CRC's Crazy Compendium 2; Eclectic Boogaloo

I suppose it’s cheating to take quotes for the titles of these Game of Thrones chaps…but it takes me just as long to find the ‘perfect’ quote as it does to come up with a witty (or just usually god awful) pun, so it is what it is.

I’m still sort of stuck with single minis at the moment for a number of reasons, so this banner chap is all I’ve been working on the the past day or so. I wasn’t really paying attention to how much time I spent on him this time round…so I don’t have that info. That being said there were a few things I was trying out that I wanted to go over in detail. Firstly I decided that I wanted the mini to look much more practical (let’s ignore the Stark colours on the tabard here) but also have some interest in colours, so I wanted to do something a bit different with the chainmail that makes up a fair bit of the mini.

Fairly simple work here going from a basecoat of Leadbelcher (GW) followed by a coat of Wyldwood Contrast (GW) to give the oily brown look before drybrushing another layer of Leadbelcher over the top just to add a bit more of a metallic look. You could do this with Agrax Earthshade (GW), but the colour is not as deep as with the contrast as you will see with the rest of the metal being done with Agrax over the Leadbelcher.

The rest of the mini was painted using normal methods, but I did want to go over the banner a little as it is the same as the tabard…but with extra steps. The tabard was just done with a Celestra Grey (GW) up to White Scar (GW) transition, but there’s a few extra bits I did with the banner that I wanted to go over.

To start with I covered the banner with a coat of Nuln Oil (GW). This was to try and deepen the shadows a little, but really you could skip this as you can see it does very little (though if you’d use a brighter prime then maybe it would do more good). Over that I thinned Celestra Grey and coated that over the whole banner but focused successive layers onto the folds to try and build some shade tones…it sort of worked. This is the same method as for the basecoat on the tabard though not quite to such an extreme level. After that I moved on to Ulthuan Grey (GW) to build up the highlights on those folds. I tried to be a subtle as possible, though you can see some stark (accidental pun) contrast between the two colours that I fixed later on.

Then I moved up to White Scar and focused even smaller areas on the folds. This Celestra Grey > Ulthuan Grey > White Scar is the method I used for the tabard. On the banner, though, I found the colours to be too blocky and un-blended so I topped the flag with a glaze made up from White Scar mixed with Lahmian Medium (about 4:1 with medium to white) just to blend it out.

After that I painted the wolf with some black to grey general steps and picked out the trim on the flag with a green as a small homage to the TV series that for some reason added green to the Stark colours. Basically I didn’t know what colour to put there so I picked green. It works. I also took the time to try and add some black lines to the edges of the white to frame it a little better. In the end he ended up like this:

So minus the wolf motifs possibly changing to a brighter grey colour, he’s all done! Pleased with how he turned out…though when I get to painting the rest I may not go quite to in-depth on the paintwork… 😛