replace living necromancers as soon as possible. The first one found was Mertvet - the most reliable one. That wasn’t thanks to his loyalty or stability, no - rather, the opposite. He could be simply expected to always act in his own interest. Where a loyal man could be broken in the most unexpected moment, Mertvet’s betrayals could always be planned for. He got recruited into Daremnych’s cult when he was busy terrorizing the countryside as a powerful, immoral wizard conducting experiments on people he captured. In exchange for his help in the Death God’s army, he could continue his deeds while enjoying the newfound security, without being harassed by heroes trying to slay him. That and he didn't have to risk the price of denial - fighting much more powerful Daremnych - which was in the end, the reason for his death a long time ago. After being raised, Mertvet and the Great Priest decided to simply continue their agreement as if nothing happened.
I'm back to painting zombies! Well, sort of - I managed to finish a pack of Zombie Wolves from Gamezone Miniatures.
I wanted to have those beautiful miniatures probably ever since I started collecting undead - and got them cheaply some years later on eBay, that was quite a steal! Then I filled the gaps between the parts and then they lingered on a shelf while I was doing other big projects. I finally took them while I was working on Vaclav, because I wanted to post something new, instead of just spamming zombie groups and I hoped that I could squeeze a small project somewhere in between... and well, seeing as I am posting them now, that didn't work out that well! Still, I found some color schemes and basecoated them at that time, so I had at least that going for me! Painting them went really quick and I had lots of fun with it, unlike the last Gamezone model that I painted... that gives me great hopes about their Mournful Knights, which are also waiting for their turn for a long time.
Seeing as there is only one unit of them and they are much less generic than the current GW ones, I wanted to make them a little bit special - so I painted their fur differently, getting some inspiration from pictures of real wolves and dogs. It mostly got lost underneath the rotting flesh and blood, but I think it gives them an interesting feel and I think they turned out good enough.
Sorin, fond of using wolves in his plans, usually resorts to local ones buried under the Varsavian earth. Only on special occasions he uses his own, trained pack of undead canines brought from the far north. Bigger, stronger and more resilient than your usual raised wolf, they are very reliable scouts, pursuers and distractors. Sorin’s kennels are big enough that with some necromancy added, he will never run out of beasts to help him catch especially elusive prey.
"Necromancer Lord" from Avatars of War range, one sculpted by Gary Morley - the same one who sculpted the old clown-style Nagash for GW - so this model can be seen as his another take on the topic, even if for another company and under a different name. I liked this mini the moment I saw it, but I still had to convert it a bit to make it fit my Slavic wights better.
And speaking of those wights, man it was good to be back to this patinated color scheme! It was more than two years since I painted anything like that and I had to remind myself of how to do it, but once I did (thankfully the tutorial is helpful to me too!) I had a real blast, kinda nostalgic! I took out two liches and a bunch of Grave Guards too - and I did the whole process on the all at once. Then I did the usual bone, blacks with freehands and reds, only this time concentrating on the giant liche here. I will be posting the rest during upcoming weeks. Daremnych was especially interesting because he had this ground with bones rising up from the base - I never painted something like this before. Well, that and flames too, even if I hate painting those!
This guy opens a new 'season' in my upcoming projects too, expect much more from this subfaction in the near future!
Alexander Hautfell and his necromancers were crucial to raising, sustaining and supporting the wight armies that were the most effective fighting force available to the undead. That gave them much independence and influence in the local politics. That lasted until King Zlyshko managed to find another well-hidden wight barrow. Necromancers, not knowing into what they were getting into, helped to raise another ancient wight. He introduced himself as Daremnych, the Grand Priest of the Death God and the Hierophant of Bones. Towering over everyone else, he was one of the rare Varsavian Giants, a powerful necromancer and a very old, experienced schemer. Centuries spent in the barrow rusted his precision of handling the wings of magic and he didn’t know the new, refined invocations of the modern sorcerers, but his incredibly powerful, if somewhat wild and unpredictable magic skills were enough for the wights to finally stop relying on the feeble, human necromancers. They could go forth really expanding their armies. Still, even if discarded and without protection, Hautfell wasn’t ready to give up yet.
And now something different - a Chaos monster! I bought him kinda like I did with my Boyar earlier - not because I intended to use it somehow on the tabletop, but because it would fit in my Slavic-themed collection. While a cockatrice isn't a particularly Slavic beast, a basilisk certainly is! It was probably the second mythical monster I heard about as a child - after the dragon from Krakow of course.
