Painting Basilea

So after playing a lot of Grimdark Future my usual gaming chums have started on One Page Rules’ other battle game Age of Fantasy. I dove in with a good amount of enthusiasm and even though I already had a couple of fantasy armies already I bought a couple more (since as wargamers we are all cursed with the lust for more projects).

Being a big fan of Cthulhu and all he gets up to (mostly sleep these days) I bought into Mantic’s Nightstalkers (Shadow Stalkers in AoF). I’ve been working through them slowly:

But I did have this desire to play ‘the goodies’ (not Bill Oddie, Graham Garden and Tim Brooke-Taylor, although a bunch of lads ready to beat people with black puddings would be a great fantasy force) so I bought the Basileans from Kings of War – the goodest of good guys.

They are a difficult range to get on with, large amounts of Mantic’s restic stuff rather than your more traditional hard plastic so I wouldn’t recommend them to a beginner, but they are good high fantasy models. I started with the Paladins:

Wanting a brighter silver I drybrushed up as best I could.

The Paladins were all basecoats and washes, and I stuck to three colours to keep things looking striking – red, gold and silver. After the wash I did a highlight on the red and called it a day.

I think Mantic’s choice of blue, silver and white is somewhat of a misstep. An entirely cold colour scheme won’t look as striking on the tabletop and won’t help you sell your models.

The only other unit I have finished so far are my Elohi, they were similarly done, bar the wings. I painted them white and then used Citadel’s Apothecary White contrast and it worked perfectly. I don’t think there’s an easier way of painting white.

I’ve still got five Paladin Knights to go, thirty infantry and a Dictator.

I wanted a bigger unit and looking at the Basilean Phoenix I thought it would be easy to paint, the price however was a bit of a turnoff. Mantic’s quite a strange company to buy from, the Army Deals are insane, incredibly good value, but often times the units outside of those boxes are rather pricey (well the same you’d pay for a similar model from Games Workshop). So I hit the local discount shop looking for an large bird that could be painted to look like a Phoenix.

I found a terrible looking dragon instead.

Loving the fairy tale style of this dragon toy I have set about polishing this turd.

But there’s a long way to go yet. I’ll keep you updated as things develop.