A 'Chariot of the Harvester' from Gamezone Miniatures, painting finished in April 2016. Despite being rather small, this one took much more time than it should. The assembly was a bit demanding but it was nothing that greenstuff couldn't fix. The painting after that was just tedious - it was really difficult to discern what is what on the mini and my motivation wasn't the best at the time.
Either way, I am rather satisfied with it and it was an interesting experiment with basing. It's difficult to see it here, but I made a road with wheel-ruts on it and covered only the sides and the middle part with grass. This was the first time I used big tufts of grass and they proved most useful for this one.
A deadminder was a very important profession in the varsavian society of Death God worshippers. Wars were being waged, animals were being hunted in the forest, villages were being raided by bandits. All of that left many corpses - which left untended, were later eaten by animals, forgotten and unmourned. The deadminder was supposed to gather all the corpses - in whatever state they were left - and later perform the necessary rituals and send the deceased to the Death God's embrace. Many people had this profession over the centuries, but one particular was immortalized in the folk stories. He was a father pleading his loyalty to both his family and the Death God. He often spent many days far from home, burying the dead and then coming back to spend few days happily together with his wife and children. One time, he went away and weren't coming back for many, many weeks. Then the hard times came and the mother began having difficulties to feed the whole family. The youngest daughter saw her mommy overwork herself, only to get barely enough food for all of them. She decided to lighten her mother's burden - being driven with the love for her father and the devotion to the Death God, she ventured into the forest to find the deadminder, live with him and help him, for he surely had a lot of work. It's said that she found her father, worked together with him and for their devotion the Death God let them stay in the world of the living. Some think they both died in the forest, but others can swear by seeing both of them traveling slowly through Varsavia, minding the dead as always.
GW Corpse Cart painted in November 2013. It got small conversions - there's a spear for the driver to use and branches on the back, mostly to have more surfaces for OSL (object source lighting - simulating light with paint on a model) to work on. This was also my first take on OSL ever and I think it came out quite well.
More than one grisly myth in the Varsavian countryside tells about a ghastly cart being drawn by corpses - and Livio Heim is the source of most of them. Nobody really knows his story, but now he's a necromancer that roams the land in search of corpses - all to add to his collection. After all the years his grip on sanity is getting looser, but he's still eager to ensure everyone that his greatest creation will shock everyone sooner than anyone expects. It's quite easy to convince him to tag along and support the undead bands in exchange for having a full battlefield of bodies to search later.
The Coven Throne, a rather big vampiric chariot finished in March 2017 - plastic from Games Workshop. That was a hell of a project, took quite some time. Challenge for the mini was to really push the red-black-white scheme to the max. It works for the carriage itself, but it gets lost in all those green spirits. But still, in the end, it was all kinda worth it.
You can see the WIP post HERE- with the subassemblies and some techniques described.
First are the photos of the whole model.
After returning to their ancient homeland in Varsavia, von Greifens found themselves at odds with another vampire that rose to power during their long absence. A small, bloody court was held here by Lady Ecaterina Sokolov - once a wife of a Kislevite Boyar, now a vampire countess on the lands of Varsavia. Yet despite her pride, her position and forces seemed weak, which provoked brother’s attack. They came out victorious - only barely, though. She kept her own domain in which she still rules unquestionably, together with a personal army - and von Greifens were obliged to defend that land. In exchange, Brothers were free to govern and expand Varsavia as they liked. Before both parties concluded their meeting, the Countess shared a secret with the newcomers - information an ancient Varsavian death cult, which much later led to unraveling the story of wights and their Death God, changing the local balance of power forever.
Ecaterina herself, when enraged by something personally, brings down her wrath from upon an exquisite throne loft upon by ancient spirits and accompanied by her two most loyal handmaidens.
In December 2016 I slowly started putting the Coven Throne together. The whole model is impressive enough, so the conversions I planned were rather small. First, I gave the Countess a new haircut (inspired by THIS picture) and her handmaidens got some fur trims on their clothes. The plan was to make them look a bit like old russian nobility.
The project kept growing while I was working on it. While looking for inspiration on russian noblewomen, I noticed that they used a lot of pearls. So I ordered 1mm ball chain and used it to add pearls to the whole carriage. ALso, the commoner scythe in the skeleton's hands was replaced with a much more noble halberd.
Then, the base. I wanted the Countess to be both connected to the forest theme the rest of the army has and also be somehow more civilized. So I planned a stone path coming from her palace into the forest - the idea with the bent fence came a bit later. I joined some bent and cut nails with drilled sprue pieces and then held it carefully over fire to make the plastic bend too. Maybe it's not as wide as a proper entrance to the forest, but it works much better than my first idea - having the ghosts phase through the fence. That doesn't really work without translucency.
Next, the spirit horde. It was a big challenge to make the normal ghostly parts different from the metal parts while still keeping them distinctly uniform. In the end I painted ghostly parts white, metal parts light silver - and then glazed it all with blue and green. The effect is subtle, but that's what I needed. There are some freehands on the robes, but that's also very light. The whole thing was quite a pain to reach everything with the brush.
Now, the carriage itself. As most of my vampires, Countess and her entourage are kept in the black-red-white colour triad - except any special effects that is. The whole carriage was thus a one big excercise in painting everything in those three colours. It was a bit demanding, but turned out okay in the end.
And as the last WIP picture, the Scrying Pool. I wanted to paint an image there, because the background in the book describes it like that and I never seen anyone doing it on this model. My first attempt (above) was rushed, sloppy and flat. Next one took much more time but also turned out much better.
