Painting THAT Dark Elf

I should have finished this one last weekend, but I got distracted… wanting to work on a dragon I had been given. That mini is coming along nicely, but this morning I made an effort to get the last of the detail and highlights down on Drizzt Do’Urden.

This is a single part metal figure by Ral Partha, 1988 for TSR “10-550 Drizzt”. I probably bought it on its own in a blister-pack way back then, and most likely because it was a figure with two swords, rather than for the character himself. I do have a lot of the novels of the Icewind Dale / Dark Elf / etc series that date from the late 80’s so I should have known ‘who’ I was buying.

The figure has been in a figure box for so long that when I picked it out for painting I took it for someone’s copy of Drizzt and not a licensed production until I went searching for some details.

I have a separate bunch of drow figures, and was more interested in this now for the two swords… so not painted as Drizzt. I’ve been playing a lot of Lord of the Rings Online recently, so I looked at images of the rangers from the game, picking a palette of mostly browns.

I really enjoyed painting this, once I worked out my colours. It was also great trying to do more work with highlights. I’m pretty comfortable with shading and washes, but getting the fine lines for good highlighting can be a struggle based on a combination of sculpted detail, focused eyesight and holding a fine brush steady. The sculpting on the figure itself helped a lot in this case. I’m also impressed that I didn’t just get the hair and the eyes right, but even managed eyebrows!

Painting: Warhammer Forces of Chaos #2

My second set of five Chaos Warriors. These are all Citadel / Warhammer single piece plastic figures. I think these came from a friend who’d bought extra figures. If I’d bought them they should have been packs of four or six the same. Two distinct sculpts, but not too different from each other or the original Hero Quest figures.

The chaos warriors got gun-metal armour like the previous sets. Axe wielders (0737 Citadel, 1997) then got their armour lightened with silver, and silver highlights. The halberd wielders got green ink on their armour and gold highlights. I wanted to do something different with the shields, and went with a two colour diagonal pattern. That was still a bit plain so I thought about putting an image or something over the top. Digging through my bits and pieces turned up a sheet of decals marked “Dark Elf Shields” – and these three white symbols (and only three) were just the right size.

I’m very happy with the final result. This now gives me an assortment of nine chaos warriors, who will also do as general evil/undead warriors, or even magically animated suits of armour since there’s no visible flesh (assuming you excuse boots and gloves). After taking photo’s I (of course) realised that I’d missed something – the silver on the chainmail of the halberd warriors! That got remedied before I took them out for a spray of clear acyclic.

Next off the tray: Probably the Hero Quest “Gargoyle”. I’m thinking of doing him as a statue, with a little bit of modification so that he’s not so balrog-like.

Painting: Warhammer Forces of Chaos #1

I’ve just completed five figures from Hero Quest as my first project for 2021: four Chaos Warriors and the Chaos Sorcerer. I’ve got five more Chaos Warriors started, and I think this is only the beginning of a lengthy run of Warhammer figure painting.

These five figures were fun to paint. The main reasons I’ve enjoyed doing them, and will continue are exactly why I got just past halfway through my Space Marines last year and haven’t gone back to finish them. These are all one part plastic figures with simple poses, nothing complicated but they do have interesting armour design and quite a bit of detail. While I’m going to have similar painting themes with the three different sculpts of chaos warriors, I’m still enjoying this and thinking of ways of making each have a distinctive look. (The marines, while being three chapters, were essentially fifteen identical, very simple and boring, sculpts. Maybe I can pick at them in between my warhammer fantasy painting.)

I particularly like the Chaos Sorcerer. I started out with a darker flesh/grey skin colour, that I thought was too dark, and lightened it to the very pale grey it is now. (It looks a bit whiter in pictures than it really is.) His hands are a little too big… a lot of the painted versions online have these painted as gloves, but there’s a lot of texture on both sides that I wouldn’t expect if you wore gloves. This figure is a perfect figure for any undead caster in my D&D games. The base decoration was fun too – I’d cut some skulls off the helmets of some of my other chaos warriors and one remained in good condition. I thought it would be fun to use. It sits of a pile of small broken sea-shells.

