The Dogs - Spring Clean Challenge 2026

This army has all of my favourite units in it and it also has what is in my opinion the best ever Citadel/GW sculpt – The Green Knight.  Sculpted by Michael Perry for the Bretonians released as part of Warhammer Fantasy Battles 6th edition in 1996.  This is likely to be amongst the last miniatures he sculpted before he lost his arm.  It is a popular myth that he did it as one of the first after the accident.

There are some blank spaces on this miniature which display painters love to do freehand work on.  That’s very impressive but I don’t have hundreds of hours to get mine done.  Therefore I’m sticking to Speedpaints+ just like everyone in this army.  I love the art  of Simon Bisley and he painted a piece in Slaine: The Horned God that has inspired me.  Here is his Green Man (actually King Gann during his ritual sacrifice to the Goddess but who cares about that).

Therefore, I’m going for the three brightest shades of green I’ve got.  First a quick test swatch on some white painted card to see what works well.

I selected three of these for the three basic layers of the miniature.  I got the basic bits done first.  The horse is Grim Black and I underpainted the caparison with AP Blighted Green (one of the Blanche colours).

The lowest of the three layers of the caparison is going to be Absolution Green, the middle layer Shamrock Green and the top layer and his surcoat are going to be Ghoul Green.  Orc Skin didn’t seem to fit so well tonally with the other shades so I will use that for the plumed crests on his helmet and the horse’s headdress.   To unite all of these colours I drybrushed the miniature with Vallejo Fluro Green.  I’m nothing if not bold with colour.  He is a character after all.  He should stand out, or at least that’s my excuse 😀

Once the green was on I got a better feel for the look I wanted and I decided to go with gilt armour rather than steel.  Therefore I used Azteec Gold and then after sealing in all of the first coats with matt varnish I went for Darkstar Victorian Gold, which has a green tint.  This is what he looked like after this step:

Next we had a go at the pennons for the back banners.  Sadly the original ones had to be removed when he went to miniature hospital and were too creased and torn to be reused.  I therefore measured the best one and drew some replacements onto a piece of paper.  They were then reconstructed using the same foil sandwich technique I used on the Alcatani banner.

Then there were a lot of edge highlights to do.  I don’t normally bother too much with these but I wanted him to look good.  Rather than use a bright gold as the top highlight I went for Vallejo Metal Pale Burnt Metal.  This is the brightest, chromiest metallic I’ve got and unless you know it is a shade of silver you’d never notice when it is edge highlighted onto gold.  It just makes it look super bright.  Given we’ve gone for Bisley-style hyper real for the green then I needed the armour to give the same look and not get overwhelmed.  The back banners were done in the three brightest greens, Orc Skin, Ghoul Green and Shamrock Green.  They and the plumes were highlighted several times with layers of their original colour with a dot of white acrylic mixed in.

As a display piece this barely counts as undercoated but for the tabletop he looks good to go:

Finally I wanted to see how he would look against some natural green tones.  Spring is in full spate here at Zoid Towers and I have a garden and small wood to wander around so The Green Knight went on a quest.  There wasn’t anything quite as green as him out there but I think he looks good against a natural backdrop.