Praying Knight Complete...

Mornin' all.

The praying knight is finished.  I've been practicing a little more at the picture processing malarkey (using GIMP), and I'm beginning to get the hang of it I think.  I'm having all sorts of colour balance trials with my camera, so I've used GIMP to get it to where I think it should be (certainly a lot damn closer than what they were pre-processing).  I need to do more with the camera in the first place so I don't have to mess about with the pictures quite so much afterwards, but this will do for now.

I'm really pleased with this chap, he's not perfect, but the overall look and feel I was going for has come across pretty well (I hope).

Most of the colours I've gone over in previous posts - I think the only ones I haven't really covered are the hair and skin.  So the skin first:

• Base:  Tallarn Flesh
• Shade:  Gryphonne Sepia
• H1: Tallarn Flesh
• H2:  A 1:1 mix of Tallarn Flesh and P3 Ryn Flesh

I've been careful not to go too light with the highlights as his face is mostly in shadow.  I was very relieved that his eyes are closed.  The sword and hands are a separate piece from the rest of the model, so I wasn't sure whether I should glue that on before or after painting.  As it was, the lower arms didn't fit too well on the elbow guards, and needed a lot of work to get to fit, so the decision was made for me.

The hair is nothing too spectacular:

• Base:  Khemri Brown
• Shade:  Devlan Mud
• H1:  Khemri Brown
• H2:  1:1 mix of Khemri Brown and Dheneb Stone
• H3:  Dheneb Stone
• Glaze:  A thin wash/glaze of Gryphonne Sepia was applied to tone everything down

The final glaze really did do the trick, as it was too bright before.  All that was left to do was sort out the base - here I used some Gale Force 9 basing materials in patches, interspersed with some of the grass tufts I'd bought from Mutineer Miniatures.  The tufts are actually quite big so I broke a couple apart to use.  I love the effect they give, with the autumn leaves dotted about, and really add to the model.  A couple of coats of Humbrol Matt varnish flattened off the model nicely.

Next up (amongst other things) is my fledgling warband for "Get the Girl, Kill the Baddies":

From left to right - Ulf the Mad, Ifil Ironwolf, Brevik Dragonslayer (yeah I know he's a bit wimpy to represent me, but he'll have to do...), Breggan the Bear, and his brother Juggo the Dwarf.  I wanted Juggo to be a dwarf human (a la Tyrion Lannister from Game of Thrones) rather than a member of the Dwarven race - Juggo isn't exactly my creation, it looks like "Juggo" is written on the tab of the miniature, and it seemed appropriate...

Readers of a certain age may recognise some of these miniatures, as they are certainly old - Brevik has 1985 written on the tab!  They are all very old Citadel miniatures from their long OOP Norse range:

• Ulf, Brevik and Breggan
• Ifil
• Juggo

Ulf is the only miniature I'm not entirely happy with - looking at his outfit, I swear he was meant to be a Wood Elf Wardancer and they changed their minds about him and added a fur cloak and covered his pointy ears. I might swap him out for a Hasslefree Viking Libby at some point, but we'll see how he paints up.

My challenge with this bunch of crazies is to batch paint the majority of them and then finish each up individually with the details.  Regular readers will know how much I enjoy batch painting, so this should definitely be a challenge!  Hopefully I'll have some background for these guys soon too, all epic swords and sorcery stuff, with heroic deeds, betrayal and vengeance.

I may be borrowing from other works in the genre, but only a little...

As always, comments and criticism welcome!