Shadespyre's Lizardmen - Karnac Returns - February (252 points)

Rank and File II

For February, and for my second Rank and File month, I decided to step away from the archers and do something slightly more challenging than paint the same model another 10 times... so here we have 12 Lizardmen Warriors armed with swords (mostly) and shields, coming in at a princely 21 points each or 252 points in total.

These are the first "non-Karnac's Raiders" miniatures, and probably the biggest individual section / regiment in this project (it's a small project, after all). Now, I've cheated a bit here because I've substituted a model for the standard bearer that will probably end up in this unit (or will it? More on that later) and I've pushed that back down the line while I think about how to approach that.

A bit about colours - firstly, you'll notice some new skin colours in there, namely Fenris Grey, Hormogant Purple and Bestial Brown. I felt these added a bit of variety without Going Too Far? I hope you agree. The fourth model, with the crest and stone axe, is the "bonus" model, and I based the colour scheme on a Smooth Newt as that's what the crest reminded me of.

I've continued on with the cloth colours - blue, red, bright green - that I used to detail the archers. My explanation being that these are the colours used by the Dwarves which the Lizardmen have previously defeated and devoured. Some of the resulting combinations are a bit odd, but who knows what reptiles think is trendy?

I've mixed up the metal colours between coppery, bronzish and irony. Those big curvy swords didn't feel right in bronze, while it suits the jaggedy home made look of some of the others quite well.

The shields are based on tortoise shells and some sort of giant banded lizard or snake skin. There's next to no planning in any of this, I'm just doing what seems best at each stage, if I over-plan or worry too much about a project then I never get going.

Oh, I hinted about some potential changes in plans earlier on. Nothing huge, but ebay has shoved some more miniatures my way and this may change the final make-up and size of some of the units. The main impact of which may be having to buy some bigger movement trays, so no great panic. But it's taken long enough for me to write this blog update as it is, so more on that next month after I've actually made those decisions, I hope.

What's next?

I've started trying out some paint colours on some of the character and command models... but if I were you I'd expect the March update to be more Rank and File of some sort, so that I can put out all the characters in one big Leader month...