Skeletons

Possibly one used to be an adventurer, before he took an arrow to the head.

 

These skeletons are the beginning of a side project that I've been planning for some time, which is to build stand-in models for the Hero Quest board game. The ultimate goal is to recreate the entire game, including the board and furniture, so the models are meant to be played with. For that reason they are not in any way intended to be up to my normal standard: I'm expecting these models to be roughly handled and occasionally damaged.

 The skeletons are done mostly with contrast and metallic paints. The actual bone was rather simple:

• Black primer, just because it's excellent as a primer.
• Wraithbone spray, two coats to try get good coverage.
• Skeleton Horde from the Contrast range.
• Morghast Bone to fix any areas that don't look quite right. This is mostly to highlight something, or smooth over where Skeleton Horde didn't quite dry nicely enough. It's virtually identical to the raised areas after the Contrast paint stage, which is a nice piece of information to remember.

The eyes were simply Corax White and Aethermatic Blue. It didn't quite give the appearance I wanted; a more purple colour would have fit better.

Most cloth was covered in Nighthaunt Gloom, wood was covered in Wyldwood, and metals are a combination of various paints - there's no real recipe there, it's just play with them and try get some rust effects with washes and different metal tones.

For a lazy approach to wood grain, particularly on the shields, a hack is to first prime the shield black like usual, and then use one coat of Wraithbone base paint, applied by keeping brush strokes in one direction and making it very uneven and streaky. When Wyldwood is applied over the top, the streaks of the base paint will come through. With a little practice it can be fast and doesn't just look like a sloppy paint job.

The bases were Astrogranite, thinned with water Wyldwood, and some Hoeth Blue drybrushed around the out edge. I'm not actually sure if I won't be later using clear bases anyway, so no thought went into this process - it was mostly that I wanted to see how it would look (result: it looks bad, but at least I know that now).

The varnish spray at the end has also muted the colours quite a lot. Too much actually, though at least with undead skeleton warriors this is somewhat fitting.

Painting these models did allow me to experiment with Contrast paints some more, and basically play around without caring to be neat or paint to a high standard. Even so, the Tyranids were simpler to paint, and came out looking better, in that sense these skeletons were a bit of a failure.

-- silly painter.