Arrogant Victor

He stands triumphant on the field of battle, his war hammer wet with gore, his left hand raised in a gesture of insult to the retreating foe. This Warrior of the Empire from the Warhammer universe came to me several years ago as a free gift with my White Dwarf subscription. I only recently came across him while moving my work bench and sifting through spare parts. Having never seen a true picture of his intended colour scheme, I decided to go my own way. I imagined a battle worn nobleman in a “Ser Barristan Selmy” esque scheme with his burnished gold plate and stark white cloak. I typically don’t hold to drenching figures (even fantasy and sci-fi) in gore as I find it usually takes away from the “reality” I have suspended them in. that being said, I did envision this fellow having just moments ago delivered a particularly violent deathblow to his particularly ripe Orc adversary. The mire effect on his cloak and boots was intended to anchor the figure in his reality by tying him to the base with similar colours. I wanted the muck to go a good ways up his gear as he would have not only had to march to the site of the engagement but would also have been trudging through the morass of the battlefield in the melee. The main aspects of the painting that went into this figure that I want to touch upon are his scale-mail and plates. I began by building up the plate colour with an antiquated bottle of Polly-Scale Brass. A note on Polly-Scale paints, if you are fortunate to stumble across an old, dust covered rack of them somewhere; GET THEM. The bottle I am using for brass is one of Allan’s and I remember him telling me that many of his Polly-Scale bottles date back from the 1970s. Crack them open, mix in water, add a lead sinker and you’ve got a very useful paint! But continuing on with the plates, I used a mix of Citadel Snakebite Leather, Vallejo Iraqi Tan and Citadel Bleached Bone in order to provide a rich base for the metallic colours to be built upon.

I interspersed drybrushing Citadel Burnished Gold over the plates with thin washes of either Citadel Black Wash or a very diluted mix of Citadel Chaos Black and Vallejo Burnt Umber at a ratio of 1:2 respectively. The Scale-Mail was achieved by initially painting the areas with solid Citadel Boltgun Metal and applying washes of varying intensities to the areas that would need shading such as the folds in his cloak or his armpits. Blanket washes of Chaos Black and Black Wash were interspersed with highlights of BoltGun Metal and on the upper highlights, Citadel Chainmail. A good tip is to apply subtle blanket washes and then with a fine brush, produce horizontal washes to pick out random lines of the scales in order to break up the monotony of the pattern. Hical, James