Is there some irony in a person hoping to become a Church of England Priest collecting Daemons?
Chaos Daemons have always been a favourite army of mine. It’s probably down to how bizarre many of the models are, how the range stays close to its roots and even newer models are very close in appearance to the ones I saw as a kid.
With 9th just around the corner I was itching to get going on something new and with the promised help to melee armies I thought if I was going to get going with some daemons now was the time.
I stumbled across a painting tutorial from a guy called Miguel Garcia Fernandez who mostly utilises washes and inks to paint his miniatures, and with the promise that painting will be quicker than normal I dove in!
The effects you can get with multiple layers of washes and inks over a white prime, and a few white highlights are rather impressive, and it might be a technique I’ll be sticking to if I want to paint ‘normal’ looking Games Workshop models.
One thing I always like doing to is playing around with the colour scheme. Most of my new daemons are nurgle, and I didn’t want to stick to the usual green, so I went with a nice red-orange, keeping green for the guts and inside bits.
A big discovery painting these figures was the purple base edges. You don’t have to stick to brown, black or grey. It is a rather dark purple, Naggaroth Night to be precise, over a base to Steel Legion Drab which takes a lot of the intensity out of the colour. From the distance it looks black or dark grey, but as you get closer it starts to look not quite right, which is something I felt fits the Daemons nicely.
Sometimes I like buying paints not specifically for anything, and then challenging myself to fit them in somewhere. I found a metallic pink ink by Daler Rowney in my local book/craft shop and knew I had to get it. It ended up on my herald’s bell seen above. I’m looking forward to letting that colour loose on the army!
Model count for the year:
583 bought… that’s a worryingly large amount!
671 painted… I’m on track for 1000 models in a year…
I think if I get 100 painted models ahead of my bought count I’m going to treat myself to something nice.
Deathzap 
There is not much irony between your proposed career and your painting daemons.
There are a number of (military) padres around in gaming. A generation or two before as a vicar, an interest in model railways would probably have been the acceptable thing.
In the Middle Ages, with your artistic talents, they would have had you up a ladder in church painting a suitably terrifying heaven and hell picture to graphically illustrate the Bible for the illiterate peasants who “didnt have the latin” (to misquote Pete and Dud).
I grew up near one such Hell in a domesday book era church that had been restored (sadly without colour) after being whitewashed for many centuries. Impressively stylish and still very striking, those demons!
Like all our games, they are all part of the age old stories of good versus evil.
There is also a fair amount of smiting and fighting in the Old Testament as you explored in researching your Biblical Age armies. Do you have a Deus ex Machina biblical intervention mechanism for help from on high (plagues, miracles) built in for these Biblical Era games?
Lol, I had considered a ‘God mechanic’ for my games but figured if he’s really there he can always intervene in the dice rolling as he sees fit. I guess the irony is less to do with the C of E more to do with my evangelical roots, the type of folks that are usually spooked by Harry Potter and Halloween. There were audible gasps at a meeting once when I admitted to playing dungeons and dragons on occasion.
That’s worrying with my generally abysmal dice score of late, although playing solo, my opponent was equally poorly served by dice.
I think there is probably kudos with younger people in coming from a background that plays and understands such games, films etc.
This Halloween Potter spooked by issue also bedevilled (scuse pun) the use of RPG in classrooms in the 1990s onwards. It is just a form of escapism as much as television soaps etc.