Captain of the Hawk Lords

I was going to title this post with a silly quote from Prince Vultan from Flash Gordon, but I just didn't have the heart to do it...

I don't have a name for this chap yet, but he is painted and I'm really, really pleased with the way he's come out.  The purple, yellow and gold are detailed in the two posts here: http://lairofthebreviks.blogspot.co.uk/search/label/Hawk%20Lords, so I won't repeat all that.

GrimKlaw convinced me that I needed to put a little battle damage on him (the miniature, not GrimKlaw), so to start with I added a "Leonidas of 300" style slice down the helmet.  To be honest, the helmet was crying out for it really, I imagine he'll be shouting "This is Preyspire!" at some point...

OK, maybe not.  I can definitely recommend that particular head from Anvil Industry though, and they're developing a really good range of products.

The grey stone of the Crux Terminatus was a base coat of Adeptus Battlegrey, shaded with Nuln Oil.  Then it's a highlight sequence of the base coat, Codex Grey and then a 1:2 mix of Codex Grey and Pallid Wych Flesh.  The Pallid Wych Flesh adds a slightly beige tone in, helping it look a bit more like stone. 

The battle damage was then added afterwards, using really thinned Abaddon Black to begin with, trying to get as thin a line as possible.  Then the mix of Codex Grey and Pallid Wych Flesh was applied "below" the damage, and overlapping it slightly to make the black line even thinner.  After that it was just working back through the highlights, blending them in as I went.  This went much better than I thought it would, it's thinning the paints as much as possible that makes it work.  The shield is far and away my favourite part of the model, I keep looking at it and thinking "Damn, I did that..."

The Axe head was a base of Army Painter Gun Metal (see the latest Ancible article for my grumblings about Leadbelcher, although Jeff at Pirate Viking Painting informs me that they have fixed the lumpiness), washed with Nuln Oil.  I then used a little of the NMM technique and added some Abaddon Black shading, to give the body of the axe a little more depth.  The highlights are blended in Gun Metal, Chainmail and Mithril Silver,  The jewels are the standard GW method, learned back when WFB 4 came out with all those High Elves.  The greens are Castellan Green, Death World Forest and Ogryn Camo.  I used these greens to highlight the back of the cloak:

Before anyone asks, I'm damned if I know whether the axe haft is straight or not.  I've altered it so many damn times and it never looks right, so that's how it's staying. Back to the cloak, I'm still trying to decide if I should have added some freehand or not.  I have a horrible feeling the answer is "Yes, you muppet", but I don't want to mess around with it now, as I'm really happy with the way he looks.  The snow is from Gale Force 9, quite frankly a far superior product to the GW offering, although I think maybe I could have made the snow a bit deeper on the base.

Live and learn, and all that...

So he's done, and I'm happy with him, and it's on to the next project.  I'm on Twitter as @Brevikesq in case anyone has a burning need to read my terribly infrequent tweets - I'm going to try and post some pictures up there too occasionally to keep my motivation up.

As always, comments and criticism welcome!