Road to the Crystal Brush: Part 4

I'm into the final two weeks before the competition and with that deadline looming I have the King himself finished.



If you're new to this series you can check out Part 1, which shows how I built the model, Part 2, which goes over how I painted the Constructs, and Part 3, which breaks down how I painted the Chariot itself.

This model has so much detail on it that it was somewhat hard to decide where to start. For a lack of anywhere better to start and because it was the lowest depth of detail on the mini I picked his robes to start. They were painted with a base coat of Rakarth Flesh and given a light wash of Agrax Earthshade. I then layered and highlighted back up through Rakarth Flesh and White. Besides the deepest folds I mostly just used the Rakarth Flesh as my shade.

Next up I moved on to the skin and bones. The bones were just painted like all of my other skeletons, while the skin was painted using my tutorial on Mummy skin. I actually had to look up my own tutorial because I forgot how to paint the skin.

The next largest color on the King was the gold, which presented a bit of a problem. The gold lining on his collars would most likely get paint on them when I painted the interior detail of the collars, so I held off on painting that gold till later. I did finish the entire bottom half of the gold though. This was painted the same way as on the chariot.

The largest part of the collar was painted to look like gems, similar to how I painted the "feathers" on the front of the chariot. It was a little more difficult though since these gems did a complete circle around the head. That may not sound like a problem, but when you need to pick one direction for your light source to be coming from that means each gems needs to painted slightly different then the other so that it looks "correct." 

I decided to do a much of the head area as I could next. The mask was painted to look like the black marble that the constructs are made out of to help tie everything together. The glowing eyes were painted following a slightly tweaked version of my tutorial. I also worked on some of the gold on his top half, a few of the gems and his high color, which was painted to just look like a simple turquoise color.

The bandages on my Tomb Kings models are always a pain. There are so many of them and they are so thin. I really like how they turned out on him though. Nothing fancy here. Once these were done I decided to finish base coating all of the gold since I could no paint the "bracelets" around his arms.

Since it's the focal point of the mini I finished off the head area next. This meant highlighting all of the rest of the gold, the black on his beard, and painting the white on his hat and ear flaps.

How here was a part of the model that I had been looking forward to with eagerness and trepidation, the freehand on the hat. When I started the model I didn't really have a plan for it, but luckily I just happened to do the sketch above for fun, which helped me plan out his hat design. In fact I ended up copying it exactly.

Here you can see my starting on it. I blocked out the shapes with the turquoise then used the white from the hat to paint in the lines defining the scarab and the feathers.

Here is the hat all done. Besides duplicating the scarab design on the other side I also added a few hieroglyphs to the front and a gold line around the top of it.

I also took this as an opportunity finish the gem skulls on the front of his hat and on his legs.

With the majority of the model now done I painted all of the doodads on his lower half. This included the skulls and the items hanging from his belt. I am particularly proud of the wine jugs. These were done with a base coat of Ulthuan Grey, then the wine was painted Khorne Red. The wine was shaded by mixing in Rhinox Hide and highlighted by mixing in Ushabti Bone. The glass part of it was shaded with Shadow Grey and highlighted with white. A reflection point was paint on last that went over both the glass and the wine to help tie it all together.

Last up was the sword and reins. The sword was painted with Dwarf Bronze and shaded with Agrax and Balthasar Gold. It was highlighted up with Runefang Steel. The gems on it were painted like all of the rest. 

The reins were simply highlighted with Eshin Grey and then an Eshin Grey/Ushabti Bone mix. His cape was painted the same way as his robes.

With that the king is done! Now it's on to the banner and then he's done...

Until next time,

Tyler M.