Tale of Four Gamers - Challenge 1: Empire

Well, the deadline has come and gone and Challenge 1 of the LoDH Tale of Four Gamers has come to an end.  I'll be posting updates on everyone's finished (or perhaps unfinished!) models and then I'll have a wrap-up post with some final comments and the scoring for Challenge 1.  Only Justin has yet to turn in his pictures, although he assures me has has taken said pictures and only has to find the cord to connect his camera to the computer in order to send them to me.  A likely excuse, Justin!  I should have expected as much from a well known ne'er-do-well such as him.

I don't have much of an update for my Captain of the Empire, as he was pretty well finished earlier this month.  I did, however, finish basing him- my first model ever to have paint on it's base!

I had a bit of a rough time with the lighting while taking these pictures.  I'm not an experienced photographer by any stretch of the imagination, so I apologize if the details aren't as clear as they might possibly be.

Here is my finished General of the Empire on warhorse, a model I am pretty proud of.  For his armor, I tried a bit of a NMM effect while using metallic paint, so it's really metallic-non-metallic metal.  Weird, I know.  I think it worked out pretty well, although I'm afraid the pictures don't show it as well as they could.  I used a base of Chaos Black and Boltgun Metal and then layered it by adding in amounts of Mithril Silver until I was using pure Mithril.  I think it looks great in person and has exactly the high-polished look that I think a General of the Empire, especially one from Averland, should have.

This angle doesn't show off much of the armor, but I wanted to show off the cloak which I was also proud of as it required many, many layers of yellow to paint.  It's not Golden Demon quality, but I was concerned that I didn't have enough yellow in the model to really scream out "Averland!" and the cloak took the model all the way up to 11 (which, as the great philosopher Nigel Tufnel points out, is one more than 10).

There you have it- Challenge 1 completed!  I'll have another picture of both models included in my forthcoming wrap-up post.

Brandon

Tale of Four Gamers - Challenge 1: Empire General

Yesterday I posted pictures of my (nearly) finished Empire Captain with Battle Standard.  Once he was done, I turned my attention to my General on a warhorse.  When modeling the General, I really didn't spend any time worrying about whether or not his wargear would be WYSIWYG (What You See Is What You Get).  Coming from 40K, WYSIWYG is typically, if not a huge deal (nobody wants to be That F'ing Guy), at least encouraged wherever possible.  Most gamers are ok with proxies in a friendly match, but no one is that excited about playing against your Tactical Sergeant counts-as Marneus Calgar.  In Fantasy, I just don't see how it is possible to be WYSIWYG with your characters without having a ton of individual models you can swap out as needed.  With the differences in magic items available to them, it just wouldn't be practical to have one Captain modeled with the Sword of Striking, and have to swap out for another Captain if you want to take the Hammer of Judgment.  Long story short- I'm not concerned about whether or not my General or Captain are holding the right weapons.  That being said, I just modeled my General in a way that I thought looked cool.  I gave him a lance, because number 1, it's baller, and number 2, I figured at some point in the future if I wanted to have a BSB on a warhorse I've got a stand in ready to go.  I didn't attach that weird baby ribbon thing that comes in the kit.  It creeps me out a bit, to be honest.  I gave him a pistol in his other hand, again, just because it looked cool.  I have some other bits and bobs that I want to put on later, like a sword in a scabbard and his cloak, but I don't think those will make it in to this challenge.

In this picture you can see that I started from the ground up with this model.  I painted the horse first and then worked outwards in the various layers of cloth, chainmail, and armor.  The yellow I painted like I did for all the yellow on my Captain.  I started with a layer of Snakebite Leather, to give the Yellow a lighter base to cover than the black.  Then I painted Golden Yellow completely over the basecoat before giving the area a wash of Ogryn Flesh.  Next I layered Golden Yellow back on, leaving the wash in the recesses.  Finally I highlighted with Sunburst Yellow mixed with a little bit of Bleached Bone.

I decided to paint the horse's armor gold, as befits a General of the richest army in the Empire.  I started with a basecoat of Shining Gold and Scorched Brown.  I then washed the armor with Devlan Mud and layered Shining Gold followed by Shining Gold and Mithril Silver mixed.  As you can see in this picture, the overall effect was a little more like bronze than gold. 

I remedied this by later painting on a layer of Burnished Gold which has more yellow pigment in it.  For the armor decorations, I wanted them to look like the metal itself was colored, rather than having been painted over.  I mixed a little Boltgun Metal into Chaos Black for the basecoat, and then added increasing amounts of Codex Grey for the highlights after washing the basecoat with Badab Black.  I followed the same process for the yellow lettering using Golden Yellow and Shining Gold.  Does the effect work?  I'm not sure, to be honest.  The yellow didn't really preserve the metal flakes in the paint as well as the black did, so I think that was a wasted effort.  I'm not displeased with the black, but I don't know if it looks as good with the golden armor underneath it.  I'll see how it looks once the entire model is finished.

5 days to go and I'm almost there.  Will anyone else join me at the finish line?  Stay tuned for more.

Brandon