Drawing inspiration from other painting blogs on this site I decided to put together my own. Since I've been sick for over a month I've had plenty of time to sit around and do nothing but paint.
Empire was my first army and I only started collecting it early last year. Since then my original purchase of a box of state troops has grown into an army well over 7000 points (yes in a year, they don't call it plastic crack for nothing). However, I've very much been into
playing the game rather than painting. Painting originally bored me to tears, I hated it, I couldn't do it (I'm still crap). But now that I've spent a small fortune on my army I feel like it's my responsibility to paint it. Also I ran out of money for video games and other things...
So, last month's effort:
Free Company!
Ironically I started painting these guys first because they weren't state troops. I could do whatever colors I wanted and not have to worry about uniformity. Since I wanted the bulk of my force to look like gritty uniform soldiers outfitted in only what the state would provide, I quickly became bored with painting state troops. They all looked the same.
The Free Company gave me an opportunity to experiment with outfitting a unit in the spoils of war. Since I have recently also compiled a Warriors of Chaos army I had plenty of marauder shields left over. What if...just bare with me here... what if... my Free Company had campaigned against Warriors of Chaos and picked up some loot! Genius, I bet no-one has ever thought of anything that original. Empire vs. Chaos.. wow i'm amazing.
Here's the filler, filled with all the look they gained from killing a few marauders.
And apparently 1 Chaos Knight, although his unit had been killed by cannons and helstorms.... and he himself was sick with tuberculosis.... (don't mention it to them).
OMG magnetised:
And from the back:
In July my focus will be:
30x Swordsmen
TGM Knights Encarmine + his unit.
50x Halberdiers
Captasus
Edit: I thought I might add in a bit about the production of each unit here.
Since my army is to be from Talabheim, my palate had to be fairly scrict from the beginning. Red, White, Black. Of course small amounts of brown, green, silver and even purple would be needed for belts and laurels, armor, wine and other things but the chief colors would remain mostly fixed.
I decided to add in two other colors that would feature throughout the list. They of course were the colors of my new knights of the panther; yellow and blue.
I had originally assembled the free company as generic models, discarding the provided GW bases and using instead Gale Force Nine magnetic bases. I heartily recommend them as they have more weight than plastic GW bases and are great for holding up metal standard bearers. As you can see from the pics above they can be held upside down with no trouble.
When it came time to paint the unit I tried to subtly work in my colors while keeping them as an individual unit. I wanted them to feel like a rustic, hardened mercenary company who had seen their share of wars. Since chaos incursions into Empire lands seem so frequent I figured the company would be veterans of battle against Chaos. I simply added shields to whatever models I could and extra weapons to those who couldn't take a shield.
For the Captain of the unit (name pending) I used a pistolier head and a marauder cape.
I picked the colors Red, Yellow and Green to be the main colors of the unit. I began by base coating every model in Chaos Black. I painted them with citadel foundation paints, Mechrite Red, Iyanden Darksun and Knarloc Green, and well as Calthan Brown for the belts and Boltgun Metal for armor. I used Dwarf Bronze, Skull White, Calthan brown and Boltgun Metal for the shields. I applied only a single coat of the foundation paints and the metals and white were done in 2 coats.
The models were then washed with Badab Black to give them a grizzled dirty look.
The filler displaced 4 of men who are going back in the bits box for now. To model the filler I used a barrel from the cannon/mortar set as well as a chest, 2 marauder standards, one in the barrel and one with its pole cut down so make a difference in height. I added a small pike of 3 marauder shields and added 1 chaos warrior shield and chaos knight lance. I then propped up a shield from the GotE/CotE kit as a reward from a ranking official for their service. There is also a weapon rack from the Helstorm/Helblaster kit.
I painted the flagged banner and the skulls in Bleached Bone and added a Mechrite Red chaos rune to it. The other affects were painted with the same colors already used and washed with Badab Black.
I then put super glue on the bases and dipped them in citadel sand. I washed every base heavily in Badab Black and left them to dry. When they had dried I lightly dry brushed Bleached bone over the bases. Again once that had dried I super glued citadel static grass in clumps.
