Cold One Knight Champion

Dark Elves Cold One Knight Champion

As mentioned in some other articles on this site, the Cold One Knights have a special place in my heart. As a child I was very interessted in dinousaurs and all these extincted lizards. Only six years old I was able to tell you everything I have heard about this topic in hour lasting explanations. Growing up, all variations of dragons and of course Godzilla were the next on my list of special interest. As a youth I kept some pythons, a boa and a iguana and still today snake venoms are part of my scientific work. Since these early days the fascination for reptiles in their various forms accompanied me through my life. When starting to read fantasy books the dragon lance books with all their stories about dragons and draconians were my first ones closely followed by the books aroud Drizzt Do´Urden. The latter fascinated me and I loved this strange Dark Elves with their matriarchy society, their skilled fighters and of course their lizard riding Dark Elf nobles. No wonder that the Warhammer Dark Elves setting which was similiar in all these details fell on fertile ground.    

Some hobby history
Back in 1998 the Cold One Knights were part of my first Poster Deal army. I am having the day in my mind when I opened the blisters and started the building of these awesome miniatures. After I painted my first Spearman test miniature I can´t wait to get my Cold One Knights done. Therefore the Cold One Knight Champion was the second miniature I painted in my Warhammer hobby time.

Comparison of my Champions from 1998 and 2018

I converted the miniature a bit by addig chains as reins and tried something different than the classic green painted base design. The paint job was simple and based on a dark colour scheme with some red details. 20 years ago I was very proud on this miniature. During my early years I painted a lot of these Cold One knighs and was able to put a very big unit on the Tabletop.

The miniature
20 years later these miniature are still some of my favorites. Again the Cold One Knight Champion was a miniature of first choice when deciding to repaint my 4th Edition Dark Elves Army. When looking through my left overs from these time I found a full Cold One Knight unit in one of the boxes. I bought them second hand shortly before the change to the 6th Edition and they never get painted. Happily, I startet to clean and prepared them properly. I quickly mentioned that using Milliput as a gap filler is a big advantage today. I wished I would have known that 20 year earlier. That would have saved me a lot of headache and frustration. I decided to move on with my High Elves ruins for the base and tried to display parts of a street with debris. I used bit from the High Elves Sorcerer sprue as basis, made a simply mold and casted the bit with gypsium.

View on the base as well as on eyecatchers: Sword and Shield

Painting the Cold One 
I started with painting the Cold One. I looked through a lot of references how other painters painted these or later versions. I stumpled over the exceptional work from Stefan Rath, paiting a Cold One Rider as part of his Dark Elves tower diorama. His miniature combines olive greens, blues and dark greens in a subtle way without looking to colourful. Additionally, he used light colours for the belly and legs while using darker tones for the scales on the back. With this reference in mind I started to paint my own. I used Ogryn Camo and desaturated it additionally by adding Administratum Grey. This mix serverd me as a basic colour. I shaded by adding black containing a bit of Incubi Darkness. The Highlights were done using Bleached Bone which can be mixed nowadays by a 1:1 mixture of Ushabti Bone and Screaming Skull containing a tiny bit of Golden Yellow. The scales were painted in Incubi Darkness. Each scale was highighted to the bottom with thinned Bleached Bone and shaded to the top using thinned Black. This reversed light to dark transition is characteristic for reflecting materials like gems, metal and shiny scales. The resulting light effect works fine and underlines the reptilian look and character of the miniature. 

Painting the Cold One Knight
The colour scheme of the Knight is a continuation of the scheme from the Champion on foot miniature. It uses purple as an army colour and red for smaller details. Two eyecatchers on the miniature are the sword and the shield. The sword was painted in NMM chosing reflections which work on its complex shape. Designs with an odd number of surfaces are always complicated. Normally you always try to paint neighboring areas with an opposite brightness. This works always fine for qual numbers of areas. Odd numbers of ares often require double transitions which has to be painted freehand. However, as I planned to do multiple tranistions in one area anyway it was only necessary to change the lenghts to get a good looking result. Anyone noticed that this sword looks like a Super-Stardestroyer from Star Wars? The shield was discussed in detail in my last article, so nothing more to say about it additionally.

Thoughts about the Cold One Knight Unit


I really like the final result and he looks very much like a Champion. Now its time to paint more Cold One Knights and to think about how the final unit should look like. I like the Eavy Metal Team idea to paint the Cold Ones in different green and blue tones. As espacially the Champion and the General have dark bluish Cold Ones it looks like their skin and scale tone shifts with increasing age. I really like that idea, but that means my Champion is riding the wrong Cold One. Now I will plan the whole unit, will plan a combination of fitting bases and put together a unit of Knights and their Leaders fitting together.

Cold One Knights Work in Progress

But this will be the story of an other article.
I hope you enjoyed this article. Let me know what you think about the Dark Elves Cold One Knights of the past in the comments.
Kind Regards,
GeOrc