Hordebloods: Champion #1

I've completed the first shock troop of my Hordeblood infantry. My champions are the backbone of my best lists and always do their job - soaking pain as well as dealing it. For their skin tone, I've gone the Warsong Demon Tainted route. This gives them firey skin with brown shades and yellow highlights.

This fellow is the leader of the unit, but more will follow.

Like all my Hordebloods, I paint their red tabards first. It's a constant that all troops with have, and a stepping stone to compare the next colours to.

Rather than do all the skin at once like I normally would, I've only painted his face since I haven't painted this tone before. This makes the face practice, takes a few more layers of paint to get it where I need. Rather than the bright yellow highlights some of the inspirational pics use, I went with softer yellows, skin tone actually, to highlight him.

With a few variations to cut out testing steps, I paint the rest of his skin the same as his face. You'll notice that in following steps, the skin tones change a little. I ended up using a red wash later to tone down the bright orange and shift a little more red in, then some brown wash in recesses and shadows.

Unlike my Warlock Stonebearers, I haven't based his armour off anything. I wanted NMM, so I went with that using some white, grey and blue-grey armour and spike styles.

I've also wanted to integrate red into the armour and the plates create a nice bold contrast with the basic greys.

You'll also notice I've painted some of the armour spikes with a horn look rather than metal. The photo on the left I've painted the spikes in stages. Brown over the black base, beige streaked from the tip on the middle one and white streaked from the tip on the final one.

As I've been working on the Hordebloods, I've been painting mostly NMM - non-Metallic-Metals. But I've been painting the odd clasp with metallic paints to make little details stand out. For this guy, I decided to get a little more experimentive with mixing the two styles. You'll notice below that this makes for a really nice look.

For some extra flare, I've carved runes into his blades and painted a glow effect. In the final photos, you'll see I've also gel'd them to have some energy crackling out.

Here's the final photo of him from multiple angles. Click for a high-res shot and you can also find the pic on my Deviant Art.

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Take a look at my Step by Step page for the entire Hordebloods project. Here you will find each model broken down into links showing each step: Concept, Works in Progress, (for both modelling and painting) and Final Shots