Death Riders of the desert

After some time, as usual, I have managed to finish the Death riders. These models are truly magnificent with all the details, but that also make them very hard to paint, and very time consuming. As a collector I appreciate this, but if I had to paint a viable army of these I would despair. That aside I enjoyed the experience but would probably not paint another five at the same time again. And that is my second point in all of this. I do normally not batch paint, but focus on a singular model and try to make the best of it, but this time I decided to go for the whole squad at the same time. This ment that I had to go back and forth on the models as a continually discovered things I missed. I guess that if you are a seasoned painter or commission painter this might not be a problem as you probably already painted a stuff of them, but as a first time experience it is a bit daunting. But, with the amount of back logg that I have on things that I do want to paint, batch painting might be the way to go to get it done with in my life time.

For the riders I did the same as for the "horses". I went with a tan armour and grey robes and trousers. The robes do nicely tie in to the "horses" grey bellies hand feet. This makes the over all model look cohesive and the grey of the robes does still give enough of a connection to the original Death riders of Krieg colour theme. In the end I think this tied in nicely with the desert theme of my imperial regiments with out losing to much of the grim darkness of the Krieg theme. The only thing I am a bit uncertain about is the glowing power coils of the spears as they are not typically part of my palette.

But I am happy with how they turned out. Now I just hav the Marshal left to do, but that will have to wait a bit as I am very keen to start on some Saturnine terminators and a dreadnought for the first legion.

Death Riders WIP

The summer is nearing its end and I am returning to work. I did have high hopes of getting some time to sitt down with my hobby stuff as I have quite a large back log of models I would like to paint and things to do on Opus and the flight wing. But even if the weather has not been super great it has not been bad enough to motivate me to stay indoors when there has been literal tons of things to do in the garden. So instead of painting models I painted the house. Instead of building stuff for Opus I built walking paths around the property. That and barbequed with my wife and spent time in the lounge set on the patio and read books late into the night. So progress has been slow, but that is ok as the summer has felt very productive over all. But as autumn is coming closer and it is getting darker I am hoping to have more time in the evenings for painting.

Well, I have been able to squeeze in a few hours to finish up some old medels and to start some new. In this case the Death Riders I got for my birthday. I absolutely love the models and have been looking forward to painting them. The detail is superb and they have a lot of character. I opted to go for the full out fit with rifle and sword on the "horses" and the lance held by the rider. I also added some extra stakes and broken concrete to the bases to give them some more texture.

When it comes to the colour scheme I stuck with pale skin on the "horses" but opted for a similar desert tan colour on the armour as I have on my desert rats to keep the theme on the Astra Militarum troops. To make the skin a bit more interesting I decided to make the feet and belly a darker grey shade while the top and head is more bone white. I am really happy with how the toning turned out. Basically it a mix of wet blending and dry brushing. Tack and sadels got the standard brown leather treatment and the gasmask a black rubber tone. Now I just need to find some time to paint the riders. I am thinking to do a similar colour on these, with a grey uniform and tan armour instead of the box art that has black armour. We will see how it turns out.