Journeyman Painting Log 9

Taste my green ice cream!  

Four whole days since the last painting update?  Looks like I'm slacking off.  Today I finished up Zerkova and eVlad.  One is a terror on the tabletop and the other has the face of a horse.  I'll leave it up to you to decide which is which.  Looking at the picture on the left as I'm writing, there's little I like about the Zerkova model.  The pose is confused with the running and the ice cream, the sword is too thin (and therefore bends easily), the running-induced crouch plus all the swirling cloaks means much of the body is obscured.  Maybe it was the particular cast I got, but the detail seemed shallower than usual.  Then there's the face, which we won't mention again.  In retrospect I should have made the trim on the cloak a little darker, like the other Greylords, so it doesn't blend in as much.  She's also a bit googly-eyed, though that does seem appropriate when considered with all the context.

The perfect killing machine?  Close enough.

I'm happier with how eVlad turned out.  Maybe not quite as well as his prime version, but still suitably epic.  As with Zerkova I should have done something about all the fur on the cloak, maybe making the central part darker than the edging.  The dark red armor came off well again.  I'm particularly pleased with the frozen rock base.  I've seen many examples of the bright blue as shading for ice.  This approach seemed a little odd at first until I got lots of good views of ice, snow, glaciers, and other cold things in Alaska a few years back.  The approach was new but painless to implement.  Get out your cameras/markers/other recording implements because I'm going to criticize Vlad's shoulder pads, which is unlikely to ever happen again.  On this model the shoulders get in the way of the face.  The non-cavalry Vlads (maybe Vlad3 as well, I haven't looked too closely yet) have long, gaunt faces that hold a certain appeal for me.  On this model you can't really tell because the shoulder pads block half the face.  I like the aesthetic, they make sense in a "they're meant to ward off blows" way, and I hope they're always Vlad's defining feature, but in this case the sculpt could have been done in a way that included the gigantic shoulders and also left the face visible.

More warnouns in the pipe.

Currently on the table are eEryiss (still) and Beast 09.  I recently primed eButcher, the Old Witch, and Scrappy, despite how the picture looks.  They'll be making their way to the painting table soon.  I've only played eButcher once or twice and didn't have anything approaching success with him.  To say he's a different sort of caster would be too simple, and not exactly the sort of different I'm pledged to explore, but he looks like a lot of fun and (I assume) plays unlike anything I've fielded before.  I love pButcher because he's not complicated and absolutely murders things.  While eButcher is also a capable killer, he's far from simple.  I won't be running the Doom Reaver spam army, mostly because I only have one unit (for now), but I will be giving epic Orsus a good long look to see if I can figure him out.  Old Witch will be different as well, but in a different different way.  The trap with her is Iron Flesh, which could entice me to place her like a mix of regular Iron Flesh caster (go WGI and Kayazy!) and Bethayne (arcable Gallows).  She's far more tricksy than that, so the challenge will be to play her according to her style instead of mine.  Further down the queue, the IFP are slowly taking shape.  I glued them to their bases a few days ago and found that many hands are already drilled, so there won't be as much work to get them pinned as I expected.  I wanted to magnetize the shields so I could swap the one unit between regular and Black Dragon, but having looked at the models I think it would be too much work to get done for the Journeyman league, which only runs another three weeks or so.  By going with just assembling them as regular IFP (or as Black Dragons if I go that way) I should have enough time to get them together, painted, and on the table.  Can't say the same for Conquest, but I can (and will) still hope.