"Bring out your dead!"

It was time I painted the first of the bigger models for the army! The first of these was to go into my 1000 points force was the corpse cart its a very cool model just wish the instructions gave you an order to put it together... after a little bit of faffing about and a small amount of green stuff the cart was ready to paint.

There were a few new challenges on this model first of these was the fire! looking at old films the way fire appeared in black and white was just a bright white glow this is down to how the film pick up the light in dark streets it was normally shot in.

This look wouldn't suit a model just having a large area of bright white looks really odd on a model. I decided to go for something a bit different and took a photograph of a some flames and grey scaled it to see what sort of shades and tones there were.
This looked a lot better on the model and is what I have done.

The next challenge was to do some sort of blood. I really like the look of the new "Blood for the Blood God" paint from Games Workshop and wanted to get an effect that looked a lot like this.

Dave in the Reading store is also working on a Vampire army and had used this paint on his ghouls (see picture) I wanted this high gloss but transparent look so from looking at his work and converting this photograph to grey scale I played around with a few mixes to get the look right. the final mix is quite complex but works.

3 parts Mechanicus standard grey, 1 part Abaddon Black, 2 Parts Lahmian Medium, 3 parts Gloss Varnish.

It still allows the highlights to show through from the model underneath but also has a very deep tone to it with a gloss finish. It can be seen in the stomach cavity  below.

I really love the look of this models and have really enjoyed painting it! Its the first model in the army on a larger base so allowed me to see what my basing would look like across a bigger surface I have added a few larger rocks to it but haven't gone made with it to keep it looking like it is part of the army.

I didn't stay with the black robes found on the characters in the army I wanted some thing a bit different so have done a very light grey based on the robes lepers are depicted wearing in a few films this I think suits the model a bit better and draws the eye to him rather than getting lost if it had been painted a bit darker.

What's next?

I am going to finish off the units of skeletons and grave guard to complete the 1000 point list then I will move onto some of my more interesting ideas for the army.