WIP Dark Elves Cold One Knights - An Update

My unit of Dark Elves Cold One Knights was already growing when I started to paint the General on Cold. The latter gets into focus as my entry for the 20 years competition in the Facebook 'Eavier Metal Community. Unfortunately, the General was not able to decide this competition for him. Anyway, I was able to finish this piece of 4th Edition Dark Elves History and the miniature gets a lot of attention and positive feedback in the social networks. Now it was time to return to his knights he will lead into battle.

My rough plan in the end of last year was to reproduce the studio builds. I had already built and painted the Cold Ones of the Cold One Knights Box, even if the light green runner was mounted by the Champion figure.

WIP on my Cold One Knights unit in the end of 2018

It was clear that this guy has to move on another Cold One sooner or later. The other two Cold Ones turned out nicely. The light green standing one was a pleasure to paint. The only disappointment was that the head didn’t fit that well on the neck and that the dorsal spikes are not in line. However, this is only visible when looking very close and from above on this beast why I just ignored that. The dark runner was painted in a dark green version. I was not brave enough to painted it in bluish tones, something which will revenge later. With these three builds I started in 2019.



My biggest concerns were the builds of the rare knight as well as for the standard bearer. Both required bits which are very rare (take look into my article about the Cold One Knights history). Two months of searching through thousands of eBay auctions finally had an happy end. I was able to get the rare tail bit as part of a badly executed conversion of a Skink Cold One Rider and the head a part of lot of Cold One Knights. Because I needed the tail two times I made a copy and used it on my Cold One for the Standard Bearer. The original parts I used for the build of the rare knight. Now I had everything to complete the Cold Ones of Command Crew and the first four knights.

                                      left Build of the Standard Bearer Cold One and right Cold One of the Rare Knight


Time to move the Champion to his new mount. Therefore, I finished the build of his new Cold One and the base for his old one. I painted his Cold One in the similar colors I used for the Generals Cold One reflecting also the bluish tone of the studio painting. While the Armour of the Generals mount covered most of the Lizard, here you saw nicely how the bluish colors work on skin and scales. Finally I was very happy with the result.

                                       New Cold One for the Champion Knight primed and painted in bluish tones


Swapping the Cold Ones on their final bases was a bad idea. However, it was necessary as I prepared all six bases in advance with an overlapping design and each has its specific position. Consequently, I removed the light green runner and positioned it on his new and already painted base. Positioning the bluish Champions Mount on the Champion base was more difficult. This procedure required to cut some painted parts away allowing to bring this mount in line with all other Cold Ones. With tears in my eyes I look on the ruined base but with happiness on the overall look of this growing unit.

WIP Cold One Knights unit

Instead of repairing the damage I created, I decided to seek comfort in painting the rare Knights Cold One. This mount quickly became my most beloved one as it is so special. The miniature appears to be  the initial design than Trish Carden started to sculpt the Cold Ones. Even if it looks very static it has a unique dinosaur appearance. I decided to go with the light green variant as the studio painting was also one of the green versions. Her my latest progress on this reptile:

WIP of a Cold One featuring the rare cold one bits

I have a lot of WIP pictures taken during the painting process and when finished I will write everything togehter in a more detailes tutorial. So far on my workbench.
The journey will continue. Stay tuned.


As always I am looking forward to your comments and feedback

Kind Regards,
GeOrc

The General,

released in October 1995, the Dark Elf General on Cold One was one of the last miniatures seeing the light of the day of the 4th Edition Dark Elves release. Dark Elf collectors get a first sight of this chap in the Dark Elves Armybook as part of Kurl Vraneths Raiders, an exemplary army supported by pictures of unpainted miniatures. After its release in White Dwarf (WD) #190 he get further appearances WD #191 in an army shot fighting Dwarfs and in WD #192 and WD #193 leading the Dark Elves army of Jake Thornton in a campaign titeled RAID. In the 5th Edition he reappeared again during the High Elves release in WD #210 leading the Dark Elves against their hated cousins in an army shot decorating the back cover. During the Tears of Isha campaign in April 1998 he decorated the index pages refering to a Warhammer Battle Report were he loosed against a Chaos Army. In shame of this battle or as a reaction to the 6th Edition Dark Elves release he disappeared. Now he is back and celebrates his comeback 20 years later on these pages.
    



