X.II - Chaos Marauders

The second of my celebrations of ten years of blogging. 2009 was a return to a more typical year for me. I returned to my wargaming heritage - painted and played mostly fantasy. I made a solid start on a chaos warband, painting marauders, spawn, hounds, warriors and a few characters. Then I had a crazy idea to develop an elf army that could be used as either High Elves or Wood Elves. From all those models I have chosen this unit of chaos marauders as my pick of the year.

This was the first time I had tried something new in painting terms. Previously, I had stuck to the prescribed method of base coat, shade, then highlights, but I felt that this was only really suitable for darker coloured models. With all the light flesh to paint, I tried a white primer, then used glazes to add the colours, in just one or two easy steps. It proved to be very quick and very effective and I started to use this method on more of my painting. So this unit marks that significant change in the way I paint. It saves time and looks better (in my eyes) to the old layering method.

This unit was also the first of a chaos army that was to feature heavily in coming years. Chaos had always appealed to me for so many reasons. There was huge variety, there were so many units to choose from. The background pantheon allowed for great creativity - these marauders as followers of Slaanesh would have looked different had they taken up arms for Khorne, or been blessed by Nurgle. The army could also be built up quite quickly as many units (though not marauders) were low count - chaos warriors, ogres, knights, trolls and the like. This unit was the start of a big, ongoing project.