Tale of Four Gamers - Challenge 1: Chaos Knights

Today I got Justin to send me some pictures of his WIP Chaos Knights Champion and Standard Bearer for this month's challenge.  From the outset, Justin planned to paint a basecoat only on both models before adding any additional layers of shading or highlighting.  That way he would have fully painted models that counted as complete for the competition and could take his time painting them up to a higher standard later.  Games Workshop uses this technique in a lot of their online tutorials, I think primarily because it is easier to create an article with a progression of pictures of the whole model rather than individual pieces.  How does Justin's "(Not Very) 'Eavy Metal" technique measure up?  Let's find out.

As Justin is painting an army devoted to Nurgle, we can expect to see lots of Nurgly colors throughout- lots of earth tones in greens and browns.  These Chaos Knights are no exception.  Justin wanted to carry the Nurgle theme right down to the horses themselves and paint them to look rotting and diseased.  While he is only sticking to basecoating at this point, he has painted two legs of the horse up through the highlights so he could nail down his painting blueprint.  He started with a basecoat of Khemri Brown and highlighted the legs with increasing amounts of Bleached Bone until he reached a pure Bleached Bone final highlight.  If you look carefully you can see where he has painted very fine veins of Regal Blue over the legs so that the horse's flesh looks kind of sickly.  The final step is a liberal wash of Gryphonne Sepia.

Justin says the key to painting veins is to remember that veins stem from the heart, so they should always branch out towards the extremities and never towards the center of a model.  Justin isn't a doctor, but he did stay at a Holiday Inn Express last night, so I would believe whatever he says.

All of the armor was painted with a 2:1 mix of Boltgun Metal and Gretchin Green.  I think it looks really good.  It's got a richness to it (is that the word?  richness?  fullness?  saturated?  someone help me out here) without being bright and un-Nurgle-like.  The accent trim and chainmail were painted with a simple coat of Tin Bitz.  Here is another shot where you can see the veins painted on the front left leg of the horse.  Note how he appears to have failed a panic test against a Terror-causing lampshade.

Justin followed this same procedure for painting the unit's Standard Bearer.  He plans to freehand a Nurgle icon onto the banner, but that feature probably wont make it in under the deadline for this challenge.  I'll be sure to post pictures of the finished model when he gets it done though.

It looks like Justin's strategy is going to pay off and he will be able to turn in two "completed" models to fulfill the challenge requirements.  I think this is one unit that will look great when the rest of the knights have been painted up and I'll be sure to post pictures of the fully painted unit when they are done.  Well, three of the four contestants have made some real headway towards finishing the challenge, but where is our intrepid Skaven companion?  Has he done anything at all?  Is he done already?  Is he laying in wait in the vast subterranean passageways of the Under-Empire planning our demise?  Stick around because Cam himself- the man, the pig, the legend- should be along shortly to give us an update on his progress.

Brandon