Another mouthful of a title today. We’re into October’s models (I’ll get the September Round-Up happening this weekend). These models are from the aforementioned board game, that uses a modified version of the Pandemic game engine. As longtime players of the original and several of the variants (with lots still waiting to be cracked open and played!) – as well as former players of World of Warcraft, Marouda and I picked up this boardgame several months ago and have played it a few times now. It’s quite fun, though much easier than regular Pandemic.

As it happens, we pick our heroes randomly each time we play – but Arthas the Lich King and the three Abominations feature in every game that you play. They also seemed like pretty straightforward models to paint – not amazing sculpts by any means, but not terrible either, especially in light of being board game models.

Arthas was painted using dark metals, pre-highlighted with a careful drybrush using a makeup brush and then tinted with a very subtle glaze of blue over it all. His cloak and tabard were painted in an almost-black dark grey, and drybrushed to just bring up the highlights in a teal-ish blue. Almost a comic-book style of highlighting, but with a dusty/worn effect from drybrushing.

Wheras if this were a GW model, I’d have made the detailed hilt of the sword Frostmourne stand out with gold edging, the WoW model is actually all in dark steel, so I just left it as it was, with a bit more highlighting on the blade edges. The fur around his greaves and vambraces is rather poorly sculpted, so I just p[ainted it in the white fur of the source material and tried to understate it by putting more effort into the highlights on his leather gloves, as well as edging the armour where approriate in a “white gold” colour (Pro Acryl Light Bronze).

I had to paint in the details of Arthas’ eyes and mouth, since the model just has flat space in those areas, giving them a wash afterwards to dull them down and simulate the shadow of being inside his helm. I also painted his forehead gem using Citadel’s Gemstone blue over Vallejo Model Air Chrome. I also used Chrome to pick out the top highlights of his crown, shoulder and vambrace spikes and top of the sword blade edges.

For Arthas’ base, I wanted to build on what I learned recently when experimenting with the Water Effects on the Archon Fountains and give Arthas an unnatural/magical-looking ice and snow base. I got some AK Water Effects and mixed in a small amount of Contrast Pylar Glacier to see what would happen…

It gave me this paste….

Which went on pretty much how it looks, but allowed some manipulation. The colour was pretty strong but still had some transparency to it. I then let it dry for a day or so and added another layer, with less contrast mixed in to create a more transparent effect on this next layer of ice, then repeated several times adding less contrast each time until eventually it was just Water Effects. Finally, I added snow to the base, on and around the peaks of the ice swirls. It’s not something that has come out amazingly well in these photographs, but I’m pretty happy with the overall effect. Once again, a board game model that I was painting anyway provided a great canvas for trying something new.

At the same time I was working on Arthas, I was also doing work on the three Abominations. Since these are basically great big Frankenstein’s Monster-style undead golems/zombies, stitched together from various remains I just painted them in pale zombie tones with some slight variance between the three models, just as seen in WoW. They feature some pretty poor detail in spots and weren’t exactly fun to paint, but they’ll look good on the table and that’s what matters most.

Unlike Arthas, who behaves as a sort of spectre over the large regions of Northrend in the game, these models roam across the actual zones, so I gave them dirt bases with some grass and intermittent snowfall on top, as the continent in-game is a mixture of biomes but with an overall wintery feel. While I doubt Arthas would get a ticket, the Abominations may well qualify for Dave Stone’s latest painting challenge as he is the one coordinating Zombtober this year as a subset of “Apocalypse Me“.