The chaos warriors got mostly gun-metal armour, with a bit of red ink to tint it, then silver edge highlights. The armour can look fairly dark, or lighter and shiny, depending on the amount of lighting.

 

Background: Hero Quest (Milton Bradley & Games Workshop) came out in 1989. I had both this and Warhammer Quest (1995), while a friend had both of these, and Advanced Hero Quest, and most of the expansions for the games. A group of us played through the initial games, and spend years on and off with Warhammer Quest. Over the years I collected a lot of figures – frequently to have them for these games and be able to use them for D&D.

 

Painting Chaos Warriors (GW Space Crusade)

After painting my Genestealers, I got my Chaos Warriors ready from ‘Space Crusade’. At this rate, I may end up painting the Space marines too!

The five figures – three standard warriors, one with a heavy weapon, and a commander were all simple black plastic. The three marine squads in the game are blue, red and yellow. I didn’t want black painted figures. I wanted the detail on these figures (which is quite good for a board game) to be noticeable, and decided on green as a contrast to the actual marines.

Space Crusade is the closest I’ve ever come to playing anything Warhammer 40,000, though I have read a fair number of novels. So, I don’t really know (or care much) about chapters and colours. Oddly enough, a little bit of digging on the web turned up a renegade chapter of chaos space marines with a basic colour matching what I was planning on. (Green isn’t a popular colour apparently, and I only found two separate posts with painted figures.)

The Children of Purgatos: Their Power Armour is painted emerald green trimmed with gold. They often decorate their armour with images of golden flames projecting from their armour’s golden trim. A renegade Chapter of Chaos Space Marines of unknown Founding and origin, that was declared Excommunicate Traitoris for reasons that are not listed in Imperial records.

I could have tried hand detailing flames on armour plates, but as it is I’ve spent a lot of time on them over a week and I’m very pleased with the results.

 

Painting Genestealers (GW Space Crusade)

Back in 1990, Games Workshop got together with Milton Bradley and released ‘Space Crusade’: a Warhammer 40K inspired board game for 2-4 players. While it’s possible that I bought it myself, I think it’s more likely that it was a birthday or christmas gift. I have played it quite a bit, and enjoyed it, and often thought about painting the space marines. It has mostly been collecting dust most of the last decade until I started raiding the box for various figures to use in my Gamma World game.

Both the Dreadnought and androids (Necrons) have been painted and appeared on my blog in the past. Recently Dave brought a You-tube video to his readers attention that involved painting genestealers in five different styles. This promptly got my genestealers located and put on my desk to paint. I was disappointed to find I only had three! (I haven’t lost any pieces; the game only comes with three.) I had hoped for five or six so I could follow two of the paint schemes.

 

I started with a basic ultramarine blue as a base coat, and then mixed a purple into that and went back over most of the model. A mix of flesh & purple on the head, hands, feet, and the ribbed bits on back, legs, arms, etc. Still following the video, a lightly watered down light tone (Army Painter ink), some (slightly lighter) blue highlighting, and gun-metal on the claws instead of a dark grey. Fushia for the tongue and head detail, white teeth and eyes, followed by a spot of red. I did highlight most of the claws with a bit of mid-grey (which is visible, though not obvious from the photo), and a lighter pink on the top of the fingers – which appears after drying not to have been light enough to actually stand out. Some of the blue highlighting isn’t particularly noticable either, so next time I try this I need to go even lighter, or simply do a second round with more white mixed in. I’m very happy with the final look in any case.

I’ve got the chaos marines from the set on my desk now too. A few of the people (thanks again Dave!) I follow have been using “the Tray” as a way of storing works-in-progress and a visible plan of what they want to paint in the “near” future. The figures I plan to paint, normally just sit on my desk. I’m thinking a tray of some sort will both encourage me to complete some figures, and stop me having to move the figures on my desk around when I need to take photographs, have books on the desk as I look up rules, or write adventures, etc, or my wife wants to take over part of the desk. A tray can be picked up entire and moved out of the way more easily than individual figures.

So here’s the tray – or what will be the tray once I actually find or make one: