Cleaning up my Workbench

The Workbench in July 2019

My approach in painting miniatures is simple; Paint something which attracts you the most. The advantage is that you are always highly motivated. Unfortunately, it happens that you loose your interest before a project is finished. You grab the next one or move on to a different project. Therefore, my shelf of shame with all my unfinished projects is a large one. Becoming a Daddy has made things more complicated. My painting time devides into evenings doing the night shift by taking care for our little boy. As I am mostly tired from the day my painting concentrates on doing simple work like basic colours, simple transitions with less colours like in NMM, big surfaces, bases and so on. When having some spare time on the weekend I use it for work which needs much concentration like Freehands, finelining, painting eyes and so on. As you can image I do not have much spare time on the weekends which results in an unfinished miniature accumulation. When you are following this project you already noticed that half a dozen Cold Ones are still waiting to get saddled by their missing knights. However, when I started my work on the Cold Ones some of the infantry troopers become victims of loosing interest. From time to time I continued work on them but finally two executioners and two Witch Elf stuck in the pile for getting their finish sessions. Therefore, I decided that the July will be the month to finish all that stuff from my 4th Edition Dark Elves project that stucks somewhere in my painting pipeline. Lets see what we have here:


Executioners

The Workbench in end of 2018

I started painting the first three Executioners in end of November 2018. Quickly I concentrated on one miniature which left the two unfished troopers behind. My interest then quickly changed to the Cold One Knights and I wanted to paint a test miniature of this cavalery unit. The two unfinished Executioners patiently waited for their time to come.





During that time I had some smaller painting sessions on the hoodies, base and the black leather. Finally, they waited until mid of July 2019 to see a brush again. I started with finishing the chainmail, silver and gold elements, the gems as well as some correction work on all finished parts.

The next sessions covered the axes which were a lot of fun to paint. Finally I painted the leather, base and some battle damage as well as some blood on the axes.

Finished NMM on the two new collegues

I am happy that these two maniacs have joined their collegue to sever some limbs and heads.

 


Witch Elves

These two girls waited more than half a year to get finished.The Witch Elf in defending position was the last girl from the first rank which I started painting with the two other girls from the left flank in 2018. You can see her leying around in the first executioner picture above. The latter two were quickly finished but the motivation left me to continue with this third one.








The girl with the raising swords is from the second rank and joined her later to motivate me. From time to time I spent some painting time in both but quickly concentrated on this second Witch Elf as she was much more detailed and thrilling to paint.

Again the front rank girl was left unfinished behind. I do not know why this particular Witch Elf had her difficulties motivating me to finish her. I told her story in our Tabletop-Board and some angry members put up the pressure which was necessary to get the job done.

Sometimes a whip is motivating more than hundreds of nice words!

The Witch Elves Unit so far. Ready to shed some blood

       

Dark Elf Warriors

When ever I had some spare times in the early mornings while my little boy still sleeps I had a coffee and continue to prepare some troopers for my 20 miniature Dark Elf warrior unit. It took me a while to collect these very rare metal versions of the Dark Elf Warriors. Now, I am happy that the first 10 miniatures are prepared and ready for painting. I think I am going with some red colours for this regiment.

The first Dark Elves Warriors prepare theirselves for some undercoat

Sorceress on Dark Pegasus and Plastic Sorceress on foot 

Finally, I have a small teaser for you.

Two Sorceresses on their way to lead a new wing of this army

First, the Talisman Sorceress on foot. I get this plastic miniature from ebay. It was painted ok but with very very thick layers of paint and primer. It was hell to get this miniatures stripped from the paint and to prepare her for painting. Because this girl is a bit smaller compared to the metal miniatures, I put her on a bit higher base design to cover her size. Here she comes, ready for painting.

I also prepared the mighty sorceress on black pegasus. The challenge on this miniature was to create a base which supports the impression that this beast is just jumping to fly up into the air. As you can imagine it was a lot of planning and trying to get this heavy metal miniature balanced. But see it by youself.

                                                                       Its all about Balance


I hope you like my progress. As always I am happy to read your thoughts in the comments.

Kind Regards,
GeOrc

Executioners - Part II

Initial thoughts
After I had finished the preperations on my executioners unit I can´t resist to paint the first miniature of this unit. Therefore, today I want to write down my experiences with these miniatures. In preperation for the paint job I made a lot of thoughts which colour scheme I should use. I liked the original colour scheme from GW very much, showing them in purple. But this was different to my initial idea for this army, seperating it in a basic part coloured in purple and a Temple of Khaine addicted part coloured in red. Consequently, I thought about red coloured hoddies and cloths fitting to the colour scheme of the witch elves. I stumbled on the beautifully executioner unit from Iain Aitken, who painted an awesome 4th Edition Dark Elves Army. Please check Iains Facebook site and take a look on Iains Miniature Art.

Executioner Unit by Iain Aitken

 Iain painted the hoddies red, exactly as I had it planned. His result is stunning, but resulted in a much lighter colour as I had it in my mind. I wanted somethind dark and sinister in its appearance. However, I wanted to avoid black hoddies, as I wanted the hair and the axe shafts in black, ending in a to dark area on the upper side of the miniature. I already made this fault, when painting the first executioners 18 years ago. Finially, the GW colour sheme wasn´t that bad and I gave it a go. Beside the purple for all cloth parts I really liked the golden bracers in this colour scheme.    


