Warmachine: Painting Bane Thralls Part 2
Time to finish up this Bane Thrall. Read part 1, pick up your brush and follow along!
We never did look at these axes last time. They’ve been getting painted along with the Thrall itself. Right now my focus is on the axe haft. It’s been painted with Umbral Umber before getting a light wash of thinned down Iosan Green. Both of these colors are from formula P3, as are any other colors in this article unless specifically stated otherwise.
I pick out the wood grain with some Bootstrap Leather. You don’t actually have to paint the grain exactly. Just run some stripes of the lighter brown down the haft.
Next, the axe grip, as well as the strips on the Bane’s arms are painted with Hammerfall Khaki. Then they and the axe haft are washed with GW’s Agrax Earthshade.
I go back over the wraps with the Hammerfall Khaki again to give them more definition.
Then they get a final highlight with Menoth White Base.
At that point I’m ready to put this guy fully together.
The gauntlets are now painted to match the rest of the gray. I needed to know how they would be oriented to make sure the shadows and highlights were in the right place. Then I start on the skin. I prefer more of a classic zombie green for my undead – even when it comes to not so fresh banes like these. To get this pale green I mix a little bit of Iosan Green into a larger amount of Menoth White Highlight.
The green is shaded with Sanguine Base. I also paint the teeth with some Menoth White Highlight.
Here a little Exile Blue is mixed in with the Sanguine base anywhere I need an even darker shadow. Additionally I’ve given the teeth an Agrax Earth wash
Then I do some highlights by mixing some more of that Menoth White highlight into the green.
I start to add some glows to the eyes with Necrotite Green. Water it down and apply it in a couple of very thin layers to get it to blend outward into the skin.
Then the eyes are defined with a very thin line of Iosan Green.
The last step is the skirt. The detail isn’t too fine here, so we’re going to do some serious wet blending.
I blend pure Rucksack Tan into the blue as a highlight. It’s normally a much lighter color but a lot of that disappears when you blend it straight into that dark blue. To shade the blue I’m using a warm black blend I keep around. It’s Thamar Black with some Bloodstone mixed in.
When it’s finally dry, you can do the basing.
I make the mushrooms myself one at a time. It seemed like a good idea when I started my Cryx army in 2005. There were far fewer options and most Cryx lists shared around five arc nodes since the things were so cheap. No one ever really used Slayers, but Reapers were fairly common. I don’t think any of us had even realized how powerful a really spammy Cryx force could be. Cryx armies always had the most dudes – but that was usually 30 at max. Basing everyone with mushrooms seemed pretty novel but worth the effort. Of course now I’ve done this for over 200 bases – three of them huge for the sake of consistency. And people people always seem to like them so that gives me more incentive
I start with a little ball of purple oven-hardening clay, push it into a little rod of wire and start shaping it into a cone. All the holes are pushed into it with a push pin or something similar. The mushroom holder is also made out of oven-hardening clay. It’s necessary to keep the mushrooms from becoming misshapen from lying on their side.
And there we have it. Ten new plastic Bane Thralls. I’m pleased with how the kit turned out. It was pretty easy to clean taking a small fraction of the time of the Warders from a couple months back. The only problem is 10 Bane Thralls really doesn’t feel like enough Bane.
So I also did Tartarus and the Bane Thrall UA. Still could use some more Bane.
So I also finished up a unit of Bane Knights, with a few extras in case Tartarus adds some to the unit. And I also did another unit of Bane Thralls. This time it was the metal ones I’d had lying around since the unit was resculpted. And of course they get a UA too in case I wanna run a Goreshade2 Tier. That’s 39 Banes right there. But it still doesn’t feel like enough. I guess I do still have the 10 from my old unit from way back in the day. But even then I’d still need at least six more if I ever want to run Goreshade 1’s tier and start out with max Banes (they get advance move in that tier – seems pretty sweet). And of course I’ll need to paint at least 1 unit of Bane Cav.
~Hope you enjoyed the article. How many Banes should a Cryx player own? 49 feels like scraping by honestly.
