Kingdom Death:Monster - What have I gotten myself into??!!!

KDM minis for the most part are NOT cheap. If youre lucky to snag them from the KDM store updates n sales you get to avoid the filth that is eBay and the scalpers that lie within in. Buuuuuuut if you miss something and really really need that model…….. well……. good luck. Finding a mini sought on ebay at less than a 200% markup is unusual and some of the prices there for the more sought after minis can be seriously nuts.

One of the more rare and sought after minis in KDM is the Lion Knight 1st which came out (iirc) about 2015. It originally sold for about $50 as its a monster and larger sculpt than the smaller survivors variants. The last time I saw a first run of the Lion Knight 1st there it was going for north of $400.

However, sometimes. just sooooooooometimes Lady Luck takes pity and smiles down on a KDM collector and just the right time~! Checking FB one day I found that a well know French miniature painter was selling off some of his rarer KDM pieces and not for horrid scalper prices!
I jumped in and managed to get first run versions of both the Lion Knight 1st and the Storm knight (another mini I’ve been trying to track down for a fair price for a while) for the very decent price of 60euro each!!!!

I have been wanting to paint the 1st Lion Knight since I first saw pics of him over on the KDM collector site. He is, at least to me,  one of the most emotive, sad, narrative and disturbing sculpts that KDM has ever produced. His story is a sad one and the sculpt that Thomas David came up with for him is just amazing. Hand sculpted rather than by CAD, there is a gorgeous traditional feeling to the model and it exudes a presence and character than I feel can often be missing form the almost perfectly sculpted computer designed models.

The Lion Knight’s wee bit of fluff gives a start to his sad tortured story –

“The first Lion Knight was a failure. Its vision permanently fixed a few moments into the future, it was driven mad living outside of time and deemed too unstable to lead the Golden Entity’s armies. Now imprisoned deep within the Golden Labyrinth, the first Lion Knight stews in its derangement, the heady stench attracting Wailing Smoke from all corners of the abyss. The first Lion Knight spends its lonely days in lively conversation with them.”

There are two main parts to the Lion Knight 1st model. The Lion Knight himself in a cloak of (as I imagine it) his own flayed skin which in stripped from his own body whilst in the throes of his insanity and then fashioned during a lucid moment to ‘re-reclothe’ himself and the above mentioned Wailing Smoke, his only company and conversation while imprisoned in the Golden Labyrinth.

I’ve left the Wailing Smoke part aside for the minute as I intend to pin that to the plinth base and then add some detail and blending to it with a mix of milliput & greenstuff before painting it. We’ll come to that part of the project later on.

I assembled the Lion Knight himself fully and after giving him two coats of black primer through the airbrush, switched to white primer and laterally primed the model again from a specific angle, directly looking into his anguished face,  as if he were staring up into the only small bit of light allowed him in his cell.

As I noted above, and inspired by the details of the sculpt,  I imagined the Lion Knight as having a raw, flayed look to him and his cloak a bloody look on the inside.
I started painting the figure first by working the flayed body wet in wet to get a preblended base coat – going from a dirty turquoise in the shadows up to an angry red skin tone for the mids and then up to a still quite pink highlight pulling the eye up to his screaming face as it looks up to light and possible escape above him forever out of reach.