Ride for Ruin! - Valtteri's Undead Legion - March Rank & File 3

I had a simple goal for March: paint my cavalry.

I feared it would be difficult and slow because painting cavalry usually is. Luckily these were pretty straightforward and fast to paint so I had time to add a chariot and a bonus Wraith as well. And some terrain! I love making terrain.

Here's what I painted in March:

The Skeleton Horsemen and the Wraith are 3D prints from Red Bard Games, like the Zombies from February's post. Once again they're wonderful old school models but are a bit bigger/thicker than their OG counterparts. Then again, scale has never been one of Warhammer's strong suits.

The Chariot on the other hand is a true necromantic construction. The crew and one of the horses are from the original 4th ed plastic kit while the second horse is a bit newer (Tomb Kings era perhaps?). The chariot itself is a 3D scan of the original plastic model that I found online and had printed out. My friend's Bambu filament printer had churned out pretty great results so we decided to give it a challenge. I hid the print lines with a filler spray and gloss varnish. If you look closely you can still see the lines but on tabletop it looks just like the real thing!

Painting

As with my previous models, enamel wash is the hero. With the small skeleton warriors the washes work great on just a flat white surface, but I wanted to give these bigger models some depth. I prepainted the bone by applying AP Pallid Bone Speedpaint over white. I then drybrushed the models with a bone colour, light beige and white.

A tip on drybrushing!
Most of us have probably been using a tissue for wiping the excess paint off. A few years ago tutorials about drybrushing with a dampened make-up brush and a texture palette started popping up and you know what - they actually work! The idea is that by using a texture palette instead of a tissue and keeping the paint wet you don't end up with that chalky finish that drybrushing usually does.
Since I'm lazy I've simplified the method a bit:
I don't bother with a dampening pad (it's good if you want a really smooth result but I like to have some texture. Most of the time I use regular drybrushes too. There's all sorts of fancy commercial texture palettes but I made my own by simply stippling some wall filler on a plastic palette. Works wonderfully!

I also did some highlights on the riders on the riders, mostly by drybrushing the whole model with an off white. Below you can see a finished model before the enamel wash.

The horsemen came with blank shields and I really didn't want to do freehand on all of them. Luckily I managed to score an untouched transfer sheet straight from ths 90s! It took some cutting to get them to fit on some the smaller shields. A few transfers broke but it was fairly easy to repair them with some paint. I also painted some flames for one of the skull transfers.

I couldn't resist doing a freehand shield for the Chariot - the image is straight from the box art.

Terrain

When I started planning for the challenge I knew I wanted to do some classic terrain straight from the pages of the Armybook and White Dwarf.

First up is the humble Barrow Mound. The stones are rocks and pebbles, the mound is styrofoam coated with a diy sculptamold and texture paint, then flocked.

I've been slowly building my terrain collection to match my gaming mat but for some reason I haven't done any hills. Maybe bacause they hadn't been that important in the games I've been playing. But what's Warhammer Fantasy without artillery deployed on hills? So I knocked up these two stepped hills. They're flat on the back because they're meant to positioned on the table edges. The materials are the same on the barrow mound.

My new terrain in action!
I played another 1000p game of 5th edition with my friend. Note how a good game doesn't care about bases. We had no problem with him using round ones and whenever things went a little weird we just measured how they would actually fit on square bases. A fun game once again, even though my Undead were crushed mercilessly.

Statistics

Look at that, I've got a decent sized army already!
Next month I plan to paint Mummies and some extra skeletons for summoning. I'd also like to do more terrain and I should probably get started on my Vampire Lord.

January
25 Skeletons w. Swords&Shields, including Command Group	214 points	25 models
Wight	37 points	1 model
Necromancer Champion	163 points	1 model
2 Skeleton Ogres	72 points	4 models
2 Mummies	90 points	2 models
February
2 Wraiths	150 points	2 models
20 Zombies including Command Group	88 points	20 models
Zombie Ogre	16 points	2 models
Screaming Skull Catapult	74 points	5 models
March	904	61
Chariot w. Scythed Wheels, Crew w. Shield & Bow	79 points	5 models
Skeleton Horsemen w. Shields& Light Armor & Command Group	276 points	10 models
1 Wraith	75 points	1 model
Total	1334 points	77 models

Previous posts:

January
February