Shadespire Undead

So the first Shadespire Army I decided to paint was the Undead's.

I figured it would be a good starting point to do alot of different techniques to get back into the habbit, base coating, washing, dry brushing, glazing, metallics. All that good stuff.

Unfortunatly I didn't take any "in progress" images as these minis were painted before this blog was even an idea in my mind. But below you will find images of all 7 of the undead's included in Shadespire.

The Techniques

The first thing is to prime all the mini's I used Citadel Chaos Black primer, but really a medium gray or even a bone colour would be preferable, I just happened to have chaos black around at the time.

Next I painted all the base colours:-
Bone - Citadel Zandri Dust
Metal- Citadel Leadbelcher on the silver armor/weapons and Citadel Balthasar Bronze on the shields
Fur - 20/80 mix of Citadel Abaddon Black and Ceramic White
Wood - Citadel Rhinox Hide
Cape - Citadel Khorne Red

After that I went about washing all of the model minus the cape in Citadel Agrax Earthshade (this stuff is great, I use it so often on all sorts of things), you could also use Citadel Nuln Oil on the armor if you wanted a darker metal look, but I was aiming for that "Just crawled out of the ground" muddyness.

The cape was washing in just the shadow areas where fabric folds meet with a Citadel Druchi Violet wash to add some nice purple saturation to the shadows (I like saturated shadows).

Next game some layering steps. First I went around the armor panels with lead belcher again just to shine up some of the edge detailing and to pick out certain parts of the weapon better.

I then highlighted areas of the cape that were on raised edges with Citadel Bugmans Glow and did some light glazing with a very watered down bugmans glow to fade the raised areas into the standard fabric better.

Citadel Doombull brown was my choice for the woods, as well as edge high lighting cuts and nicks here, I also lightly dry brushed any wood parts of the shields to pick out the detailing.

Dry brushing! So almost all the metals got a dry brush of Citadel Dry Necron Compound, the Fur was dry brushed with Ceramic white with a tiny hint of Abbadon Black to make it off-white. Then all the bone was dry brushed with Tyrant skull.

At this stage most of the hard work was done and only the detailing was left.

The weapons looked too new to me, as these skeles were meant to be under the ground for years I decided to go back over the metal with a watered down Balthazar Bronze followed by some Citadel Technical Nihlak Oxide. (If I were to redo this in the future I would think about using something like Vallejo Chipping Medium to create a flaked metal look on some of the shields and weapons.) After that I drybrushed necron compound over the weapons very very lightly just to repick up some of the edge detail.

After all this the only thing left was a few touch ups like paiting some bolts and applying Nihlak Oxide, the base, which was fairly simply a base coat, wash and dry brush and then varnishing them with Vallejo Matte Varnish to seal the colour in ready for playing Shadespire!


And that is how I created my first Shadespire Squad ready for play, any questions feel free to leave them below.