Imperial Flight Officer Lt. Varras gets a new coat (of paint)

A few years back I bought a couple of large lots of abandoned Warhammer collections. In hindsight I suspect weariness with older 40K editions and blind AoS rage where part of the reason the second hand market experienced a glut of badly photographed shipping boxes filled with random models. This Imperial Officer, Lieutenant Varras, was in one of them. I repainted him this weekend.

Don't rest just yet! You'd better strip and paint my crashed ship as well now!!!

I loved the 'I'll just sell it all' times. I'd make a blind online offer for a large box of (presumably) models. Receiving the box would feel like Saint Nicholas Day (here in the Netherlands we exchange presents on the eve of December 5th instead of at Christmas morning (don't look it up, parts of the celebrations are, shall we say, dated and a bit problematic)). One of the models that rolled out of one of these boxes was this one. It had faithfully been covered in large globs of paint. I thought he was part of the Necromunda system or perhaps an old White Dwarf giveaway. No matter, after a coupleof years staring sternly at me from a shelf in the shed, I decided to dunk him in Biostrip-20 so I could apply a paint job similar to the original one.

I thought Lt. Varras was yelling at me over his heavy metal space ship collar fashion accessory.

I was rather happy with my results on the first go round except the photographs of him all failed miserably (sometimes a nicely painted model photographs as if its splashed by ugly streaks of paint). I showed one of the better pictures to a friend who told me to stop whining as he thought he looked quite nice. So I decided to post the picture above to our gaming group and the Facebook Games Workshop Army Painters Group. There I learned his name (Lt. Varras) as well as his origin story. He's an objective marker from the 4th edition Battle of Macragge starter box (apparently you move him around on the first learning Warhammer mission). Having learned his name I found this post on Azazel's Bits Box. Quite useful as I learned Varras' mouth wasn't open, yelling a command, but rather a closed grumpy one. As my previous move out of the comfort zone was rather successful I decided to do that again.

I was quite relieved not to twitch and ruin the entire face with my 0 brush (yes this has happened in the past (a number of times)).

So I carefully reworked his face wearing my Optivisor (the 'too nerdy for me to look at you glasses' as my wife calls them). I thinned down my flesh colored paint (Cadian), carefully adding in more white and I (tried to) subtly enhance the highlights. I also reworked some shadows using Reikland Fleshshade. Its always scary to take a brush back to a model after declaring it finished. But one again I'm happy I moved out of the comfort zone and did it. Although I'm not quite sure what I'll be using this lieutenant for, he'll be a proud addition to the display cabinet (and probably end up on a Kill Team table or something).