While it's a good base, I didn't find the GW Cockatrice to be 'basilisk enough', the rooster aspect of it wasn't as pronounced as I would like - and the most important feature of the beast, its eyes, were also way too small. So I made new eyes out of greenstuff and built all the fleshy parts around them to make it resemble a rooster a little bit more. I also didn't like the weird claw the original sculpt had on the end of the tail, so I just cut it off and sculpted a normal, scaly tail. I bent the wings a bit too, they were unnaturally straight and flat - thankfully it's very easy to do such changes in resin with just some warm water.
When I was at the end of my zombie-building process, when I was completely out of suitable models and cool ideas, I filled the missing places with those statues. I planned it like that since the beginning - seeing as those are scratchbuilt, I needed only milliput, greenstuff and a free base - I could easily make them exactly as much as needed. They would also help to bring this chaotic mass of corpses a little bit closer to the Slavic theme of this force.
I thought I would make them stand alone on those 40mm bases, but they would become either way too thick or the base seemed empty. That's why the three ones seen on the top of the picture got a single zombie each to make them a little bit crowdier. Two below are kinda opposite - I wanted both the spider and the whipper to stand on something that would elevate them and those wooden idols were a much better idea than using a simple, boring stone. The minis were there first, statues came later.
I will make a tutorial in the future about building and painting those.
Giant sculptures depicting old gods, heroes and ancestors, carved out of whole tree trunks are a common sight in the Varsavian wilderness - it’s difficult to move through the land without stumbling upon at least one of them. Despite their true meaning becoming mostly forgotten today, the villagers still care for those idols - not wanting to anger the old spirits and being somehow proud of their old cultural heritage, something that makes them different from other people of Kislev. Boyars tend to ignore this sentiment because the villagers still pay their taxes and it's much better than worshipping Chaos.
As I wrote in the WIP post, I never really liked those old bedsheet Spirit Hosts that GW was selling before upgrading them in 2014. Even so, when I noticed some of them on ebay recently, I realized that I actually want them! They possessed enough oldschool charm to add them to the collection, but that didn't mean that I wouldn't convert them. To make them more Slavic and also add some variance to the unit, I decided to fashion them after hermits that lived in russia in old times. The whole idea, together with a painting that inspired me, can be found in the WIP post, linked above.
I painted them in the same way I did with my last banshees - only this time I wasn't sweating as much about detail. Well, they aren't as much detailed as the banshees too. I wetblended them first - dark green on the bottom parts and light green on the top parts. When that was dry I highlighted the top with a white paint and added several layers of black shade on the bottom parts, especially in the recesses. Then I added some Coelia Greenshade, mixed with Vallejo Glaze Medium on the middle parts to blend two extremes together. Then it was just a matter of some refining touches, like on the hands or on their faces. In the end, it was pretty quick to do, I remember that banshees were more labor-intensive.
Faith in the harsh land of Kislev values frugality and abstinence - and while common people remember about it only a few times a year, some people take it much, much more seriously. Those ascetic hermits can be found all over Kislev, but they are especially common in dangerous Varsavian forests, where they can really test their bodies and faith. Here they preach spirituality and peace, sometimes acting as quite effective neutral mediators between warring chieftains. The problem was, Constantin wanted the Varsavian chieftains to wage endless wars between themselves, to make them easier to control and contain - and to have a steady supply of dead to be raised in the vampires’ armies. Because of that, he had Sorin and Ioana hunt down every single hermit hiding in the forests. Violently murdered despite their innocence, their disturbed spirits were easy to shackle down, to serve their killers even after death. Vampires find them useful both on the battlefield and to haunt the countryside, ruining the hermits’ reputation for years to come.
I really love cavalry miniatures and of course I couldn't skip on them in the Zombie Legion. The problem was that they usually go on 25x50mm bases and I had to stick them on 20x40mm ones - they have some difficulties fitting in, but with right neighbours they manage all right. You can see the unpainted versions of most of them HERE.
Most zombies walk by themselves, because it is usually tricky to make both the rider and the beast move in unison - but sometimes, an exception is made - even if such zombies can barely stay on their mounts, not to mention fighting. Still, Constantin loves to mock his defeated enemies, so if his forces manage to slay a high-ranking officer, a noble, or a member of an elite unit, he raises his corpse and puts it on a horse as a vile parody. Bretonnians - his most hated enemy - make this especially difficult. Knights will never suffer anyone of them be raised in such a manner, so they always bring their fallen comrades back with them or - should he really be raised - he’s hunted down with extreme prejudice. To express their disdain properly, vampires had to ‘build’ their own knight - out of random bodies, wooden scrap and farm tools. After some time Constantin decided that this solution was even better than having a real undead knight.
