Update IX: Age of Sigmar Fyreslayers

Hello friends, its been a while! Things have been very, very, busy for me since my last update in July. I have completed a draft of my thesis, my long-time girlfriend has moved in with me, we have moved flats, and I have entered the submission pending year of my thesis.

With all of this going on, my hobby time has been significantly curtailed, although I am now hoping that things will settle down now and I can return to painting when possible. I will certainly continue to update this site!

In the two months since my last update I have managed to continue progress on my Age of Sigmar army, and I have completed ten Dispossessed Irondrakes and five Fyreslayer Hearthguard to form a shooty elite core for my army.

For my Irondrakes I wanted to tie them into the snow theme of my Fyreslayer army. Given that they are entirely encased within their armor, I thought it would be cool to make them look as if they'd been unearthed from the ground or snow. I will have very few Dispossessed models in my army, so for their backstory I'm saying that it was a unit of long-dead dwarves from the old world who were found by my Fyreslayers frozen into the ground. The rune-priests reanimated them into a zombie-like existence in order to make use of their long-lost dwarven weaponry and allow them to continue to pursue their ancient grudges.

When it came to modelling them, I opted for an extremely simple paint scheme that was essentially only a two-color basecoat: metal for most of the model with some gold accents. I knew I could get away with this as much of the model would be covered with powdered snow and tufts, providing a sharp contrast to the basic/muted colours underneath. To give them an appropriately worn look I gave them several coats of various washes, before applying Army Painter "Poison Ivy" tufts and Vallejo "Powder Snow" over their armor to make them look suitably unearthed. I can't say enough good things about the Vallejo snow, its by far the best snow product I've ever worked with and the miniatures simply would not look the same without it. I'm very pleased with the overall effect, and almost regretted having to paint the actual colors on my Fyreslayer models afterwards!

For the Hearthguard I continued with the color-scheme I'd established for the battlesmith. The only difference being that I toned down the brightness of the orange for his beard. I still feel like the beards are a real weak-spot in my painting, as I can't seem to get any nice contrast on the orange. In hindsight I should have liked to give them white, black, or grey beards, but its a little too late for that now. Otherwise I'm happy with how they turned out, although they are fiddly models to paint and took longer than I would have liked.

For the future I have 20 Vulkite Berserkers who have been prepped for assembly, as well as a Auric Runefather on a Magmadroth and a Grimwraith Berserker. I'm thinking for the Vulkites I might try an extremely simply airbrush-heavy technique so they don't take as much time as the Hearthguard. But I'm really looking forward to working on the heros!

I am hoping that between this army and my 40k Orks I will not be tempted to produce a full GW-system army again in the future. Its just too time consuming and daunting to batch-paint large number of troops, and given my newly-limited time I am longing for a skirmish-scale painting project. I will treasure my AoS and 40k armies and continue to add to them, but I'm hoping I won't need to paint like this again.