Vorghan the Slayer

Vorghan the Slayer, ready to lead his troops into battle and seek glory in the name of Khorne. This is, of course, the free figure from the recently relaunched White Dwarf. I made a slight modification by removing the head trophy that protruded from his back, as I felt that it ruined the profile of the model. I wish I had gone a bit further and swapped the large blade for an axe, and possibly changed to a different (non-helmeted) head, but that's hindsight for you. He looks a bit cramped on his base, but my chaos army is a stickler for tradition and he wouldn't be allowed to join on one of those new-fangled round bases. At some point in the future, he will be joined by a unit of marauders/warriors, I am not sure which as yet, but for the time being he is a lone character model. An infamous character, in fact, from the annals of lore - only the true Warhammer nerd will recognise the name. He does have a sizeable retinue at his command, ready to take on a rival chaos champion, but more on that in a future post.

I was particularly pleased with the armour. Black is quite a difficult colour to bring to life - strictly speaking it's an absence of any colour, so perhaps not surprising. I have always been hesitant to highlight it with blue as so many tutorials recommend, that gives a very silky appearance to my eye, best left for clothing. So I tried stippling and highlighting with grey, then washing in browns and reds. It seems to have worked out well. 

I was even more pleased with the flesh. I used my own base colour, glazed it quite harshly with chestnut and browns, then glazed with the original base colour to tone down the harsh contrast. Again, it seems to have worked well and it's a technique I can come back to on other models. Luckily, I blogged quite a bit of my painting progress so here's a handy list if you want to give any of the methods a go yourself. 

Step 1 Step 2 Step 3 Step 4