Khador Commission and then some....

Hi it's Lee again with the latest update from my painting table...

This weekend I completed and handed off the Khador commission I've been working on. If you know me on Facebook, or are part of the Warmachine Hordes Vancouver group then you might have seen a WIP shot a week or so back. I have some pics of the mini's at near completion, one or two at completion and a group shot that is now the header of the blog. I'm really sorry I couldn't get the timing better to actually get shots of all the models once completed. The weekend was insane, with finishing the commission, going to meet the client, doing the photo shoot for our website gallery and the Drake release party(amongst other things) there just wasn't the option.

I now have the photo booth set up and the settings can be ported on the camera, so that won't be an issue for future projects. Today I won't really be going off track too much, but tomorrow I'll do a fluff post (not that kind of fluff) with some upcoming events, new commissions, etc.

Project Brief...
To pin and restructure the arms of 5 Berserker models and Kherchev The Terrible, preventing them from drooping and to lengthen the arms slightly. To pose Kherchev in a highly animated pose to show his manoeuvrability as a caster by posing him leaping off a wrecked jack. To paint the models in a snow-cammo scheme that allowed for a great amount of contrast without being inconceivable as a real warfare scheme.

The scheme...
The scheme set with the client was for an off-white blue/green/purple/what-have-you snow-cammo, with little to no battle damage and weathering. The idea being that white is too bland and leaves littel to no pop, and that the original Khador scheme makes absolutely no sense for an army running around in the snowy mountain wastes (unless maybe your caster is following Winston Churchill's lead with daylight bombing runs). Everything else was pretty much left to my idea as to make the scheme work. The client has a lot more work for me so I wanted to try to avoid using mixed colours, being that replacing paints could cause issues maintaining the scheme later on.

Shot of a completed model.

So I went with the blue for the off-white, I like the tones and leaves for lots of options for contrast through the model. I also chose to run the bulk of the metal tones on the silver side of things, rather than going with too much brass, bronze and gold which I felt would have been too "noticeable in the snow". Still wanting to have a fairly high degree of contrast, the complimenting tones are mostly subtly placed.

The project started with re-structuring the upper-arm sections of all the figures. The client wanted them replaced as the arms tended to droop and bend away from their original posing and was tired of that(it also causes metal fatigue and would lead to them breaking eventually anyway). Looking at the size of the parts, it was apparent that pinning would be an issue if I wanted to keep the detail of the original parts, so I removed the upper arm sections almost entirely, only keeping the wider parts of the pistons. at this point the detail that needed to be drilled into was going to be very thin, and wouldn't very strong as a standard pin. There was also the issue of loosing some of the detail if I used a pin too wide. So I did a compound pin on the arm sections, using a very thin durable inner pin to connect the parts and an outer pin in-between them, adding more glue surface area and a higher degree of durability.

Here's a shot of one of the pinned arms....

The added advantage of the compound pinning was that I could make all the arm pistons the same length and ensure I didn't end up with some models having longer arms than others.

So Kherchev was an interesting model to assemble, I must admit the khador stuff is wonderful for posing in general, as a menoth / cryx player I'm used to very little in the way of posing options. being that the figure needed to have a very animated pose and be leaping off an object a bit of restructuring was needed in other areas, so I snapped the glue on the torso joint, right shoulder and right hip joint. The torso was simply posed turned a touch more to the right and the should reposed accordingly to have the model posed with it's axe brought back for a swing. The right hip joint was pinned, glued and then encased in putty to add structure to the joint that would hold the entire model's weight. I think the pose came out really nicely...

Kherchev's final pose.

The primary contrasting hues were placed in the metals and the basework. I painted the base a very red brown, highlighting up to rather drab tone, I felt that highlighting too much, though effective for contrast on the basework would otherwise rob out the overall appearance and bring too much focus away from the figure. I also didn't want to cover up the red tones too much. To add to the effect I went a little overboard on the rust effect on the scrap parts on the base, each base has some element of metal, be it a cog, gear, weapon or rail track that could be rusted, and took that all the way up to a bright orange more-so than I would on anoth rust element. Being that I planned to cover the bases in a fairly large volume of snow I wanted as much colour in the basework underlay as possible.

Kherchev's Base as an example of tones used on the dirt of the bases.

The metals of the model were more subtly done, being that there was the mandate of having little-to no battle damage and weathering, I wanted that crisp appearance, so kept the contrasting hues of those areas rather subtle, starting with a 50/50 mix of boltgun and black, then washing with an undiluted agryx shade and then a wash of 50% - 75% diluted sepia. After the washes dried I brought the mid-tone up to boltgun's new compliment and then went right in to mithril highlights. The copper smokestacks did allow for a lot of red, so I went with a base of warplock, going up through screaming bell into dwarf copper and then a copper/ mithril mix. The smokestacks were later glazed very roughly with a mix of black and a dark brown to give a sooty effect. The gold area were based with warplock, shaded with molten bronze and then highlighted with a 30/30/20/20 mix of rhulic gold, mithril, pealescent silver ink and pealescent gold ink.

You can see good examples of all the various metals in this shot, and how the warm tones are prevalent throughout the metal sections to aid in contrast.

The armour itself was done quite easily, starting with a base of russ grey I shaded the armour into it's mid-tone and highlight with spacewolf grey(P3's frostbite will replace this later on). The extreme highlights were then gone over with white scar to give the mini pop and annunciate the edges. I really didn't want to shade all the way up to white on this as part of the gradient because I wanted those edges nice and sharp. The accents were done with a base of stegadon blue(because it has a nice little hit of green to balance things out) then shaded with troolblood base, edged with spacewolf and then hit at the extreme points and zenith edges with white scar for a little extra edge and to define those edges from the main armour sections.

This model actually ended up with another 2 layers of snow after this picture was taken, because I thought the pose was apt for him to be trudging through ankle-deep powder.

The snow basing was done in muliple layers to build up  a bit of a puffy appearance, and to fill in sections where I wanted the snow to be deeper between crevices and so on. To give the models each a sense of individuality the snow was done in varying depths on each base.

All in all I'm quite happy with the scheme, there are a few changes I'd like to make on future models, but that will come when I get the next job for the army... you\ll see. and because we're talking about mini's here's some more photos.

 

Here are a couple shots of Kherchev almost completed, he got a few extra highlights and some shading here and there that you probably wouldn't notice. 

...and one more group shot....

Ok thats it for me today, I've got huge amounts of work to do, including 2 more unique projects and a website to write for... oh, no, I'm not going into it - I'll blog it tomorrow.