Monday, August 29, 2011

Warriors of Chaos: 2 of 5


Warhammer Fantasy: Warriors of Chaos Army Blog
Part 1 | Part 2 | Part 3 | Part 4 | Part 5


In this article:
Spurred on by my initial progress, I dove head first into the meat and potatoes of any good warriors of chaos army: warriors of chaos!

Warriors of Khorne

Warhammer Fantasy: Warriors of Chaos with shields, handweapons, and Mark of Khorne

When I was getting ready to paint this unit I knew I wanted to do something special. I didn't mess with the colors (which I tend to), but rather chose to model the boys with a little extra flash.

The back of the new plastic bloodletter head is completely hollow to fit it's contact point. It also fit perfectly over a chaos warrior helmet once once the helmet's horns had been trimmed away. This was a piece that had to happen.

I had bought 2 boxes of plastic bloodletters to supply my new facemasks, and couldn't help but admire the swords that came as well. With Khorne symbols for hilts, it was just too good an offer to pass. I carefully trimmed the swords away from the bloodletter hands and glued them to warrior hands. The only problem was that the blades were ridiculously long. Now if you want to make a unit of khorne warriors with great weapons, leave the blades to size and go from there, but for simple handweapons they're just too big. I cut the blades down at odd angles to give them a jagged look to match the rest of the blade.

Finally the banner was swapped out for a custom khorne banner, again from the plastic bloodletters.

Warriors of Nurgle

Warhammer Fantasy: Warriors of Chaos with great weapons and Mark of Nurgle

I had started the unit with the backpiece/cape bits but stopped halfway to focus on a different project. The problem when I came back was that I couldn't remember what colors and washes I had used to paint the fur on the shoulders for the backs. Matching the back to the front (which were all separate) was near impossible, something I overcame with and overlaying blend on top of the original colors.

I felt bad for forgetting my place, but I realized it gave many of the fur pieces an interesting and dynamic look I wouldn't have gotten otherwise. Happy accidents are wonderful to have, but I don't enjoy the thought of relying on them. Lesson learned: store your models in separate containers between paintings, especially when batch processing.

Chosen Warriors of Chaos

Warhammer Fantasy: Chosen Warriors of Chaos with great weapons


I generally operate with the rule that if I'm painting something for pleasure, I never want to paint it the same way the 'eavy metal team did. There are many reasons for this, primarily that I'm not as good as they are.

The other major reason for not being too keen on painting canon colors is... well why do it at all? Someone already did that, the best thing you can hope for is to copy what they did, and what's the fun in that? Always go for something new. That way, even though the quality of painting isn't 'eavy metal level, you have something new and interesting to show.

I knew I wanted a unit that didn't show dedication to any of the god's in specific, but the black and gold was just lacking that essential pop that makes a good model stand out from the crowd. In retrospect I definitely would have added a secondary color like green, blue, or red to give them some real punch.

So that's another 50 models covered for the warriors of chaos. After having finished the chosen, I was ready to really ramp up my conversions and painting with a wholly different beast: Chaos Knights!

Next Article: Part 3