Painting my Blood Sisters

No Oldhammer today! Today I will write about painting a contemporary Dark Elf miniature, or Daughters of Khaine, as parts of this ancient race were named today. I started with a small force of Daughters of Khaine miniatures in early 2018. After some progress, I quickly decided to paint some of these for the Golden Demon competition in Germany. The Melusai looked the most promising to win a trophy, but in the end it was to time-consumeing to finish three of them in time. I droped the idea half way done and switched to finish my five Witch Aelves as this seemed more realistic. Finally, I finished these five girls and togehter with my rebased Medusa they joined me to the competition in Düsseldorf. Unfortunately, my entries were not ale to win a trophy, but a recommended mention. After the competition I get a bit tired of the Daughters and shortly afterwards I jump on the Oldhammer bandwagon. Now, one and a half year later theses snake ladys sneaked on my workbench asking for a paintjob and a dust free spot in my cabinet. I can´t resist especially as my wife loves these miniatures and get some painted could reduce the constant complaining of her to finish some stuff :)

Painting a Melusai
I will fokus on the skin tones of Snake and Aleve and the hair, as these parts received the most attention and a lot of people asked for the used colours and some advice.

Snake-Skin
I used Graveyaed Earth (alt. Steel Legion Drab) as basic colour. Then, there are two transitions. The earth tone becomes very light to the belly and very dark to the back. I used Bleached Bone (alt. mix Screaming Skull and Ushabti Bone 1:1 with a tiny bit of Golden Yellow) for the light tones and a shading mix consisting of Abaddon Black with some Incubi Darkness for the dark tones. I painted the rough transitions on the whole snake body. Note, I painted the scales as refelcting surfaces means, that in most cases I painted the dark tones on top and the light tones on the bottom of a scale:

Then I used White to highlight the scales on the front. Additionally I used some mix tones of Graveyard Earth and the Shading Mix to soften the transitions to the back. I used bluish tones for the light reflections on the dark scales. Therefore, I painted the rough lights with russ grey and the reflections with a mix of Russ Grey and White. As the snake body is a stretched cylinder, I added additional geometrical light reflections on the sides. These were painted in the upper half (45°) as well as in all curves on the external sides.

Aelve-Skin

For the skin I used my classic recipe. I added Bleached Bone as basic colour and shaded with two mixtures of Bleached Bone and the Shading Mix (light grey and mid grey). I added the shading mix to very deep shadows. Then I used Warlock Purple and then Liche Purple as glaze to add some colour to the skin. Be careful that you use these colours only as glaze. The pictures above give you a good idea how the result look like.  


Shiny Hair

The decision for the hair was a really hard one. One one hand I thought about some colored hair similar to the studio painting on the other hand I wanted dark hair because the miniature had already a lot of light areas. I decided for the latter and painted it the same way as the scales on her back. The overall look was fine but in detail it looked boring. I showed the result some friends and finally Lukas “Bloodmaster” Wiggering gave the crucial tip adding some purple. I blended the purple between the Black and the Russ Grey. Additionally I lighted the reflections nearly to pure White. The result looked very good and I liked it a lot.

The next steps included a lot of NMM painting. Especially the mask was a difficult task due to the many curves and details. The halberd was also a hard decision. Finally I decided for a very shiny weapon and added a lot of blue, purple and brownish reflections.

Final Pictures

I hope this small guide helps all who want to paint some parts of this miniature the same way. Let me know if this article is helpful and what think about this scaly lady.

Kind Regards,

GeOrc