First is the Empire officer with his untypical vertical orientation. He is converted slightly - I took away his head, put an eye in the crow's beak, sculpted some guts hanging out from the horse's belly and added a gash in its eye socket. When it came to painting, I had an idea to make him really nice and glossy, using black and gold (inspired by Nilfgard colors from the Witcher franchise) and then cover him rather thickly with dust and mud and see how it'll turn out. In the end, I think I overdid the mud a bit, the glossy parts are really subtle - but at least he still fits with his colleagues.
And the the rest - a winged hussar, a rusted knight, bretonnian knight mockup and an acrobat. The first one is a greenstuffed kitbash mounted on a metal horse with some rather straightforward painting.
The second one is quite a veteran of the legion, built and painted for the first expansion to the unit - but he didn't have any cavalry friends back then. I always wanted to have a limp corpse being carried on a horse in my army and a really, really rusted knight too - so he counts here for both. The rust is different than most of the legion, I painted him before I started using pigments for rust.
The third one started as am attempt to kitbash an undead Bretonnian knight. While doing that, I noticed that I either don't have good bits to do it, or making them out of greenstuff would take too much time. That's why I started using much more 'rural' accesories, to create some sort of a mockup my Vampires could build up. Then came the backstory explanation for it and it all worked out fine in the end. To bring the idea further, I painted him in washed-out, natural colors, something a peasant would use, not like those colorful nobles.
And the last one came to be when I was trying to mount a ghoul model on a skeleton horse. I couldn't fit it there nicely, no matter how I tried but I noticed I could make it simply stand on its spine, like an acrobat. Seeing how zombies can be made more humorous than your usual undead, I just ran with it.
Finally, after starting this project in November 2016, I managed to finish it!
It started with me buying an old model of High Elf Imrik - I loved that model ever since I saw it as a child! Then I wanted to incorporate it in my undead army - but I also wanted to avoid butchering the model turning it into a zombie. I decided to make it look scarier and more evil - a dragon befitting a vampire. To achieve that, I covered him almost completely with new, pointy scales out of greenstuff. It was a tedious task, but I managed to change the details while keeping the original form still there. Then I mounted on it a vampire that was leftover from the Terrorgheist set. The whole conversion process is documented in THIS post, while the base with the falling trees is documented HERE.
THIS photo and THIS artwork were the main inspirations, both for the sculpting phase and the painting one.
The painting proved no less tedious than the sculpting! I didn't consider the fact, that with those new scales, its surface area increased significantly. Other than that, it was really difficult to hold this spiny beast. I have been holding it by the wings the whole time and painted them only after I glued it to the base. One of them even broke off after all the turning and rotating. Then there was the fact that red is quite a difficult color to work with - I had to go several times with basecoat, shades, wetblended layers, glazes, hightlights - all that through every scale. Thankfully, after that was done, the rest was much easier and more enjoyable.
The base itself was quite a challenge too, but a welcome one - it was the first opportunity to use dirt mix on such a big base instead of the usual drybrushed sand. Besides, I bought a lot of basing materials specifically for this occasion after paying extra attention when I was biking through forests this summer. I even used my Johann (he would be probably more like Jan in my story) model to make it extra special.
One of the main reasons why Lady Ecaterina wasn’t replaced by another upstart pretender during all the years is Vaclav, known in Varsavia as Vaclav the Red. He’s unconditionally loyal to his mistress, ready to do anything for her - yet nobody, perhaps besides himself and Ecaterina, knows why is that so. If the fact that he’s one of the true Blood Dragons and has the skill to prove it isn’t enough to deter enemies, his giant red dragon - his loyal companion and mount - usually is. Together they impaled, incinerated and torn into pieces countless foes. Still, even they weren’t able to overcome the numbers and wit von Greifens brought with them - and Lady Ecaterina was forced to parley. But if not for him, she probably would be forced into unconditional surrender or killed outright. Their current cooperation with von Greifens is questionable at best, but Constantin is willing to improve it if only to get the dragon knight on his side.
And the second picture, because I couldn't fit all the views I wanted to show in a single one.
And a little bonus picture!
