With my first model for this year’s ETL successfully finished, I found myself quite motivated to continue! Next in line was a model that I had actually attempted to finish several times — enough times, to be honest, that I was almost prepared to consider the model itself jinxed😉 The model in question is the converted Apothecary/Chaos Lord I built for Khorne’s Eternal Hunt almost two years ago:
It’s a fairly involved conversion, combining parts from no less than four models from the Dark Vengeance boxed set: The torso of a Ravenwing Biker sergeant and the legs of a CSM Chosen were spliced together to form the Apothecary’s body, with arms from a different Chosen and the censers from the backpack of the limited edition Interrogator Chaplain added for good measure. Anyway, all in all, I think it’s a pretty elegant conversion, if I do say so myself, and one that reads both as a World Eater and an Apothecary — plus it should really make for a rather convincing Counts As version of Fabius Bile as well😉
In the interest of full disclosure, this isn’t even the first version of Apothecary Dumah I’ve built: He is one of my older characters, and a first model for Dumah was built all the way back in 2010/2011:
As you can see, the original version really played the whole Grim Reaper-angle to the hilt, but when the time came to paint the model, the whole concept just seemed a bit too on the nose for my taste, so I rather built a new version put more focus on a detached, slightly sinister feeling, instead of merely going for the Skeletor look😉
Anyway, back to actually getting the new model painted: This was actually made quite a bit more complicated by the fact that I would also have to come up with a slightly tweaked recipe for the red parts of the armour: So far, my World Eaters colour scheme has always been heavily based on GW’s old Blood Red colour, but with this particular shade now OOP (and no direct replacement readily available), I would need to find a new approach to painting red. After messing around with some of the new red colours, I found a recipe that gave me a fairly convincing shade of red (albeit one that looked slightly different from the red on my older models). Take a look:
Under the given circumstances, I am really rather happy with the result. The red still retains a certain vibrancy – in fact, it’s actually even brighter than the old version – while also seeming suitably gritty for a follower of Khorne. And I also made sure that the rest of the paintjob, particularly the bronze areas and detail work, matched the rest of my army to create a sense of visual coherency in spite of the slightly different red.
One “special effect” I really wanted to add to the model was to paint the various vials on his belt and inside the massive syringe adorning his Narthecium gauntlet as though there were liquid sloshing around inside of them — this has been a favourite effect of mine ever since JeffTibbetts’ included a similar effect on his Imperial Knight’s chainsword arm. Anyway, I was fortunate enough to come up with a fairly effective result, especially given the tiny size of those vials. Take a look:
Since I basically had to “reverse-engineer” Jeff’s original effect, I thought you might like to read a mini-tutorial for painting this kind of liquid-filled vials on your own models. So here goes:
Mini-tutorial: Painting glass vials containing liquids
Disclaimer: There’s probably a thousand ways to do this, and may approaches that are ultimately better than mine, but it’s a quick and simple recipe that has worked rather well for me so far. And like I said, thanks must go to JeffTibbetts, as it was only after seeing the aforementioned effect used on his “Queen Bee” that I began to wonder how to achieve something similar myself.
I’ll be using a turquoise colour scheme for this, both because it’s a recurring spot colour in my army and because it produces a result that resembles liquid-filled glass vials reasonably well. This should really work with any number of different colours, though. The three colours I use are Vallejo’s Halcon Millenario Turquoise, black and white (any brand will do for these last two, obviously). And now for the actual steps. I made a diagram for you:
Step 1: Mix your main colour (turquoise in this case) with a drop of black to take away some of the pop. Then paint the entire vial using this colour. Adding the black is optional, although in my case the stock turquoise was *very* bright and stunning, so I needed to take the edge off a bit😉
Step 2: Add more black to the mix and paint the lower third or so of the vial in this darker colour. If you are doing this while the paint is still moist, you may even be able to pull off a bit of wet-blending here.
Step 3: Use your original main colour and paint the area immediately below the upper third of the vial with this. What you want here is a gradient moving from the original turquoise to the much darker mix at the bottom. Again, if you are fast enough, the efffect will look all the more convincing. But if the vial is very small,the effect will work even without any wet-blending involved, so feel free to take your time.
Step 4: Add a drop of white to the turquoise and paint a thin line at the top of the layer from step 4. This is our “waterline”, so to speak.
Step 5: Add even more white to the mix (until there’s only a hint of turquoise in there) and use it to paint thin vertical lines along the vial to suggest light reflecting off the glass. Don’t overdo it! One or two thin lines are enough. They also need to be really thin, lest they end up covering all the paintwork underneath.
That’s it — you can now add a generous layer of gloss varnish to make the vials look even more like glass.
