Tale of Four Gamers - Challenge 1: Empire Captain

As you can read in my ToFG Month 1 post, I have decide to start an Empire army.  After reading the army book and flipping through the really cool Uniforms and Heraldry of the Empire book, I decided to paint my army in the colors of the Averland province.  I liked the look of all the Handgunners and artillery available to the Empire and while I really like the fluff for the city of Nuln, I didn't want to do an all out Nuln army (playing Blood Angels definitely had a little to do with this- I'm tired of painting red!).  I also thought that the Black and Yellow of Averland looked great together and their reputation as the richest province in the Empire would give me opportunities to really bling out my characters and special units/war machines.

The Empire is perhaps the only army that can be built entirely in plastics, and GW's Empire General kit is a must-have for any aspiring Elector Count.  For under $25 you get 2 General or Captain figures, one mounted, and the option for a Battle Standard Bearer along with several different armament options.  Really good value in my estimation.  For the contest I decided to assemble a mounted General and a Captain on foot with the Battle Standard.

For my Captain on foot, I decided ahead of time that I wanted to go for a high quality tabletop standard figure.  I wasn't going to spend a lot of time blending, or doing time consuming techniques like Non-Metallic Metal.  What I wanted was a model with clean lines and moderate levels of shading and highlighting that would look great on the table leading my army to war.  Here he is after I got the main figure basecoated and applied a wash and then layered the basecoat color back over leaving the darker colors in the recesses.

I added a layer of highlights to the Captain and then painted the Battle Standard.  The Battle Standard was a breeze to paint, the wings are great for drybrushing.  With the main focus of the Standard being the skeleton, I wanted the wings to have a decayed, rotting feel to them.  I based them white, then washed devlan mud all over and drybrushed them once with bleached bone and then a second, lighter drybrush of skull white.  I'm pretty happy with how it turned out.  For the robes on the skeleton I simply based the whole area in codex gray and then gave it a liberal wash of badab black and highlighted the edges with codex gray.  The most time consuming part by far was painting the yellow and black banner, yellow is every bit as annoying to paint over black as red is.  Here is the finished product (minus the all important base).

I'm very pleased with the overall figure. I think I was able to get a model that will look great with my army and I was able to paint it over the course of a about a week giving myself lots of time to work on my mounted General. Stay tuned for a WIP post on my General as well as updates on the other challengers as well.

Brandon