Painting my Necropolis Warband

 With October, almost over and Halloween almost a week away. It’s time to get back to painting some skeletons.

After all of my skeletons were kept bashed it was time to start painting. At first, I was not sure which direction to go in. I knew I wanted to go with a color palette that I don’t instinctually select. I tend to be drawn to cool colors with a contrast highlight of a warm color. After some thought, I decided to go with a primarily warm color palette. I also decided to take a bit more care in the painting process than I would normally. My usual process consists of stabbing the model with my dry brush, but this time I wanted to paint with intent.

To begin painting, I base coated all the models in black. I find that a black base coat allows me to build up better contrast than using white or a different color. The first layer of colors was a burgundy red. This is the same color I based all of my S in. I do really like this red. The only problem is that semi glossy and I really really don’t like glossy paint.

Next, I did a layer of bright red this helped me figure out where I would ultimately highlight in which areas I would lead the black and deep burgundy to create a nice shadow

Then I did another layer of the bright red this time using a smaller paintbrush and increasing the saturation of the red in select areas.Over the course of many layers, I began to build up multiple layers of this bright red, focusing more on the peaks of important details to slowly build saturation. It was difficult to see if I was actually making any changes to the model or if I was just hyper fixating for no reason. But overtime I could see a difference with the red. After about four layers, there was not much more contrast I could create and I began to introduce two new colors. 

Slowly, orange was added to select high points on the model. The first layer was a mixture of the bright red and orange to create a smoother transition. The orange paint I was using it didn’t have good coverage or saturation. This resulted in multiple layers being needed to slowly build up the contrast and not have paint caked on the model.

After a few layers of orange, I pulled out a bright yellow to do my final highlights. Here I focused on which points in the model I wanted to draw the eye to. Primarily the face, breast plate and crown behind the skull were what I wanted to focus on. Similarly to the orange, the yellow does not have good coverage. I am still on the hunt for the perfect yellow that is saturated and has good coverage. If you have any recommendations, please let me know because I bought so many yellows. With the final highlight completed my War band was done!

While I don’t think I’ll be winning any sort of painting competition anytime soon. I do enjoy painting my models in a fashion that feels like myself. I never felt comfortable painting models like the box art or super neat and clean, but painting my models like I would color an illustration has made me enjoy the painting process a whole lot more. Now it’s time to get in a few games of necropolis and see how my skeleton Knights do. In a future post, I’ll be sharing the lore of this war band and a few of my other ones to show how adding narrative story to your models really increases the enjoyment of model making.