The Last Slayer

I finally found the last member of the slayer unit - and he was right under my nose the whole time!

When I started painting my new dwarf army I never really thought about adding slayers, as I always viewed them as nice background but mediocre models. When I picked up a complete dwarf army on a forum sale, it happened to contain a few slayer models and I had a really close look at them. Some of them I immediately sold but a handful I thought to myself, these are actually quite nice models. They don't really match the ferocity of the artwork, but they were not too bad and would make a change from painting armour. So I put together a small unit of just seven figures, with the eighth a proxy or filler model of a dragon's head (eight being needed for games of Saga). I slowly painted the unit but never got round to the dragon head, thinking I should use a real slayer. I toyed with the idea of trying to pick up a Gotrek model from ebay, or maybe one of the Avatars of War models, but in the end gave up trying to bag a bargain.

Then I bought the Silver Tower boxset, to use as additions to my Tzeentch collection. I assembled the hero figures, including the dwarf fyreslayer, while never really being convinced of the aesthetic - it's all the runes hammered into the skin that I don't like - and what's with all the key motifs? I half heartedly painted the figure and then lost interest for a good few months. But recently I have been trying to finish half-completed projects and so finally picked up the beardy chap again. A quick flurry of brushwork and he was done. In a way it was quite liberating painting a model I was not that attached to, I felt that if I messed up I could just bin it, no great loss to me. Consequently I tried a few crazy ideas as I went along - glazing the skin and hair blue for example, highlighting white then glazing over the top, that kind of thing. I am pretty happy with the result. The unit of slayers is now properly eight strong and I learned a few things about painting. I am still not convinced about the model, but I am just happy to draw a line under the unit and move on.