The miniature

The miniature was sculptured by Trish Carden and Aly Morrison. Trish was responsible for the basic Cold One parts released earlier in 1995. The final Cold One is a conversion created by Aly Morrison mixing parts of the running and standing Cold One versions which was then heavily armored. The Cold One head based on the head with the horn ridge which get an impressive helmet. The tail was a free choice of the four existing tails but most blisters contained the version with two lateral spikes.
Aly also sculptured the rider. While the leg part was newly created, the torso based on one of the Cold One Knights torsos. The head get a skull like design reflecting the skull iconography of the entire Dark Elves release. In contrast to the Champion of the Cold One Knights, Aly decided to give his General a lance and to put a second lance on the back rest of his saddle. Taken together this miniature was an awesome sight and a worthy leader of many Dark Elves forces.

The studio paint job,
    

Studio paintjob by Stuart Thomas

is a bit disappointing. The colour scheme based mainly on bluish and red colours. Therefore, the colour scheme remembers a bit the studio painting of Rakarth on his Black Dragon. However, in relation to the other Cold One Knights, the choice of colors look a bit strange. Especially the reds are a bit outstanding here. Red always draw a lot of attention but in this case on the wrong parts of the model. Consequently, a lot of interessting details get lost, e.g. armour, clothes and the saddle. Additionally, the metals look very flat and the gems are painted in dark and cold colors, not able to challenge these red eyecatchers. Therefore, the dull overall appearance didn´t flatter this very detailed miniature. Regarding the Cold One Knights, the painting make him standing out of a unit but also he loose a bit his connection to the other Knights. The unique shield design supports this impression. While the banner symbol can be spotted in simpler version on some of the shield and lance pennants the red of the shield and the winged skull didn´t appear again in the Dark Elves army. While I like the idea of give the General a more unique appearance I would have prefered to keep him more in line with the rest of the Cold One Knights and the Dark Elves army. These findings motivated me, when planning the paint job of the General as well as of the rest of the Cold One Knights.



A contemporary painting

Even if I am not a big fan of the classic studio painting I decieded to paint my General in a similar way and try to improve where necessary to get the best out of this chap. I really liked the idea of the bluish Cold One as I interpreted the colour shift from green to bluish with a higher age. I droped the blue colours and replaced them by the classic purple as I wanted to reduce the whole army look to a less colourful scheme compared to the studio painting. The thing I most disliked were the red claws and horns. Even if I like some red and used it as a preferd detail colour, the red claws and horns didn´t make any sense in my opinion. Therefore, I used more brown and bonish tones. The most difficult question was if I would to go with the studios shield and banner designs. Both were a bit cartoony but typical elements of their time. I thought a lot how I could improve these designs to fit into a more contemporary painting style. Final question, what kind of base should I use. It was clear that this mini has to stand out from all others and therefore stand on higher ground. Since a long time I was a fan of the broken obelisk from the High Elf Princes Set. Therefore, I produced a copy of this bit in gypsum and placed it in my knwon High Elf ruins setting. So far the plan... lets take a walk through the process:
   


