Bloodletter Test Model – Opinions Wanted

I’ve had more fun playing with my Khornate Daemons than I have playing with any of my other 40K armies. It’s weird, but I’ve yet to have a bad game with them: I’m a far cry from winning all my games with them, but even my draws and losses feel so close that, a few days later, I couldn’t even tell you if I’d won or lost the game. I’ve got a list that, thanks to a lot of input from Casey, I’m quite satisfied with.

But they’re wholly unpainted. This distresses me. I’ve been trying to work through how I’m going to do them for months now, experimenting on extra D&D minis I’ve got laying around… and I haven’t been close to being happy with the results.

As I said a couple of days ago, Ron from From the Warp posted his technique for painting pale skin that I’d been very interested in, since it was along the lines of what I wanted to do with my daemons. I tried it out on a Vampire, and was happy with the results, but unsure of how it would look on a Bloodletter.

See, the thing is that I want to do something different from 99% of the daemon armies out there: Khornate daemons are always blood red. I get that, and I get why.

I like the idea of making them look bloodless, like pale corpses. This lets me then splash them with blood in different ways to make squads, Heralds, and models with Fury of Khorne stand out more.

But I’d like to do something different because 1) I’d like my army to be somewhat more unique and 2) I think it opens up more painting options, different ways to differentiate between different squads of Bloodletters and such.

So, anyway, I finally decided to put up or shutup and give it a try to see what happened. This is what I got.

I really started to have my doubts about halfway through. In the end, I’m quite pleased with the results. I like it. I’m not sure if I’m actually going to go through with it for my Bloodletters, but I like it. What do y’all think?

The flesh is done with Dheneb Stone, heavily washed with Ogryn Flesh. I go back and paint Dheneb Stone over most of the model, and then wash it with a mix of 1:1:2 mix of Asurmen Blue wash, Devlan Mud wash and water. Then I pick out the highlights with Dheneb Stone.

The horns and sword are black, then a highlight of 1:1 Black and P3 Coal Black, then a highlight of Coal Black. The base is one of the textured plasticard bases I was talking about back in June (though I’ve since decided that, once I start painting this army, I’m going to base it with these temple bases that I’ve fallen in love with for Khorne) painted Shining Gold and washed with Devlan Mud.

I’ve definitely spotted a number of things I could do better with it. For one, I clearly need to do some gap-filling. The gap between the legs and torso and the one in the Bloodletter’s forehead doesn’t look so bad with bare plastic, but it really stands out on the painted model. Easily fixed, though.

I also think I phoned it in on the black and brass.

The black needs to pop more. I think I need to blend up through Coal Black and not to Coal Black. That’s fine, though it’ll take some fiddling.

I also need to do something more with the brass. I’m going to experiment with doing a bit of patina on it, using Les Bursley’s really awesome weathering wash tutorial as a start. Brass doesn’t patina the same way bronze does, but it still builds up a bit of something.