With a single unit of ghouls painted for my Undead Army, I’ve decided to join a Kings of War league. And I need to play my first match before month end. Another crazy project, oh my!
As I’m multibasing for Kings of War, I couldn’t just build the models and paint whatever I could. Before deciding to join the league, I built a 1000 point list with what I had on the painting table and it didn’t seem too crazy.
I had a couple of weeks before the league started. Besides my ghouls I had a unit of Wraiths almost finished and was working on a couple of zombie regiments. With a couple of characters and some werewolves and knights I could do it. And I figured that would help motivate me.
And as it was meant to be, those weeks turned out to be crazy busy. Luckily my first rival didn’t mind playing at the end of the month. If I don’t waste any of my free time and focus on painting only the Undead I might do it.
On this post, you can see my finished Wraiths. I went for an easy to paint ghostly look. Not because I wanted to paint them ASAP for the league, as they were only needing to finish the base before I joined, but because they’re restic miniatures, and I don’t like it. They weren’t easy to clean, with some mold lines being really difficult to reach.
Even if I didn’t want to waste a nice paintjob on them, the Lord of the Rings Army of the Dead style suited them really well. I think they look nice enough for a very fast paintjob.
In fact, the base took me way longer than the miniatures. Waaaaay longer. I marked where the minis would go on the base and filled the rest with Vallejo textures and airbrushed it brown and drybrushed it. Then I glued the miniatures in groups, hiding their bases with more Vallejo texture and painting it to blend with the brown of the base and finishing it with more drybrushing.
Once it was done, the brown didn’t match at all the brown of the Ghoul’s base. I gave it a few dark washes to bring them close together, but it wasnt close enough. I could have painted all of the new bases as the Wraiths, leaving the Ghouls with a darker base than the rest. But no. It was bothering me to no end.
I did some test on the bases I had ready for the zombies, but none of the browns I had matched the Ghoul’s brown. And as I didn’t take notes, I couldn’t remember how I did it. I was going crazy. Then I decided to mix the darkest brown I had with a little bit of black and I got a really close match.
I masked all of the Wraiths and carefully airbrushed the base, using a brush for the most delicate areas. Then I very carefully drybrushed it. But inevitably some of the brown ended on the Wraiths, so I had to do some more touch ups on them. In the end, it took me way longer to paint the wraiths than more than the double of ghouls.
Sad. But at least now the bases match.
Don’t you dare say they’re different tones of brown. They’re matching bases.
I’ve done good progress on the zombies and the three werewolves have some paint on them. This week I’ll try to work on the Soul Reaver cavalry. With the goal of reaching the weekend with all of them half done so I can switch between them and I don’t waste time waiting for washes or whatever to dry.
If I’m able to finish it all on time, I’ll only have the characters left to paint. But I won’t paint them yet. In April the size of the matches increases to 1250 and in June, the last match will be at 1500 points. I’ll work on those extra 500 points instead of painting them on a hurry. Leaving all the characters last, as I’d like to spend a little more time on them.
Even if it’s going to be kind of crazy, I think it’s worth it. In the end I’ll have a painted 1500 points Undead Army for Kings of War. That means another game I can play with fully painted miniatures.
Comments 1
Beating yourself up over nothing with the bases, as long as they are pretty close to other bases in the same unit it`s fine -there is a lot less uniformity to landscapes than many model makers seem to believe.