Draconis does….. The Silver Bayonet

18th October 2024

With the building stage complete it was on to the painting. I had the four French I had built, plus two 3D prints a friend did – one French and one Prussian. So, Lots of blue.

I tried out a few different blues, and plumped for Macragge blue for the French (except the guard, who’s greatcoat I did in Leviadon Blue) and Deep Prussian Blue for the Prussian 😊

I found the French equally as frustrating regarding the straps, pouches, piping and suchlike – in part due to my less than excellent eyesight, and in part due to my brushes. But, I pushed on through with it. I decided to give the French red collars and cuffs, and painted their straps etc in shades of white, Ivory, beige and browns.

The blue jackets, backpacks and pouches were given an Aggrax wash. The white trousers and shirts were given a diluted wash of Aggrax. For the skin tones I started with a skeleton horde contrast, followed by thinned purple and green contrast. This was then highlighted with ivory for some of the faces. The eyes were painted white then given a coat of yellow fluo paint.

Some final details, buttons, touching up straps and piping etc and they are done.

I’m not overly happy with how things came out overall (although I do like the guard) – but I remind myself that they are bad guy minis, and from play distance they do look acceptable, and fill the role.

13th October 2024

Now that my sprues had arrived, and the wolves were done, it was time to build some French revenants to go alongside the brits.

I used the same process as for the brits, combining Victrix sprues, mantic sprues and some posing.

The French guard in fact uses all Victrix parts. I picked a head that had a shouting expression, to be used for a running body, and put it on a very static body. Tilting it to one side enhanced the look.

Where I used the zombie arm I had to cut it down, as it was far longer than the other arm. I then had to use modelling putty and sculpt on (I’m not very good) a rough torn shoulder part of the sleeve.

Now I just need to decide on which blue to use……

11th October 2024

There are some werewolves needed for the very first scenario. I had two primed, and managed to find a third old one I already had (the grey one) that I just needed to touch up and re-base.

Process was the same as all the other things really 😊 For these two I went with similar colour as those used on the wolves. Brownish for one and greyish for the other. For the one with clothes on I went for clothing colours to match the bandits that I painted. This one also had flesh areas that looked slightly less wolfy, so I painted those in a human flesh colour.

Then it was some highlighting, bring various areas of the brown one up a few stages to lighten it, highlighting the shirt and trousers on the other and such. Basing, a matt varnish and here they are:

19th October 2024

Quite thematic with Halloween approaching….

A large number of dark wolves are potentially needed. I already had two old gobbo wolf rider wolves, and two metal wolves from West Wind’s EotD Lycan Brotherhood. On Sunday a good friend of mine passed on ten wolves that he had 3d printed for me (he had STL’s for Rangers of Shadowdeep I believe).

I dug out matching bases, filled the slots, Based and primed them.

While they were drying I did a quick simple test paintjob on one of the metal wolves. Using contrast grey and brown, some very light drybrushing, then picking out eyes and teeth. Result worked overall, so decided that I would go with this for the rest.

For the remaining 13 wolves I used a variety different contrast colours with greys, browns and black, and mixes thereof.

However, I felt that I wanted to go an extra step with some of them. As such I decided to paint lighter markings on a number of them. These were of varying sizes from full face, chest and front of legs to as little as some wolfy eyeliner 😊

5th October 2024

One of the enemy types needed for the solo / co-op scenarios is bandits. I already had 4 painted minis that I felt were suitable (from Empire of the Dead), so rummaged through my unpainted minis to find some others to fit in. They were Transylvanian Mobs, from West Wind’s vampire Wars range (plus one mini from the EotD Lycan brotherhood). These were primed alongside the other bad guys earlier.

I then just began laying down a limited palette of colours across the minis, to give them some moderate cohesion, and also to tie them in with those I already had painted.

Very basic process, using contrast in for some of the browns and green, and regular painting with highlights for the red and white areas, plus the ‘rawhide’ used for a jacket and trousers. All except the white areas were then given an Agrax wash, followed by a small amount of tidy up and then an overall spray with Anti-shine Matt varnish.

To be fair, they are painted to a ‘that will do’ level, as they are only used for one scenario 😊

5th October 2024

To help me work out what bad guys I would need, how many, how often, and when, I knocked up a basic spreadsheet. The numbers involved are just my estimations, since in the scenarios there is a random element each turn as to what may come out.

For example, in one scenario it starts with 8 Dark Wolves, one of which is replaced with a werewolf at the start. Then each turn you could get 0, 1 or 2 additional Dark Wolves…..

From this I knew that I had to work on Bandits, a Black Dog, Dark Wolves, Goblins, Revenants, a Troll, Vampires and Werewolves in order to play the scenarios from the core book.

29th September 2024

After a bit of an hiatus I am back at it, to some extent.

So, here are the four revenants that I have been working on…..

The build process was covered in previous posts. The basic painting of them followed the same process as for the living Brits. The main exception was regarding the skin tones. For these I used more of a leathery colour, then added some thinned washes of purple and green in places.

Then they had a dirty wash, followed by some minor highlights, addition of blood/gore, glowing eyes and suchlike.

To finish them off I stippled on some Agrellan Earth to represent dried mud and dirt, to hopefully better represent their ‘Revenant’ status.

16th September 2024

So, turns out that you need quite a few, and quite a variety of, minis for the bad guys in the scenarios 😊

To this end this past week I also cleaned and prepped some minis for Bandits, werewolves and some of the dark wolves needed for the core book scenarios.

Plenty more needed yet….

One of my old wolves was missing a leg – the leg that would have had the base tab.

I thought I would have a go at replacing it. I started out by drilling into the body and gluing in a paper clip.

I then bent it roughly to shape and poked some putty around until it sort of worked.

Then I used the rest of the paper clip to bend into supportive loops which could be covered in milliput later.