For the lady!

I love to kick off a new year with a new army. Last year I broke some personal records painting a newfangled Nighhaunt army in a rather insanely short time. This year I decided to add a Bretonnian army to my collection. First though I had to settle on proper heraldry. As a test I painted Vicomte Pascal d'Ascii and his noble serfs.

Any man who would be a knight and follow a king, follow me!

Astute readers may have noticed subtle differences between regular Bretonnians and my army. This is mostly caused by the fact that I've actually gotten started adding a Flesh Eater Courts army to my undead horde. In Age of Sigmar the Flesh Eater Courts are made up of delusional undead cannibals. Believing themselves to be noble knights and ladies they fight 'monsters' to protect their serfs. To the rest of the world they are bloodstained monsters that keep growling at you in meaningful ways while attempting to eat you. Its one of the more wonderful bits of background written for the Mortal Realms.

Guards! Knights! Squires! Prepare for battle!

As for ghouls I bought the Carrion Empire box last year and had some other models lying around. Recently I discovered that buying two Start Collecting boxes would give me all the models I needed to build an army out of what I had. Now all I had to do was decide on a color scheme. I test painted a few models last year. But I wasn't fully sold on either scheme yet. The green one being just a tad too cliche and the orange one makes it hard to add blood. I think an army of deranged cannibals requires a lot of blood on the models...

Talk! Talk is for lovers, Merlin. I We need the sword to be King!

I parked the idea for the army until these past few weekends. I've been playing Blackstone Fortress with my wife. The Ur'ghuls I painted airbrushing Stegadon Scale up to white made me consider a white horde of ghouls. I checked around the internet for ways to paint a horde white that would not involve me going utterly insane* halfway through the process (*more insane then I already am to be sure). I found this tutorial on Nord's Painting Saga. Not only does it involve white ghouls. It also involves screwing around with matte medium and weathering powders. So a cool color scheme and reason to use two tools I don't understand? Sold!

Ready my knights for battle. They will ride with their king once more!

Following Nord (and adapting where I missed paints) I used a mix of 1/3 Liquitex Matte Medium, 1/3 Vallejo Polyurethane Matt Varnish and 1/3 Vallejo Model Air Anthracite (with a lot of added water) to make a wash. I washed this over models primed white. After the wash dried, I washed the eyes, mouths and warts/random locations with a more subtle wash of VMA Anthracite and GW Skrag Brown. Letting this dry I put pure white highlights on the faces to pick out the goofy ghoul expressions. These models have wonderfully zany faces.

I must ride with my knights to defend what was, and the dream of what could be.

From that point I decided to stray further out of my comfort zone. I've added quite a number of Contrast Paints to my paint collection, but so far (a few bones aside) I had no real luck with these. This time I added a lot of Contrast Medium to the Contrast Black Templar black and used this wash-like paint to do the hair on the ghouls and 'gheist. It works. My first Contrast Paint succes (add nerd-dance here). At least I think it does (tone down nerd dance slightly, just in case). I used thinned down Contrast Skeleton Horde on bone areas and unthinned (sorry lazy) Gore-Grunta Fur on the club sticking out of one model's back. The eyes where painted white, followed up with VGC Livery Green. Metal was done with a random steely metal color (didn't look, just applied some), washed with Agrax Earthshade, given a highlight and rusted up with the replacement to Modelmate's Rust. A small pot quite creatively called 'Rust'. Luckily the marketing geniuses behind that name added a url for their company to the pot. Its www.dirtydown.co.uk if you're looking to replace your Modelmates (out of business) Rust.

Do... as I command! One day, a King will come, and the Sword will rise... again.

I found it hard to pick a color for the Varghulf's wings. I wanted to paint them red. But I knew that would ruin the blood effect. In the end I opted to give them a simple wash of Reikland Flesh. I washed this wash with a wash made of 1/3 Army Painter Purple Tone, 1/3 Forge World Dark Earth Weathering powder and 1/3 Polyurethane Matt Varnish (and a lot of water). The same mix (without being preceded by the Reikland Flesh was added to the lower half of all the models legs, arms and to the bottom bits of their faces. All that was left to do was to add a lot of blood. I continue to use the blood painting tutorial on Tale of Painters for this effect. Its a five step method that keeps the blood a bit more varied than just dolloping on Blood for the Blood God. All in all, a great start towards a fresh army and quite a quick and easy scheme to paint too! These five models took me about a day from start to finish. If I scale up the production I think I can easily paint more models in the same time-frame.

Meanwhile on the workbench (with apologies for the lazy captions this time, I'm in a bit of a hurry).

In an unrelated update. I've not abandoned the Townscape project just yet. I'm just utterly sick and tired of gluing on half timbering and cutting roof tiles. Above are all the buildings from assembly page 2. I will be finishing these up somewhere this weekend (if my weekend goes as planned). Then I'll be taking a small break before moving on to page three (it has a lot of half-timbered houses (at least to my eyes right now)). Variety is the spice of life, and right now I really needed to paint some undead. I also need to find some square based models to picture all the finished houses that I have so far. Hard to do as I've rebased almost my entire collection. The weather makes the proces more difficult. I is a lot of terrain, requiring me to go outside for photography. As it has been raining insistently here for the past week I've had to postpone that picture. I'll get to it later though. Now back to my delusional friends. For the lady!