Such is the life in Varsavia - if the dead are not rising from their graves, if the witches are not kidnapping your children to make soup out of them, if the mythical beasts are not slaughtering your livestock, then it's the dragons that are dropping trees on your head!
A small conversion work. Miniature from the Avatars of War range, one called the 'Necromancer Lord'. He was sculpted by Gary Morley, the author of the infamous oldschool Nagash model - and seeing how this model looks, it's safe to say that this one is a much subtler reimagining of that old clown. I bought the miniature because I found it really cool, even if I didn't have absolutely any use for him on the battlefield - there are no necromancers or wights in WFB or AoS that big! Still, he'll be a good excuse in my background to greatly expand on the wights and the rest of the 'Ancients' subfaction.
As cool as this model is, I needed him to fit the aesthetics of my other wights, make him more Slavic and get rid of the 'mysterious eye' symbols that were all over him. To achieve that, I gave him a pointy crown/helmet and added much more Slavic iconography. I also scratchbuilt a new sword scabbard for him, as the original one was way too weird and fantastic for me.
Also, only on the photos, I noticed that the needle in his helmet is showing - I need to fix it up! His dagger is also missing here, but I still need to consider if I need it at all.
This batch was brought together rather accidentally, it was only after building the whole horde when I noticed that they kinda fit a common theme. The first one was the ogre, I had a lot of ogre bits laying around after assembling my Crypt Horrors and I wanted to use them somehow. With a head and two hands it was relatively easy to sculpt just the torso with some guts spilling out. The spine was taken from a skeletal horse model, you can see the unpainted conversion HERE.
The parts of a giant was my attempt at using all the extra parts from the Giant box. There are so many additional body parts there, it would be a waste to not use them somehow. It was just a matter of sculpting some additional flesh to show that the part in question was indeed torn or cut off. Even though there are giant hands in the kit, the hand crawling here comes from the Beastmen Ghorgon kit - I bought the spare bits from someone on ebay mostly just to get that limb and make it crawl together with my zombies. Its position was perfect for my needs, I just needed to sculpt the torn stump and insert a toothpick and a bone from the Crypt Horrors kit there. You can find the unpainted versions of the head and the hand in the WIP post HERE.
It’s no difference for a necromancer whether the raises whole bodies or only parts of them - even a single hand can crawl if it’s instilled with dark magic - it just isn’t worth it most of the times. Unless one finds a giant or an ogre - that’s something else. Of course it would be ideal to raise such behemoths whole, but Constantin doesn’t complain when he happens upon just some torn pieces. A crawling giant’s hand can still crush a grown man and an ogre ripped in two will still messily devour anything unlucky to be caught by it.
More zombies while I am meticulously painting all the individual scales on the dragon...
Now, these were fun! Ever since the very beginning I have been trying to assign one command group to every zombie unit. Champion included, even if zombies cannot have champions in 8th edition WFB. Not only those groups made them look more organized, which I like, but they were also very good from the hobby standpoint - lots of converting, freehands, creating more interesting dudes than just your usual wound markers.
Constantin likes his horde somehow organized, at least slightly resembling real military units. He achieves this by giving each section a command group, with his family banner, a musician and a single zombie dressed like an officer. Surprisingly, this somehow improves their performance on the battlefield. It is unknown, if it’s because of the residual memories in each walking corpse are making them fight better under one command, or because it makes vampires and necromancers easier to focus their magic better when they can recognize each unit on the battlefield. No matter what it is, Constantin keeps the command groups gladly, replacing them after each battle as soon as possible.
First, the champions and the musicians. For this purpose, a champion was basically any zombie that is sticking its weapon into the air - and I actually ended with more of them than 8, so I had to choose some favorites. Musicians were also fun to build - I have so many leftover instruments laying around, I could do twice the amount needed - and every one was a cool modeling opportunity. Like that half of a zombie sitting on a carriage - I was really running out of legs so I got creative with some balsawood.
And the standard bearers - with their height, I couldn't fit them on one picture with the rest. As with the musicians, I could use a lot of my spare banners thanks to them - and they were also a freehand opportunity too! I tried painting my usual von Greifen coat of arms in many different colors and styles. It would be good to mention here that the ghoul with a bretonnian helmet, holding an axe, that's something I copied from one creative take on the Flesh-Eater Courts, done by the user Dez in the Dark Age of Sigmar thread on TGA community HERE.
While I have been working on the dragon, I managed to fit a small WIP project to have something new to show this week.
