The idea

I have been wanting to start a new Warhammer fantasy army for a while now I tried with the high elves for a little while but they just weren't grabbing my attention. I wanted to do some thing a bit different and a bit more of a challenge to paint, I had been toying around with painting up a vampire model for ages in the "Hammer Horror " style, so I got to thinking about what would work well in that sort of army.

I was in my local games workshop before a group of got together to do an evening of painting and had mentioned my idea and after a bit of persuasion from a few people I picked up the plastic necromancer model to test out my ideas.

I had in the past done some portrait painting in black and white for a bit of fun and knew from this that it wasn't going to be a simple as most would think getting skin tones right and making the different areas of the model distinctively different to portray different colours would be a challenge.

This is a model I have wanted to paint for ages and with a little bit of thought and the use of my phones camera to turn a painted example into a black and white photo I sat down and got to work deciding what colours to use.

I knew I was going to use a very limited palate of colours and decided that this set of 6 would see me through the army along with a chaos black spray. The medium has been used to turn the black and darker grey into glazes to stop the models becoming shiny. I still included the nuln oil to use on the metal work as this works better with metallics keeping that glint to the areas of the metal which are still in shadow.

The finished necromancer took me about 5 hours to paint spending most of that time painting the robes to make the inner robes a different tone to the outer cape and sleeves. the face and hands weren't and troublesome as I thought they could of been and taking them all the way up to white makes them properly stand out from the rest of the model.

The hardest part of the whole thing was working out how to get grey scale grass. I did a load of trials for this trying to paint the grass straight out the box really didn't work the paint just flakes off after a few minutes, so i tried priming it with the chaos black spray. This worked and allowed me to control the "colour" of it a lot more. it takes 3 stages of dry brushing and highlighting to get the grass to look right and to stop the paint blobbing up on the ends of each tuft.

I am really happy with the out come of this model and it has made me think a lot about how I want the rest of the army to look and how I want to display it if I make it into an armies on parade entry.