Wednesday, September 17, 2014

Building a Better Casket of Souls: Part 5


For those of you familiar with some of my articles on Bell of Lost Souls, you'll know that I occasionally have an article titled "Building a Better" where I try and improve on one of GW's existing sculpts. This is part 5 of my take on the Casket of Souls.

I have been working on the crew for my Casket over the past week or so. I decided to start with the two Tomb Guard since they were the least interesting to me out of the three. I did this so I am still excited to paint something near the end of the project and not burnt out with no desire to paint even more skeletons. This way I get to use the Priest as a reward. This is something I do for most of my projects and armies. If you do all of the most fun parts up front you run the risk of losing motivation to finish the more boring aspects of it.


While these guys are just like all of my other Tomb Guard models visually, I decided to spend a little more time on them since they are part of such an elaborate model. That meant no drybrushing on the bone. All of the bone was washed with Agrax Earthshade and then layered with Screaming Skull which was highlighted up through white. I chose Screaming Skull because I find that it is closest to the old Bleached Bone color. Ushabti Bone is actually just slightly darker. I discovered this painting my Tomb Guard unit. Half of them were painted with the old colors and half with the new, so there was lots of experimenting to try and figure out how accurate GW's paint matching chart is.


The gold was painted the same way as all of my other models. I spent a little more time making sure the highlights were precise, but besides that, no difference. The turquoise got a slightly different treatment then normal. It started with a base of Stegadon Scale which was then layered with Hawk Turquoise (I still have the old paint). I then highlighted this by mixing in Screaming Skull for 2 separate layers.


For my rank and file now I use Blue Horror, one of the Citadel Edge Paints, to highlight since I only do one layer for them. It is also pretty close to what mixing in Screaming Skull looks like, so it's quite a time saver for 20+ models. At this point I added a glaze of Stegadon Scale near the lower half of each turquoise panel to give it a little more depth. The damage was added with Doombull Brown and given a line highlight of the turquoise highlight mix.

Ahhh, that gap in the ribs is killing me now, must fix.
Since these two are special guards I further distinguished them by painting any skull decorations on them as gemstones. It's fairly quick and simple to do and adds a lot visually to help distinguish my important guys from the normal ones.


After they were done I pinned them to the base for stability. Looking at the almost complete picture I have decided I definitely need to add some scarabs and skulls to the back corners to help balance the color and light/dark ratio.


Last but not least, I have started work on the Priest. So far all I have painted is his flayed skin kilt. I really wish they hadn't sculpted his cloak to look like skin since it doesn't really fit the Tomb King theme. Yes, they are skeletons and mummies, but no where else in the range are they so macabre. Flayed skin is more of a Vampire Counts or Chaos thing. I figured I would go ahead and paint it how they intended though. I still haven't decided what I am going to do for his outer robe though. It needs to be a different color, but they sculpted it as skin as well. It will either be a dark leathery brown or a lighter, almost white leather. 


The next installment should be the finished thing, hopefully next week. I also have decided to enter this army into the Armies on Parade competition. There is a GW fairly close to where my new job is so I figured why not. Look forward to some Tomb King inspired terrain in the future once I start work on the display board.



Until next time,

Tyler M.

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