Ignatyi Ognemet

This was the last time I painted so much fire!

Half a year ago I posted my WIP pictures of converted, odd Necromancers and it's finally time to wrap up the project and post the third and the last one of them painted, the fire-necromancer Ignatyi.

As you can see, this one was all about fire all over him - the rest was my standard dirty clothing. Unfortunately, I have a weird dislike for painting flames, I don't know why, but it just drains my motivation. I noticed it already on my Hexwraiths, but this time I thought I can force myself through it and maybe it'll at least look good. To make it even more interesting (and worse for me) I bought a Burning Head endless spell because it works just perfect with this character.

The whole idea came to me when I was reading rules for 9th Age a long time ago - and they decided to give necromancers Lore of Flames, to give them more offensive potential. This gave me an idea to create a crazed Necromancer, shrouded in green balefire - if not for the game, then at least as a painting/modeling challenge. Since that time the creators of the game changed the whole idea of Lores of Magic, to my miniature no longer applies there. Oh well! I will leave the assessment to you if he looks good enough to be worth all the stress those flames costed me.

Being a fire wizard is one of the surest ways to get yourself banished from the Kislevite society - not only you pose a hazard to all the wooden buildings, but you also stand in direct opposition to the traditional ice magic practiced in the land. Such was Ignatiy’s story - what started as an unusual talent which could find its use on the battlefield, soon became a reason for discrimination and exclusion amongst his traditionalist peers. That, together with pyromania which started to creep into his mind, soon led to his banishment. Ridden with paranoia and slowly losing his sanity, he was found by a certain hooded and masked individual. That creature showed him that his talents can be melded together with necromantic arts to use the energies of the dead and create an especially fell and devastating kind of fire. Wielding those sinister green flames, Ignatiy descended into almost complete madness through all the years he plagued Kislev. In that state, he got recruited by Hautfell - as a very volatile, fiery artillery for his necromantic coven.

Joachim Messer the Vampire Hunter

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’.