Realm of Chaos Warriors

The first unit of warriors for the Realm of Chaos project are completed. Black armour, red cloaks and white fur makes a striking scheme I have used before and wanted to try again, though this time using mainly contrast paints. There is very little highlighting involved on these figures, it’s mostly glazing with diluted contrast paints. I explained the process in more detail in my previous post. I am happy with the way these turned out, black armour can be flat and dull, so getting the texture and variation there was probably the hardest part. I could also make improvements on the red cloaks, but for now they are done.

With the recently painted ungors, that’s two completed units for this project. I feel I have earned the right to paint a character, so that’s my next job. An old sorcerer model will do very nicely. A chance to stretch my wings a little and add some more detail rather than production line units. That’s what I need now, to keep the interest level high. I find as I get older that I have less patience with painting units, one reason I am keen to exploit the contrast paints in any way I can. 

Contrast Chaos Warriors

I am making some progress with the chaos warriors. Over the weekend I finished half the unit, the remaining half are quite well progressed too. I had the camera set up for commission work so decided to grab a quick shot and waffle a bit about the painting process.

As with most of my work I started with a light undercoat. In the past I have sprayed white, then added a wash and worked from that point. For these figures I primed black all over, then from above with a grey, then dry brushed with white. This gave me a much better range of tonal values, albeit monochromatic to start with, a good base to glaze over with contrast paints. 

I painted the cloaks first as I thought these (front bits) would be hardest to reach with the brush. I used flesh tearer red contrast paint, diluted with a little flow aid and matte medium. This gave a surprisingly good finish, I could easily have left it at this, but I did add a little more shading in the deeper creases using contrast cygor brown, which is a red brown.

The fur trim was washed with skeleton horde contrast, as usual thinned with flow aid and matte medium. I suspect this is how contrast paints are made, with pigment added of course. I then dry brushed with white for an easy, effective, light fur effect. I splashed in other glazes to the fur as I painted the armour, greys, browns, yellow at random, to make it look a bit less uniform, a bit more natural.

The black armour was a bit more fiddly. I used black Templar contrast paint, which has a green/blue tendency over white. Ideally suited to sci fi figures but not my taste. So I glazed with browns and yellows to warm the tone. I then added random patches of grey and highlights with light colours from my palette, and also used white contrast paint to really try to achieve some variation in tone. Black alone is so flat and uninteresting. There was quite a bit of lightening and darkening going on with white, grey, brown and black, some glazing, some stippling, until I was happy with the result. It’s not as simple a process as the fur but then it’s a more complex thing to paint.

Hopefully it will not be too long before I finish the rest of them and I can put up a unit shot. The project is ticking along at a nice pace so far, hopefully I can keep at it, not get distracted by other projects. I spend more time painting canvas than miniatures these days, this Realm of Chaos project could be my swan song.

Ungor Raiders

The first unit in the Realm of Chaos nostalgia project, ten ungor raiders. I would say these are 90% painted with contrast paints and the results are pretty decent. I have been painting using self made glazes over a white undercoat for years so the switch to contrast was not difficult. I found contrast paints, like virtually every paint I use, to be far too thick and diluted them using flow enhancer and matt medium, but maybe that’s just a habit I have picked up.

These are the first unit to emerge from the Realm of Chaos, part of a larger army I have started as a nostalgia project. The plan is to build a small force and play some games over the summer when restrictions have eased. The aim is to play using WHFB fourth edition, a return to my roots, though we might end up using fifth edition as we seem to have more books from that version. They were very similar so we can probably mix and match easily.

Eagle eyed chaos generals for that era will no doubt be aware that ungor did not use bows in those versions, but as easy going gamers we will ignore that little oversight. They are also round based, which probably is no hardship for skirmish troops but might cause some consternation among the wargaming basing police. I will be using rounds on all my figures as I simply prefer the look. As casual gamers we usually can fudge along quite nicely irrespective of rules, bases and the like. 

These figures are, as stated, mostly glazed and I have skimped on a lot of detail. They are designed for gaming and not for entry into painting competition. Having said that, I reckon the standard is good for speed painting and am happy to show close ups to the nerd world.