The armored Cold One
I started my own paintjob of this miniature with the Cold One in the beginning of January. I already painted a dark green version of a Cold One based on Incubi Darkness lighted with Bleached Bone. To shift this colour more into a bluish tone I added Regal Blue. This mix I used as a basic colour on the skin. I shaded the skin with a thinned mix of Abbadon Black with a tiny bit of Incubi Darknes. For the highlights and the light belly I used Bleached Bone. The scales I painted with Incubi Darkness Shaded to the top with Model Air Black and lighted them to the bottom with Bleached Bone. After I basic Cold One was painted I quickly started to paint the armour. I used the same NMM silver and gold as described by my Dark Elves Champion. I reduced the gold share to some details only as the General itself will become the shiny guy on top. I added purple to the saddle and the inner side of the chainmail and red to the gems all over the armour. Mouth and teeth were painted similar to my other Cold Ones. Claws and horns were painted with my usual Bleached Bone tones highlighted to white and shaded with Graveyaed Earth and the shading mix consisting of Abbadon Black with a tiny bit of Incubi Darkness. To reflect the older age I added some layers of Scorched brown in the shadows shifting the whole look more into the brownish tones. 

The General
For painting the General itself I used established colour shemes and light situations similar developed by painting my Dark Elf Champions on foot and on Cold One. Some features here are the helmet, the lance and his shield. Taking a closer look at his helmet it becomes clear that Aly Morrison sculptured this helmet in reference to the skull designs by the illustrations of Wayne England. Therefore, I choose a light situation and reflectios which support the skull like appearance. The center I painted very bright to give the skull appearance a white look. For the top and the spikes I used a lot of gold to draw the attention of the miniature to this part of the figure. In combination with the red from the gem the helmet draw a lot of attention and become a good eyecatcher. The lances I painted in my typical weapon NMM. While in most cases before I restricted the refelctions to bluish colors. Here I used also brownish glaces for the bottom part of his handheld lance. The brownish tones stand for the earth reflections and together with the bluish heavon reflections they create a much better environmental reflection situation on this miniature. Another eyecatching reflection situation is the big red gem on the bottom of his handheld lance. I decieded to paint this ball with classic spheric
reflecions consisting of two color transitions from dark to light seperated by a curved horizon line. Painting these color transitions need a lot of patience and repetitions to get them smooth. Even if this is hard to achive on a spheric object the result is worth all the pain and tears while painting on this detail. Same is true for the cylincric reflections on the lance poles. Even if these lances look discreet compared to other parts, their simply painting contain a lot of effort and work. Final detail I want to say some word about is the shield. I thought very long about its design because I had not a good feeling for the studio painting. On one hand I liked its unique design compared to the more uniform Knights shield on the other hand I missed the link to the Knights shields. I started with copying the skull design from the knights. For the wings I experimented with the colored illustrations from the armybook. I tested a lot with wings and the skull in different sizes using photoshop. Finally, there was need to morph the wings in a way filling most of the shield and to size down the skull as much to fit between the wings. Then printed the final design and transfered it on the shild using a mask (check my tutorial for a more detail description).  
 

Shield Design from Artwork to mask to final Painting

Banner and banner pole
Some last words on the about the banner. This was the most annoying part of the miniature. I thought a lot about a general banner strategy, when starting this Dark Elves army. 20 year ago I created paper banner as everyone else. As time goes by and the miniatures developed further more and more plastic banners appeard. When you were forced to create a banner by your own using plastic card or polysterene sheet was closer on the plastic banners of the rest of your army. Therefore, I initially thought about using plastic card. I thought these banners would look much more qualitative like the paper ones. I experimented a lot and tried different painting techniques to apply the freehands. Make a long story short, in the end the plast card banner didn´t work. Perhaps I will discuss this topics and show my failings in an own aticle. I removed the plastic banner and painted the same again on paper. The paper banner was more flexible and I was able to add a better movement.

