skeletons

After the test model for the unit I moved onto the rest of the mass of bones, I have always loved the look of skeleton warriors after seeing Jason and the Argonauts and watching their very awkward  but aggressive animations the noise and jerkiness of their movement has always stayed with me and has many time made me want to do a skeleton based army.

This was always going to be one of the brighter units in the army due to the amount of bone on display so having a very dark metal and nearly black robes would contrast really will with them and also tie them into the rest of the very high contrast army.

From painting the first on I had learnt how to do the bone and decided to see if there was a slightly faster way of doing it. What i have ended up doing is applying the layer of Cerimite white as a wet brush then making a glaze of Mechanicus Standard grey into the recesses of the model then re high lighting the areas around the face and ribs as these would be the area of the model your eye will be drawn too. Doing it like this has saved me a lot of time and has allowed me to paint 8 models in around 4 hours not including drying times. The banner was a whole other matter.

The mix of helmeted and bare heads adds to the effect of the unit I think as a whole there will be more bare heads in the unit just to distinguish them a bit more from the grave guard I am planning on doing.

I spent as nearly as much time on the banner as I did the other 8 models I have painted in the last day for one I spent a bit more time painting the bone as it would be one of the major things in the unit and was always going to stand out, the other reason was the hand painted banner I wanted to do following the lines of imagery from old horror films I had had the idea to do moon lit scenes on all the banners in the army. For this one i chose to do a back lit tower with ghostly windows from which flew a flock of bats. I haven't painted any thing free hand like this for ages and spent a bit of time blocking out the shapes changing the shape of the tower and hill quite a few times before I got it how I wanted to be. I knew what colours I wanted it to be which is why it is so dark the sky was either going to be a very dark red or blue which would of contrasted a lot better than the greys which have been used, but this being the case it had to be like this to work and look right in black and white. I did try a lighter sky but it just looked wrong.  The bats were the last thing to be added to the banner and add a bit more contrast to it and pulling the theme of it together.

I'm not to sure what I will be painting next as I am waiting to see what i get given for my birthday but i think i will jump about between different units so I don't get bored of doing the same thing.