For a long, long time I really disliked those old bedsheet spirit hosts of old. That's why I used LOTR minis for my own ghosts. But about a month ago, when I was looking through eBay I noticed three bases of them being sold cheaply and I realized that I actually like those goofy bastards and I totally want some.
Seeing as they are dressed in robes, have bald heads and use ropes as belts, I wanted to have them as some kind of monks - and mix them that way into my story. But their remaining hair is long, so that theme wasn't perfect. So next, I thought of the Russian ascetic hermits of old - I would only need to sculpt some beards and hats. The picture that inspired me is below the photos. This idea was also great to add some differentiation too - for all their oldschool charm, those ghosts come in only three variants and are rigid enough to make them unposeable. Besides that, this also instantly gave them some Slavic feel and made them fit better into my army and story.
The Dragon is taking a lot of time to paint, so I'll be showing some zombies in the meantime. This time, some elves.
I had some elf miniatures laying around, but I was never really fond of using them as zombies. They are all very clean, many of them with cloaks, robes - and the minis themselves, with their elves proportions, don't look very good if mixed with parts from the zombie kit. All of that makes it quite difficult to turn them into undead. Despite all that I added a small amount of them to the legion - even if it's only to have representatives of every race in the horde. Still, I think they turned out pretty ok - I especially like 'Lokhir Fellheart lite', the one with a standard crammed into his torso - and the wood elf with a bloody face. The High Elf one is from the old Cursed Company set, no converting needed - you can see other miniatures from that set in my collection, you can find them HERE.
Elves don't show up in Varsavia very often but Constantin can still boast about having few members of the elder race in his rotten legion. Some of those were parts of the Druichii slave raids, some were scouts operating in the Old World and some even fell from the sky after one of their aerial battles. Unfortunately, after being raised they don't retain their legendary skill or agility, so those zombies are just weak and frail versions of the human ones - with them it's probably more about collector's value than anything else.
And the second picture, an undead dark elf mistress whipping her zombie sub. The idea came to me when I was looking for usable bits in my Dark Elf Dragon box. There are two body options there, a male lord and a female sorceress. I wanted to place either one of them on a log and look silly, but I didn't know which one should I take - the sorceress won in the end because giving her a whip was an excuse to add someone being whipped in front of her, cheaply taking even more area using only 1 model more. That and the lord could be used for some vampire conversion later on, maybe. I added some trees to the bases, sculpted half a head for her, a new back for him, painted them - and a small BDSM action in the middle of the rotting horde was done. You can see the unpainted version HERE.
My second Blood Bowl team. The first one, Orcs, can be found HERE. I converted the standard human team to represent Bretonnia rather than Empire. It started with giving them extravagant helmets taken from Knightly Orders, but then I noticed that I don't have enough of them - so I made them Bretonnians instead. That makes them more varied, gives Bretonnia some representation in Blood Bowl (at least until the official team is released... as if!) and makes use of some of the helmets I had laying around my bits box. One change I made since the WIP post was to sculpt little shields on their chests. I wanted some clear, visible space to paint their coat of arms, but all the existing ones weren't good for that - so I made them myself. This strengthens their Bretonnia-ness even more! I also had to freehand all the markings on them, with texts on the bases too, because the font provided by GW didn't fit those knights at all.
At first, I wanted to paint them blue+yellow and call them Aquilean Aces - but that not only involved using yellow, making this project more difficult than it should be, it also narrowed down the colors I could use to those two. Because of that, I changed the color scheme to a red+blue background with yellow markings - not only it gave me more options when painting their armor, it also references the most common Bretonnian color scheme, which makes them even more recognizable.
All in all, painting some Bretonnians, all (mostly) clean and shiny was an interesting exercise, but I think I need to paint something darker now! That and finally play some Blood Bowl!
The Carcassonne Cavaliers are your typical Bretonnian knights-only team - proud, chivalrous and completely full of themselves. All the players were - as all self-respecting noblemen - trained from childhood to compete - and they are really good at it. They would probably win the championship already if only their concept of nobility and superiority weren’t hammered so hard into their heads. Every single one of those knights considers himself the star player, regardless of skill - and they notoriously underestimate their opponents, believing them to be beneath them. They also have big problems assisting their teammates - older veterans don’t want to pass to knights who aren’t their seniors - and the younger ones are impetuous and hungry for glory, always wanting to score the touchdown by themselves. Besides that, they are a pretty solid team!
