With my Arkanauts done it was time to add a hero to lead them, and luckily an Aetheric-Navigator was on hand to take command. This burly duardin was a ton of fun to paint, and fairly quick and easy too!
This model is really easy to put together and the only sub-assembly I did was to keep his backpack separate while painting him. He's a bit bigger than the standard Arkanaut, and the 32mm base he's on only magnifies that. It looks really nice when you have him in front or next to a unit though. It adds some heroicness to the model with minimal effort.
I painted him using many of the same techniques that I used on my Arkanauts. Seeing as how the model is about 90% armor I base coated all of the armor with Leadbelcher. I didn't have a real solid plan for what areas were going to be iron and what was going to be brass, so once the iron was base coated and washed I kind of started just picking out random areas in brass. I tried to get a good balance between the colors, and used the studio's Navigators from the book as a loose guide. Once this was washed I drybrushed the whole thing with Necron Compound. Since he's a character though I also did an additional, light drybrush of Stormhost Silver to really pick out the highlights.
The armor was then weathered with Skragg Brown for the rust and Nihlakh Oxide for the verdigris. With that I was well over half way done with the model. The next thing I did was quickly paint the gloves black and the straps across the gloves Zandri Dust in the same manner as the other Overlords. The last minor detail I did before moving onto the glowing parts were his pants, which you can see from the back. These were painted Incubi Darkness, washed with Nuln Oil, then highlights with Kabalite Green, Syrabite Green, and finally Gauss Flayer Green. In the end this was mostly covered up by the backpack, but it was still worthwhile since you can kind of see it.
The Navigator has a lot more areas on him that could potentially be glowing. I knew I wanted his eye lenses and the orb he was looking at to be glowing from the get go. I also wanted his backpack to look pretty energized, so I made sure to pick out as many orbs and domes as made sense to be a power source. I also picked out the orb on the bottom of his staff as being a glowing area to try and help balance the model out a bit, otherwise all the glowing parts would be on the top.
I considered painting the lenses on his staff the same way, but went for painting them like regular lenses instead. I figured he would have to actually look through this, and how can someone look through something that glows? I used the same colors for these as I used for his cloth to help tie it all in. The last thing I had to do was the base. I ended up having to paint the rock he is standing on a bit more carefully since there was no real texture to drybrush. I'm really happy with how he turned out, and he only took me a week to paint. It was probably about 8 hours total, most likely less then that.
Being me, I of course had to take a shot at making my own version of a rules sheet for the skyport of Barak-Mor. While they will most likely get special rules for a future Endless Deserts project, at the moment I just wanted to have a fancy way to show off the Kharadron Code Artycle, Amendment, and Footnote I picked for my army. The awesome logo for them was once again done by the extremely talented Kenneth Erickson who did the cover for the Tomb Kings book. You can follow him on Twitter and Instagram at @kenquistador. The Overlord himself is just one of GW's illustrations with the colors tweaked to match my color scheme. This is all very rough at the moment and will be more refined whenever I get around to the actual unofficial rules. I have yet to play a game with my Overlords though, so there is a good chance that the ruling council of Barak-Mor may convene a special assembly to rewrite their code if I don't feel like it works well for me. I would like to get to a point where I pick the same three for every game though, regardless of who I am playing against. At the moment I feel like the Trust Aethermatics rule fits their lore of trying to crack the secret of Death magic, so I will probably stick with that one anyway.
Now that all my infantry is done it's on to the Frigate, which I have assembled and primed at the time of typing this. I have a feeling this model will take me a bit longer.
Until next time,
Tyler M.
No comments:
Post a Comment