For the Freehands I choose the same symbols and design as the studio did more than 20 years ago. These were copied from an other banner from the shield and banner section from the armybook. I really liked the broken heart design. Its origin comes from the medusa of the army standard design. I have planned to use the broken heart design also on some shields and the army standard will tie later everything together. Further symbols contain the runes from the same banner I used the heart form. I put everything togehter in Photoshop, printed it on 100 g paper and primed it with some Valejo matt medium. In contrast to the studio I choose a puple background which fits better to the rest of the miniature. To transfer that design into a contemporary painting some modificatiosn were needed. As a modern paintjob contains a lot of painting a light situation into a miniature, the banner needs to be adapted to your light source as well. This requires a lot of colour transitions in the vertical axis but also in the banner folds. Something the light situation adds to your miniature are a lot of more details. Therefore, the simple banner design has to be adapted with some additional details to fit to the rest of the minture. Here, I used the dots from the printing for the texture of the cloth. As I always used a very thin painting, the dots from the print were slightly visible until the end. Additionally, I added further details with a gold frame and some damage. I put everything togehter and corrected the movement of the pennant a bit.

I hope you like the final result. Let me know what you think and share your thoughts in comments.
Kind Regards,
GeOrc

Some Cold One Knights history

A unit of Cold One Knights chasing some bretonian spearmen

The last weeks I busied myself a lot with the Cold One Kinghts of the past. I studied the Games Workshop studio army of the 4th Edition release and tried to get an idea how they built their Knights and how this fits into the history of the Dark Elves army release. I get several insights I want to share and discuss with you.

Back in the days of the 3rd Edition of Warhammer Fantasy Battle the Cold Ones walked on all four legs. This changed with the release of the 4th Edition Dark Elves to a more Raptor like appearance. This appearance was used by John Blanches artwork in the 4th Edition armybook which can be seen as one of the first concepts pawing the way for upcoming release. Also David Gallagher used a two leged variant when creating his Armybook cover in 1995. In contrast, some of the black and white art from Mark Gibbons of this armybook still used the four leged variant of the past. These artworks were updated with new raptor like art when releasing the tears of Isha Campain in 1999.
The models designed by Trish Carden were two leged raptors, which were liked a lot in the community. Consequently, the Cold One Knights become one of the most iconic units of this release. In addition the unit gets an impressive Command Crew and their release was supported by own tactical article written by Jervis Johnson in the White Dwarf #188. A General miniature mounted on a heavily armoured Cold One followed a month later. These models were some of the best of their age and used far into the 6th Edition. A lot of people in the hobby prefered the dynamic reptiles rather than the new, bulky, and cow like Cold Ones of the year 2001.

The release schedule

The history of the Cold One Knight release was a chaotic and a sad story and therefore was in line with the whole release of the Dark Elves in 1995. The White Dwarf #187 presented the second wave of Dark Elves and the first appearance of the Knights. Consequently, it also contained some Mail Order pages showing the released miniatures and their parts and bits. In this first reference the release included a standing and running Cold One body variant as well as four head and tail bits. The riders based on only one leg part which can be combined with two different torso and lance variants. The third wave of Dark Elves miniatures one month later included a single Cold One Knight in a blister. The Mail Order pages again presented the Cold One Knight parts and bits but with a different compilation missing one of the lance variants.

Another month later the Command miniatures of the Cold One Knights were released. The command crew included a Standard Bearer as well as a sword wilding Champion. The Mail Order page of the Cold One knights was updated with the new bits of the command figures including a new leg variant. This leg variant based on the existing leg bit but with additional repeating crossbow, bags and baggins. The missing lance did not appear again. Later, they stopped also the production for Head #3 and Tail #1 and both bits become very rare. In contrast to the lance, the head and tail bits appeard for some time in the Mail Order Flyers and Citadel Cataloges until they disappeared with the Citadel catalogue from 1998. 


