Elf

 

The full title of this post is Zorn Silverhair, an elf from the Golden Realms. Maybe that works for an old school RPG character, but there is a slightly more esoteric reason for such a mouthful. Let me break it down for you.

The elf part is simple enough, this is an elf figure! It’s by the company known as Statuesque Miniatures and now available through Crooked Dice. It was originally sold in a set of four adventurers though they are now available as individuals. You can see the elf’s painted companions below, a dwarf and a wizard, with just one more to paint to complete the band - free cookie if you can guess the unpainted figure. 

On the palette choice, I was originally thinking of classic green wood elf, inspired much by the old Talisman artwork. But recently I have been replaying God of War and was really struck by the beauty of the light elves, which I have tried to replicate here. White robes, pale skin and even white hair, punctuated by grey and brown leathers.

The name Zorn is not particularly elvish and was chosen for his palette rather than his race. The Zorn palette is named  after Swedish painter Anders Zorn and comprises four colours - black, white, red and yellow. From this apparently limited set it is possible to mix up many colours, not surprising if you know colour theory. Add in a blue and you have all three primaries and an almost infinite palette available to you. The figure was painted using just these four colours, though I did also also use a little silver and a brown ink.

And that brings us to an explanation of the Golden Realms. I have been painting acrylic on canvas recently and have come to appreciate the much higher quality and pigmentation of artist paints. I spotted this set on sale and so have bought a set of acrylic artists paints manufactured by Golden. These are a high fluid set rather than the thicker stuff usually used painting on canvas. I thought they would be suitable for painting minis and from my limited test to date (one elf) they are showing great promise. The four colours I used were black and white, yellow ochre and burnt sienna in place of red. I will blog more about them in the future when I have experimented more.

The Wurmspat

Another Beastgrave warband I painted recently was the Wurmspat, a trio of Nurgle warriors in old money. These were really nice to paint up, a lot of detail as is the norm these days with Games Workshop, but not too much to drive you crazy. 

I have been painting on canvas quite a lot recently and some of the techniques I used on these models. So the armour plates I painted wet into wet, letting the paint run and blend into each other. I am also gaining a greater understanding of colour. It's good to learn new techniques, though I spend more time painting canvas than minis so it's not all good.

These figures (and others) are currently on sale on ebay as I try to raise funds to replace my knackered laptop. It would be nice if you could share with anyone you think might be interested.

The Grymwatch

Wanting something small in number to paint up for ebay, I bought myself a few boxes from the Warhammer Underworlds series. Don't ask me what the game is like, there are cards in each box which are used pokemon/magic style, other than that I know nothing. The models look nice to paint which is why I bought them. The first set completed, which I should have posted yesterday for Halloween, is the Grymwatch.

These are effectively a handful of ghouls and some bats, and they would slot nicely into Undead collections. I went with a pale sickly pallor for the skin, dank and greasy long hair and a few splashes of gore here and there. The bases are illuminated by an eerie glow, which is just a wash of a blue/turquoise shade. Nice and quick to paint.

I find myself drawn to smaller groups of models, my patience to paint regiments has pretty much evaporated over the summer. So my personal work has been reduced to small bursts of activity on small numbers of models. Over the past three months I have painted three vikings, three dwarfs and one orc. That's the lowest level of productivity I can remember since starting the blog over ten years ago. The times they are a changing?