49 Dark Dwarves

In the interest of getting things painted before buying more, here’s 49 Irregular Miniatures 15mm Dark Dwarves, 24 Halberdiers, 20 Crossbows and 5 Heroes. As you can see below some are mostly painted already however I didn’t really like the scheme I had come up with so I chose to throw them in with the rest whose primer had chipped in various places and prime everyone black again.

I started off by covering everything with Naggaroth Night if you’re not familiar with Citadel’s paint range that’s a very dark purple. This was to give everything a nice base coat, but to also cover up any silver spots the primer didn’t get to.

I then drybrushed everything with Evil Suns Scarlet. I used a very big brush for this and churned through them as quickly as I could painting the whole force of 49 minis in a single batch. With 15mm figures this isn’t too much of an issue, especially considering my usual batch size for 28mm miniaures is 20.

I then continued drybrushing this time lighter and with Yriel Yellow.

I wanted the force to have a very striking look so I opeted to pick out details, mostly shields with a light blue. A tip I picked up from Lukes Aps on youtube is when basecoating like this don’t thin your paints. If you put a small amount on the miniature and then spread the undiluted paint around you can get good coverage with a single coat and without obscuring any detail.

I then continued with scorpion green on other details, mostly any fur and hair.

I then moved on to picking out any weapons and parts I wanted to be metallic with Retributor Armour. Retributor Armour is probably the best gold paint I have every used it covers incredibly well over almost any colour.

Then, and this is a little harder to spot, I picked out some details with Wild Rider Red, mostly straps but also some armour detais.

Then I forgot to take more pictures. However I do remember the following few steps. I picked out some more armour details with yellow and the strings on all the crossbows. I put a black wash over the entire miniature. I then drybrushed the whole figure again with a bone colour. This washed them out a little too much for my liking, so I went back in and washed each part of the figures with an appropriate ink wash – dark red for the armour, dark blue for the blue details etc. I finished off by highlighting some of the face details on the Halberdiers with Wild Rider Red.

At this point the figures were done, so I moved on to basing. It’s important if you’ve done a fast paint job to spend extra time on your bases. A bad base will ruin a brilliantly painted miniature and a good base will elevate a poorly painted, or good but speedily painted miniature.

I ground up some catlitter in a pestle and mortar, mainly because I had run out of sand, but also because catlitter is generally white or pale grey (at least the stuff we buy is). Which means since I had planned on painting the bases with washes I wouldn’t have to paint the bases white later. I splattered on Space Wolves Grey and followed that up with Drakenhof Nightshade. I then glued static grass in patches and once that was dry I added Valhallan Blizzard from Citadel for the snow.

It’s an odd scheme for sure, but I like it, and I painted 49 minis in a couple of days.

For the yearly total I’m up to 544 miniatures bought. I had a moment of madess and bought 96 Orcs and Dwarves from EM4 miniatures, picked up 25 15mm fantasy miniatures from Irregular for Tiny Wars and 20 metal troopers from EM4 and Moonraker Miniatures to build a Scions force for Warhammer 40k.

On the painted front I finished the Eldar Guardians previously mentioned, all the Scions and 10 more 15mm figures for Tiny Wars, not to mention the Dark Dwarves above taking me up to 579 miniatures painted. Now on to some Elves I think…