Greetings readers! After a failed month last month, I am happy to report that I have finished yet another unit for my Abyssals project, a regiment of Imps! I know this isn’t a unit people use much, but I really like the look of the free imps that come with the Mantic kits, so I wanted to paint them.
I have vague aspirations to paint another two regiments of them somewhere down to road, and seeing if they can be used as discount chaff. Yes gargoyles are better, even if they are slightly more expensive, but oh well, I like that look of imps!
These took me the better part of a month and a half to paint, but I am really pleased with the amount of detail I was able to pack into the little guys. In the past, I have only seen these with red skin and wings, but with the pale morlock skin (to match my Tortured souls), and some bright wings and hair, I quite like how these turned out!
I have to say that after painting a group of these very tiny models, I am even more wow’d by the amount of detail Rob has been putting into his Halfmen!
The final detail I painted, was also the one I was dreading the most, the fire from the torches. Fire is notoriously hard to paint. In the past, I have worked around this by painting green “magical” flames, which is a great deal easier, but since this is a project to push my abilities, I wanted to give “real” fire a try.
I don’t hate how it turned out, but I am also not thrilled. I think with the next unit (and maybe even later with this one), I am going to try to take a bit more time to layer and highlight in this general style, but cleaner, so that it fits better with the clean lines of the rest of the model. For inspiration, I found a pretty decent walkthrough of how to paint flame here.
I even tried a little bit of Object Source Lighting, another technique I have avoided in the past. Similar to the flame i’m not thrilled how it turned out, but I do think it looks ok.
It was fun to try to push my comfort levels, and expand as a painter, and some of that is doing techniques that on the first few tries don’t quite turn out great, but moving onto the next unit and trying to improve. It also helps that once I get a full force painted, I am guessing Imps will frequently get left out of tournament play, so they are the perfect unit to experiment on!
For May I score 2 points! June is the last month of the challenge, I hope to finish strong and complete a regiment of Succubi, this would round out what I currently have painted nicely, and really make it look like the start to an army. That said, I have an awful track record in this challenge, so wish me luck!