                       A                                                            B

                       C                                                            D

                       Mail Order pages from White Dwarf #187 (A) White Dwarf #188 (B) and from White
                             Dwarf #189 as well as from the 1998 Citadel Catalogue (D)


The studio army

The first Knight as shown in the Dark Elves Armybook

With creation of the Dark Elves Armybook only one Cold One Knight was painted and ready to be shown on the Eavy Metal pages. In additon, the last page of the Armybook showed a picture containing everything painted before printing of the book. This picture also showed the three Cold One Knights representing the three miniatures representing the box art of the Cold One Knight box. Therefore, it looks like the Cold One Knights were finished late in the released schedule with a focus on finishing the three Cold Ones Knights needed for the box art. The box was finished as the Dark Elves Army release get its official presentation with the White Dwarf #187. It contains the necessary parts to build three miniatures and in addition some self adhesion banners for the lances and transfer slides for the shields. While lance #1 was part of one rider of the box art, the head #3 and tail #1 were not used in the builts of the first three knights. To my knowledge lance #1, Head #3 and tail #1 were dropped early and did not appear in the box. Therefore, their bits disappeard quickly after the upcoming production molds focused on the box content.

However, these bits appeared in an other of the early knights of the studio army. The so called "rare Knight" based on the standing Cold One variant with head #3 and tail #1. The rider also uses lance #1. This rider completes the early Cold One Knights using both body variants two times and used all four head and tail variants in mixture. Take a closer look at the studio builts, they initially used the dynamic tails for the running body variants and the static tails for the standing body variant. Same is true for the lance. Lance #1 has a pointing arm position and lance #2 has a bended arm position ready for impact. Consequently, the standing Cold Ones used lance #1 while the running variants use lance #2. The painting of the Cold Ones showed different shades of green. The Box art already featured a light green variant, a darker green variant and a bluish variant. The "rare Knight" used the same dark green variant as one of the Box Art Knigths. The Knights itself mixed purple and blue colours on their clothes as well as on their lance banners. The skull and the teared heart symbol were used alternately on banners and shields.  

Different pictures showing the "rare Knight"

With the release of the Command figures with the White Dwarf #189 the Dark Elf Cold One Knights get their Eavy Metal page. In addion, the already mentioned article about Cold One Knights tactics from Jervis Johnson was released. Therefore, a lot of pictures feature the Knights in all their glory. A closer look on the Command miniatures showed that again their built and paiting was very well planned. The Champion used the running Cold One variant again with a dynamic tail. In contrast the Stadard bearer used the standing variant used the rare tail #1. Both builds used the most impressive Cold One head which is a bit bigger in size compared to the other three variants. Unfortunately, both Command builts did not use the newly released leg part. 
The painting underlined their command status. Both Cold Ones were painted in bluish colours, giving these reptiles an older and  more veteran appearance. The elite position of the Command Crew was refelcted by adding more golden armour parts as well as some unique shield designs. Here, the Champions used again the skull motive with additional red horns and the Standard Bearer used a small shield with runes.   

Eavy Metal page of the Dakr Elf Cold One Knights

Beside the new Command miniatures two other Cold One Knighs pop up. These Knights strengthen the studio army to six Knights allowing to put a unit of eight Knights on the tabletop when using the command crew as well. In contrast to the well planned early Knights of the studio these late Knights were a bit different in their built and painting. One of the late Knights Cold One built was a copy of the bluish box art Cold One. This time it was painted in green with bluish scales. The other new Knights Cold One built was a copy of the light green box art variant but using a dynamic tail. Both Knight builts use the new leg bit for the rider with additional bags and a repeating crossbow.  

The flank shows the late Knights which appeard together with the command crew

In summary it seems that the Cold One Knights-release used a list of varing parts and bits which evolved during the release schedule. Some parts were dopped and some other appeared later. In conclusion, the studio army showed more variance as most of the players were able to put on their table in the mid 90s. When I started collecting this army in 1998, a lot of the bits had already disappeared. I learned later that collecting all these parts can be quite hard. As I was able to get head #3 and tail #1 after searching through thousands of Ebay and Facebook auctions I still miss a sign of lance #1. I don't now if this bit was ever released as it disappeared already one month after its release. If you have ever seen this lance I would be happy if you could drop me a message in the comments.

That is the story about the Cold One Knights so far. The next article will show how I try to rebuilt these impressive Knights of the past.

Kind Regards,
GeOrc