Khalida finished!

Entry posted by Darth Alec September 13, 2016

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High Queen Khalida is such a wonderful model.

She's small, but so commanding. It's one of the really iconic Tomb King models for me. It's just so easy to imagine her standing in a temple, or on a sand dune, gazing across a battlefield. She looks ancient, but graceful. The model is actually quite small, a fairly realistically scaled female. She's actually smaller than the skeletons released at the same time! They weren't to scale, being as large as a man with his flesh still on. Basing her was therefor fairly hard. You can't do too much to a model like this, or you'll drown out the simple elegance of her pose. You can base Archaon on anything and it won't matter, but Khalida will drown in an elaborate basing. So I went with something ornamental, but not very complex. Two bannertops cut and glued together makes a fairly decent-looking thing. The contrast between the grey stones and the beige marble draws the eyes towards the model, so I think I succeeded there.

I tried to go with the marble technique shown in the Warhammer TV advent Calender. Not really sure I nailed it. It looks more like she has a scar running down her face. It's not easy when the model is so small! I'm actually considering redoing it. For now though, it'll do. I'm trying to paint up a lot of models. There's always room for improvement, especially for new techniques. The gold is Warplock Bronze, Retributor Armour, Seraphim Sepia and Liberator Gold. Gives it an old, once-polished look. It's an easy technique which is fast and goes on really well on most models like this. The bandaging is grey in order to fit in with the rest of the bandaging across my army. I love how she has snakes just slivering around her. Each is based on a real venomous snake. I'm most pleased with the staff-snake. It's more detailed, both in painting and modeling. Makes the staff look a little plain and boring.

You can really see the flow of the cape here. It's lovely. My painting was pretty simple, both because I wanted to not mess it up and because I felt like the model didn't need anything detracting from the front. Naggaroth Purple is the bae, with Xereus Purple and Genestealer purple highlights. This creates a rich purple without being much work. And I needed something to be purple on her to tie her into the rest of the army.

All in all, it we a wonderful model to paint. Went quite fast, too. Not entirely pleased with the marbe result, but I'm super stoked to finally finishing a model I've been staring at for nearly 15 years!