A while ago I invested quite heavily in the Mierce Miniatures kickstarter and have a large Ysian force that I have not started painting. I recently had my first Darklands intro game and was quite excited by the level of challenge and how the game plays. It's a complex skirmish game that is totally different from what I usually play and I decided I needed to start painting up my army. As this wont be main game (I'm still all about the Age of Sigmar!) I wanted to try and do this as a painting project to try and push my skills up in different ways.
I wanted to start with the Ax Drunes and so set to work on the banner bearer of the squad of ten. One of the things I tried to do with the model is work on my blending. I have recently been binge watching the Painting Budha videos on YouTube and they really demonstrate a high level of painting skill. They are also very long and informative! One of the things that I picked up was how you can create a gradient of paint on a wet palette and then select your colours from it to create really smooth (or in my case reasonably smooth) gradients. By keeping the gradient on the palette you can also fix mistakes and improve transitions with relative ease.
For this model I decided to create all my blends using a base colour and then highlighting and shading using only black and white. I also deliberately didn't use any washes, but I did try and keep the paints thin, almost like a glaze consistency so that they would blend smoothly. This was a big change to my usual painting style which is similar to the GW base coat/wash/highlight way of painting. This worked really well for the majority of the colours, but for red I swapped out the white and replaced it with Games Workshops Wildrider red as I didn't want the model to turn pink!
The basing was made up of bark and various Vallejo pastes, a Secret Weapon Miniatures skull and some Tundra Tufts from the Army Painter. Its similar to my Wood Elf basing style, but hopefully different enough to make these models stand out.
Overall I am really happy with how the model has come out, although I am less happy with how long it took (6 weeks on and off!) but I have not really done that much painting so I hope I can work through the other models a bit faster. I need to swap back to my Armies on Parade entry now though, so the Darklands stuff will go on hold for a bit again.
