SHOWCASE: Necromancer

Warhammer: Necromancer

There's a reason I don't finish many of the projects I set myself: I get distracted by other things. My desk is full (literally) of projects I've started and not finished. You can tell the models I'm working on at the moment because they're the ones balancing right on the very edge, closest to my chair. This time the distraction was a model I purchased ages ago. I picked it up because of a book I'm reading (The Rise of Nagash). Having finished it, I don't know why I didn't get around to painting it sooner (except, perhaps, for the other distractions). For various reasons, it was probably a good thing that I waited this long.

This one turned out to be a quick project. All in all it was about one-and-a-half evenings' work—about four hours, give or take. The reason I'm glad I waited until now is that I've been able to make use of a variety of techniques and painting schemes that I've only picked up in the last year—not least the glowing skeletons.

The brown cloak/robe was an accident. I'd seen somewhere that a good way to add shading to black armour is to wash dark brown into the recesses. Obviously it's not a 'shade' in the traditional sense because you can't get any darker than black, but it adds a nice contrast, as well as making the particular armour look a little bit weathered and battle-worn. I wanted to see if this would work on fabric. I still think it would to some extent, but in the process of applying it to this model, I decided to go the whole hog and do the robes in brown.

Over an undercoat of Chaos Black spray, I applied a couple of thin layers of Dryad Bark. This was then shaded with several layers of Nuln Oil, some of which were diluted with Lahmian Medium. The highlights were actually dry-brushed by mixing Dawnstone* in with the original base colour in progressive amounts. The dry-brushing in this case was extreme: there was hardly any paint on the brush at all. This dry-brush was so subtle that it was barely visible in each progressive application. The result was a slightly rough, weathered cloth—not as smooth as traditional blending, but still subtle in the way the colours shift.

The skulls were painted in a similar way to the way I painted my (currently only) unit of skeletons. The main difference is that my skeletons get a sparing white spray undercoat from above over the black. I couldn't do this to such a small area, so I built it up through a layer of grey, followed by white to achieve the bright basecoat. The next stage was to wash the area with Nihilakh Oxide. This does the job of shading and adding an eerie luminosity to them. After that, I thin the Nihilakh Oxide with some Lahmian Medium and apply a few subtle glazes to the areas immediately around the skulls. This creates a glowing effect (often referred to as object source lighting or OSL). Finally, I thin down some white with Lahmian Medium and apply some highlights direct to the bones.

After this enjoyable distraction, I really must get back to my other projects now, but I'm so tempted to paint more undead to accompany this guy... What do you think?

* Actually Codex Grey from the old Citadel paint range, but Dawnstone is the closest alternative from the current range. While I mostly use the new colours these days, I still have a lot of the older ones.