Over the last few months, I’ve decided to theme my two warhammer armies in the colors of the province of Averland. This is a black and yellow color scheme, which I’m discovering to be one of the most difficult combinations to make look natural.

I’ve made several falst starts, mostly using older style (6th edition boxed set) Empire handgunners. I believe I’ve posted pictures of them elsewhere. So far, while I’ve been minorly happy with them, I want to improve my skills. To this end, this is my modeling, basing, and painting blog.

What I’ve tried:

This project kinda got started when I took an older style Marius Lietdorf figure and sorta converted it to a Wight King.

I’m not COMPLETELY unhappy with it, but I really dislike most of the cloth involved, both on the horse, and on Marius himself. Additionally, I feel I could have done better with the skull.

Marius was painted over black primer. A reaper HD yellow, washed with Devlan mud, highlighted again with that yellow, and then with a mix of skull white and that yellow.

Next came the handgunners:

Some of them were primed in black, about halfway through the process, I decided to prime some of them with The Army Painter’s Daemonic Yellow. Both came out about the same. These were also washed with devlan mud. Overall, for rank and file, I’m ok with them, and considering I’m not a big fan of the overall detail of the figs anyway, they’ll do.

But as I move to newer, more detailed models, I want to handle them better.

The gunners were also the first models I actually based. This basing job isn’t very good, I’m aware of that.

So far, I’ve not been happy with any of my basing efforts. Here’s what I have available:

GF9 foliage flock, seen above.

Citadel Glade Grass static grass

Citadel Scorched Grass static grass

Citadel Modeling Sand

GF9 medium gravel (A little bigger than I wanted)

and some model train scenic gravel, about the same size as the GF9.

At the beginning of September, Carpe Noctem forum held a conversion/painting mini-competition. The goal: Turn an Empire Knightly Orders knight to a wight king or black knight. I submitted another averland model:

I was pretty happy with him, before I painted him. It’s not the most creative head to use, but…

The horse is from a Reaper necropolis sergeant, the legs, torso, and weapon arm are empire knightly order. The head is a helmeted skeleton from Tomb Kings type skeletons. The left arm is a tomb kings archer arm, and the shoulderpad is an old plastic space marine. Not visible, but really my favorite part of this, is his neck. I took the spinal column and part of the shoulderblades of the tomb kings skeleton, and cut it to fit the neck hole in the armor. The head is attached to the spinal column.

I really liked this model, as I said. Until I painted him.

So now here’s where I am:

I want to understand color theory a bit better, and understand highlighting and especially cloth effects.

I haven’t mentioned this elsewhere here, but I’m colorblind, and occasionally make pretty bad color mistakes (An example being not really being able to see a difference between Rotting Flesh and Bleached Bone, so I have to be careful.)

I plan to work my way through several tutorials I’ve found on the web, as well as the How to Paint Citadel Miniatures book. I am also hoping for pointers from some of the wonderful painters I’ve seen both on Carpe Noctem and warhammer-empire.com.

So here we go.