The Way of Painting
As always I started with the skin colour based on Bleached Bone with some glazes of warlock purple to add some warmth. Then I started my work on the purple clothes. For my basic colour I used Liche Purple. For the highlights I mixed Liche Purple and Bleached Bone in different variations. For shading I used a mix of Abbadon Black with a bit of Incubi Darkness. I painted the light distribution strict by zenital light rules which resulted in very nice coloured purple hoddy. Finally I added some glazes with Warlock Purple to add some more saturation to the purple. In a next step I painted the black parts consisting of hair, axe shaft, shoes and some smaller parts of his loin decoration. Then I added the gold and the red gems. I used some brownish silver NMM for the chainmail and headdress and a bluish silver NMM for his axe. The last step included the leather, based on Tallarn Flesh, shaded with Scorched Brown and black and Highlighted with Bleached Bone. The Leather was washed with Liche Purple to merge it into the purple colour scheme and some scratched were added for a used look. The base was painted similiar to the others reflecting some High Elves ruins.

I was very pleased how the Executioner turned out. The purple hoddie added some colour and therefore much more character as a black one could add. In contrast to red clothes the purple helped to get the miniature a darker and sinister look. He fits very good between the other miniatures of his gang. He is not that light compared to the with Elves and in my opinion slightly darker than the Champion. The latters appears more shiny as he carries a lot more bling bling with him as reasonable when calling yourself a champion.

Dark Elves Warband

How you think about the colour scheme and how it works compared to the rest of my current Dark Elves warband. Let me know in the comments.
Kind Regards,
GeOrc

Executioners

The first time I came across the unreleased executioners was when studying the Beastiary of the 5th Warhammer Fantasy Edition.

Dark Elves Army as shown in the 5. Edition Bestiary

 

Dark Elves Battle Force

I quickly realized a second pictures showing these miniatures as part of a small Dark Elves battleforce charging some Dwarfs in a Scenario example. I never forget my call at Mail Order UK trying to order these miniatures as well as some other miniatures featured in the armybook but without a counterpart in the shops. My disappointment was boundless when realizing that these miniatures were never released. I got some more snippets of information about the executiones when I came across Richard "Orclord" Hales Stuff of Legends Website. Surprisingly, the Executioniers had a release, even if this was a short one. You were able to get them on the US Games Day in 1999 together with the unreleased Warhydra. Well, I thought then I keep my eyes and ears open and try to get them when the time is right. In the meantime I got the chance to get a look on the Executioners, the hydra as well as on the unreleased Sorcerer in real life. In  autumn 2000 I joined Harald and Natalie Bussing to the DUZI Event, where Harald led his impressive Dark Elves Army in a 4000 points tournament battle. He showed the best of their Dark Elves collection, which also includes a unit of Executioners lovely painted by Jennifer Haley. Additionally, the unit includes a beautifully converted command group from her consisting of a Champion, a musician and a standard bearer.

   

Executioner unit from the collection of Harald & Natalie Bussing, painted by Jennifer Haley

Shortly after this event I found an offer on Bartertown, a trading site where it was also possible to get hard to find Tabletop miniatures. The offer was about 40 executioners and 1 warhydra. The guy prefered to sell the whole bunch of miniatures with some discount or splitted in two equal batches.

However it was hell of a lot of money, that´s because the offer was still available. I get that deal and my girlfriend of that time nearly killed me. I thought to take them all and to refinance the deal later by selling some of the minis. In the end that never happend. My army was 40 Executioners richer and I was poor but more than happy!


The miniatures

There exist eight different executioner miniatures. As common for that time two miniatures base on one identical basic armature. Two basic poses exist with axe holded vertical or hold diagonal in front. The axe blades vary by a round or square blade design. Characteristic for the miniatures are their hoddies which were more or less decorated and their corded bracers. The minatures also carry a lot of bags and very detailed front decoration.

Executioners as shown on the SOL website

 
I painted a bunch of these miniatures in the past for my 5th Edition army. For the painting I decided for a mix of the dark painting scheme from Jennifer Haley as well as the Games Workshop colour scheme. Additionally, I converted my Champion the same way Jennifer Haley did.

Executioners painted in 00/01

It is a nice looking unit, but the paint job did not highlight all the beautiful details, these miniatures have. As I started to rework through my 4th/5th Edition Dark Elves I also decided to paint a unit of Executioners, because I am very interested in seeing how the unit will look when painted with my skills from today. Therefore, I started the preparations to get a unit ready for painting. Here you can see this unit containing one copy of each available Executioner. The unit was reinforced by a generic command crew consisting of a musician and a standard bearer. All miniatures were prepared very qualitatively to remove properly all mold lines. Then I have based them on a temple ruin scenery underlining they temple affiliation. The central Executioner with the biggest blade was again used to display the Champion of the unit. His base was designed in a way that it is interchangable with the already painted Dark Elves Champion which should alow to lead this unit alternatively. However, I would love to rebuild the Jennifer Haley Command Crew but also to sculpt my very own from scratch. But these will be different projects.

New Executioner unit ready for painting 2018

  

Here they go. I can´t wait to see them painted. Stay tuned
Kind Regards,
GeOrc