One last piece of advice: The above recipe is intended for vials that are perfectly straight. If you know in advance that your vial will be held at an angle, make sure to align the waterline accordingly: Unless there’s a lot of speed (and/or centrifugal force) involved, the waterline should still be parallel to the ground, even when the vial itself is not! Like on these vials that appear on the arm of my Chaos Knight:
Anyway, adding smaller tweaks like this was really what helped me to transform this model into something special, although I am also reasonably happy with the tweaked red recipe I managed to come up with. So without further ado, here’s the finished Apothecary Dumah:
Unfortunately, the lighting in the pictures eats up quite a few of the subtler red higlights, making the armour look flatter than it actually is — you’ll just have to give me the benefit of the doubt here😉 Beyond such small technical issues, however, I really think he’s quite the character! And finally finishing him after such a long time (and after several attempts, no less) does feel pretty good!
I’ve had the character in the back of my head for quite a while, so it shouldn’t really surprise you that I’ve also come up with some background to match the model — or rather, the model was actually conceived to match the background in this case:
Apothecary Dumah, Chooser of the Slain and Keeper of the Seed, Primus Medicae of the World Eaters’ 4th assault company
The presence of Lord Dumah could be one of the most important reasons for the ability of the 4th to still function as a fairly coherent fighting force, for it is due to his art that the company still has access to a way of replenishing its ranks instead of being left to slowly bleed out over the millennia: Apothecaries are a rare enough breed in the traitor legions, and especially so among the World Eaters, whose Apothecaries have succumbed to the bite of the nails for the most part, abandoning their former battlefield role in favour of bloodshed and insanity.
During the times of the Great Crusade, Dumah served directly under First Apothecary Fabrikus, and he was among those tasked with duplicating the archaic and little-understood neural implants Angron had been outfitted with on Nuceria. While working on the task of implanting an ever increasing part of the legion with those “Butcher’s Nails”, Dumah became aware of their debilitating nature and began in-depth research into the possibility of mitigating the negative effects of the implants.
Yet there was little tolerance for this kind of experimentation within the legion, as the Red Angel himself regarded any attempt at tampering with the function of the nails as a way of compromising their effectiveness and purity. So this line of research was quickly abandoned by all but a few Apothecaries, while the legion fell deeper and deeper into madness and bloodlust.
Ten millennia later, Dumah still serves as the 4th assault company’s Primus Medicae and has earned the epithet “Chooser of the Slain”, as his task is twofold: As a dark, Grim Reaper-like figure, he moves among the fallen and chooses which geneseed to harvest from fallen World Eaters and which to leave to rot, because it is too twisted and curdled by corruption to be safely used for implantation any longer. And he looks for those fallen enemies whose prowess in battle and martial honour have made them eligible for being inducted into the XII legion – either by being granted the kiss of the nails or, in very rare cases, a full conversion to an Astartes in the first place.
When off the battlefield, Dumah still continues his experiments with the aim of countering the nails’ degrading effects, and he feels that he is coming closer to a possible breakthrough with every generation of new implants and with every harvested progenoid. The only question is if there will still be enough of the company left to profit from his eventual success…
So here’s the comparison picture showing the different red recipes, like I promised:
The Terminator Lord in the middle uses my original recipe, based on the now OOP Blood Red. The Lheorvine Ukris conversion on the right uses a somewhat more experimental version of the recipe I used for the Apothecary: It’s slightly closer to the original colour than the red on Dumah, admittedly, but it’s slightly more messy and less elegant as well, so I think I may ultimately be sticking to the new recipe, after all.
Anyway, here’s the finished recipe, for all those of you who may be looking for a similar outcome:
- basecoat with Khorne Red
- wash with Army Painter Strong Tone
- add a layer of Mephiston Red
- add some highlights with a 50:50 mix of Mephiston Red and Evil Sunz Scarlet
- glaze with Bloodletter
- selectively apply some Druchii Violet into the recesses
- add some final highlights with almost pure Evil Sunz Scarlet
As for the ETL, my first two models re now officially finished. Yay!
So that means two done, one to go, right?😉
With another chief officer of the 4th assault company now finished, I also took some new photos of the various Huntmasters of Khorne’s Eternal Hunt, and sharing these with you seems like a great way to wind up this post!
So, first up, a picture taken against a black background, including all the individual characters’ names:
And here’s another picture, taken against a brighter background, that arguably does a better job of capturing the colours as they look in real life:
In a way, these picture really serves as a short visual history of my last five years in the hobby, as the first of these guys must have been built shortly after I got back into the hobby in late 2010/early 2011, while the most recent one (Dumah) was finally finished just now. Anyway, I am still very happy with this collection of blood-crazed murderers, as you can probably imagine!😉
It goes without saying that I would love to hear any feedback you might have! And, as always, thanks for looking and stay tuned for more!
EDIT: As Archangel very helpfully pointed out in the comments, the fact that the pictures were no longer expandable by click was a problem, especially for the group shots. So I’ve gone back through the post, and now clicking on each picture should take you to a full size version of that image again — I am not even sure why WordPress changed this in the first place…
Filed under: 40k, Chaos, paintjob, World Eaters Tagged: 40k, apothecary, background, chaos, chaos lord, chaos space marines, chooser of the slain, conversion, counts as, dumah, ETL V, fabius bile, fluff, huntmaster, khorne, khorne's eternal hunt, kitbash, painting, paintjob, world eaters
