Shikami Devils - Month Four
My plans for completing March's batch of models also coincided with finishing an initial army for a tournament that month; Tomorrow Burns 2. This was run by our own FETI2's Chris, and in my home town of Weymouth. Suffice to say on the morning on the 1st of March I was laying down base-coats to ensure I finished the models by the time of the event, the 7th of March.
I knew I had to ensure I remained realistic about finishing the models, my initial plan was to paint the Gothizzar Harvester and a Mortek Crawler. I started with the Harvester and initially made great progress, however the model posed the first challenge to my colour scheme as the larger model really had a lot of bone to paint. I painted the 'internal' skulls in the same blue as my Deathriders and terrain pieces, however I also had the freshly collected skulls to consider. I Initially painted these in the same way as the rest of my bone but pushed the highlights all the way up to a strong white. Unfortunately it did not provide the definition between the 2 differing bones that I was aiming for. I decided it would be best to introduce and additional hue of colour to the harvested skulls and elected for a glaze of Skeleton Horde contrast paint over all these areas. This had the desired effect and added a subtle yellow tint to the bones, I then added some additional highlights by adding a small amount of Skeleton Horde to white. Here is the result and I hope you agree the newer bones compliment the scheme but stand out as a different material:
After sharing photos of the finished model with the other FETI2 lads, Chris suggested it would add an extra element if the Harvester had collected small amounts of the grass/plant life and this sat in the bone-cage on it's back. I agreed this was a great idea, so cut up some tufts with a sharp craft knife into smaller pieces and used a pair to pliers to really wedge the small tufts down into the crevices on it's back:
With the Harvester finished I hard to re-asses the possibility of finishing my army for the event. With only a few days left I examined my assembled Mortek Crawler and came to the conclusion that I could not finish the model in time. A crawler is a large model in of itself, however it also comes with 5 crew members and additional pieces such as the hamster wheel that would need to be painted in parts. This left me with only 1 model I could complete in the time frame and finish my army, a Mortisan Soulmason:
This really was a very characterful piece to paint and I was glad with the additional large areas I could use to reinforce some of the colours used on the rest of the army such as the white cloth, blue for the spirit and an extra stone texture similar to that of Vokmortian's coffin. I also enjoyed painting the large soul gems with my green palette and I added some extra layers to really help them pop.
Month 1
Bone-Tithe Nexus
Vokmortian - 180
10 Mortex Guard - 130
Month 2
Katakros - 500
Horrorghast - 60
Month 3
3 Necropolis Stalkers (The Storms) - 200
5 Kavalos Deathriders - 180
Month 4
Gothizzar Harvester - 200
Mortisan Soulmason - 140
Total = 1590
This brings to the end the penultimate month of painting, and I am now well on my way with the final months installment for FETI2. As Chris hinted at in his last post I am hugely looking forward to our Firestorm Campaign using our new armies and possibly adding a few more additions along the way!
