Warmachine/Hordes: Painting Boomhowler and Co. Pt.1
It took me nine years, but I finally got around to painting the original merc unit: Boomhowler and Company!
I think that out of all the unpainted Warmachine and Hordes minis I own, these may have been in the pile of shame the longest. I traded 8 of the ten for a Bronzeback almost exactly five years ago and bought the extra blister soon after. The guy they came from said he got them back in 2004 – the same year I started playing this game.
I begin the metals in the same way as some of my other recent painting articles: Bloodtracker Brown drybrushed with Radiant Platinum. As always I’m using mostly Formula P3 paints with GW washes.
I’m going to go with a kinda bronze look for the armor here. It is similar to the studio paint scheme, but the reason I’m really going with this color choice is to really make these guys stand out from my standard Trollblood army. I really want to try these guys out in a Family Reunion list, and I want them to really stand out. I base the armor with Coal Black and wash it a bit with Meridius Blue.
I drybrush the armor with Hashut Copper, the only GW paint I’ll be using.
Next I go over all the metals with my custom metal wash: a mix of 2-1-1 Agrax Earth, Nuln Oil, and Guilliman Blue, thinned down with a few drops of water plus a few drops of matte medium to make sure it still binds properly. For the skin these guys get a basecoat of the same color I use on all my Trollkin: a roughly 50/50 mix of Exile Blue and Hammerfall Khaki. It’s a loose attempt to match the old GW color Shadow Gray. It’s the color that so many of my Trollkin are based on. I keep a pot of it mixed up and ready in case I need to paint some Trollbloods.
Next I lay out a rough basecoat for all the shadows and highlights. I normally highlight my Trollbloods with Frostbite, but for these guys I’m going to do something a little different and actually try Trollblood Highlight. For the shading it’s my favorite mix of Umbral Umber and Beaten Purple.
Next its the tricky part: blending it all together. Here’s my blending explanation more or less cut and pasted from a previous article. Here’s my blending explanation again from the Earthbreaker article. To blend, I mix up a decent amount of a transition color and add a bit of matisse drying retarder. What I mean by transition color here is a tone that will transition two of those thick bands of color you saw in the previous picture together. So to blend the basecoat into the highlight we’re talking about a 50/50 mix of Trollblood Highlight and the trollblood basecoat I whipped up. This is applied between the two different areas of color, and while its still wet, I clean off my brush, load it up with some of the original color and blend it into the transition color. This is definitely something where trying it yourself and experimenting will help more than any explanation I can write. I also mix a little bit of underbelly blue in with the Trollblood Base to give my highlights a little extra punch in a few places.
I apply a mix of Bootstrap Leather and Beaten Purple to the lips and palms to represent thinner areas of skin.
Then I mix some Ryn Flesh into the previous color in increasing quantities as a highlight. I also pick out the scales, quills, and fingernails with a mix of Thamar Black and Bloodstone (kind of a natural orange ochre color). This toned black stands in for pure black more or less whenever I need it.
I end up with a pale purple color for the scales/quills/etc. I start them off with a mix of Beaten Purple and Exile Blue with just a bit of Gun Corps Brown mixed in to desaturate it somewhat. This basecoat gets highlighted up with Frostbite.
Again, as in the studio paint job, I go with red for the tartans. Boomhowler and his kin are a loud rowdy bunch, so something bright and garish like red just seems to fit. Additionally, of all the Trollkin I’ve painted, I’ve never done any with red tartans, so it’s something else that will make these guys stand out from my other trolls when I run them as Minions.
The basecoat of Skorne Red is shaded with more of that Umbral Umber Beaten Purple mix.
Then highlighted with Khador Red Base. Still not sure why it has base in the name when it’s a lighter red.
~And that’s it for part 1. I’ll be back soon to finish them up.
