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Most times the undead are easy to recognize by their pallid, often rotting flesh, sometimes their whole bodies are even reduced to bare bones.
With this week’s miniature we’ll never know, since Athak is completely clad in heavy robes which allow for a variety of styles and colors . Let’s see what our painters did with it!

(posting by Antonia)

When I first took a closer look at Athak, the mini reminded me a lot of some of the classic Warhammer/WH40k illustrations, with its grimacing shield and flowing robes. The pose also has a very “retro” feel to it.
Concerning mould lines I had some on the helmet’s “bat wings”, and the mace/staff needed a hot bath to straighten them out, otherwise the sculpt is quite nice.
(The name, though… A knight called “Attack”? Really? *lol* )

As I mentioned I was heavily inspired by Warhammer illustrations and decided to make Athak a disciple of Tzeentch:

As you might know, Tzeentch, The Master of Change and Mutation, doesn’t have just one signature color but many, mostly in the spectral area of blue, pink and yellow, so I used those colors and their intermediates.
I used wetblending and mixes of red and blue washes to keep the colors bright and the transitions smooth.
The results are, well, special *laughs* as the mini is quite blindingly colorful, really psychedelic, but I like how the gradients came out and for Tzeentch, this guy looks very cool of course 😀 For battlefield use I would tone down the colors significantly to make sure the models don’t outglow the whole table, but hey, it’s chaos magic, so, as an experiment and stand-alone mini I’ll keep it that way and wonder if when during our WH40k campaign we might meet a cult of Tzeentch.

 

Dirk made some small changes with a big impact:

At first he didn’t quite know what to to with Athak, but after he decided he wanted to make him an undead champion of Nurgle, Warhammer’s deity of rot and plague. He replaced the head with one from a crypt warden (also Bones) and gave it the characteristic asymmetrical horn. The mace was swapped for a scythe and he cut off the symbol of the breastplate – at first he cosidered adding nurgle’s symbol instead but found that the uneven surfecae itself looked nice, in a rotten, word off way.
For a bonus, undead Athak got a familliar, made from… well, his own head, with some feisty tentacles sculpted out of greenstuff.
After using pale greys and beiges as base colors, Dirk colored the mini more or less completely with brown and green washes, which works fantastic to convey a “painted” look and a sense of stinking, rotting, mouldy decay.
As a special detail he used crackle paint (Citadel’s “Agrellan Earth” in this case) to create a crackled, unhealthy surface on the shield’s “face” – awesome effect!

 

Michael had an unsettling idea about the shield:

He wrote: “This was fun to do, and I got to use a few new paints from Reaper’s Dungeon Dwellers line. I decided that his shield had a stretched out giant’s face on it, so it’s a little gory.”
Very cool and disgusting idea, congrats! The pale pink of both tongue and cloth highlights work well to connect the face/shield with the rest of the miniature. I can easily imagine this one as some kind of evil overlord/end boss NPC, do you have plans on how to use him yet?

 

Arjen’s Athak also sports an extraordinary color scheme::

He said: “I said some time ago that I put pink on my list for one of the next miniatures, so I thought this one was well suited. I like how extravagant this mini is with the huge head-shaped shield, the thick robe and the strange wing-antler things on its head. I first painted the armor black, but in keeping with the extravagant mini, I added some green for contrast, although it does not show well in the middle picture, so I added the small close-up in the corner.”
I like your color choices a lot, the pink and the metal tones create an eery, somehow otherworldly combination, and the green works indeed to contrast and balance the rest. Very unusual! Your venture out of your comfort zone (if I recall your motivation correctly) was quite worth it!
What color did you use on the shield? Is is a very pale gold or something like mother-of-pearl?

 

Jim’s knight has a very distinct style:

He wrote: “I ended up making a slight modification to this mini as the bat wings didn’t really seem to fit with the rest of the mini. Just my opinion, but it also helped make the helmet seem the correct size instead of too small. It took me forever to work out a color scheme. I started with black/gray/white but ended putting a little orange in for contrast. He doesn’t really seem very undead now but could still be used as an evil cult leader or subject of worship.”
It may sound strange, but the first “vibe” I got when I saw your picture was “Retro-Scifi Robot”. Like one of the classic Cylons or something Cpt. Kirk or Flash Gordon might encounter (and, of course, battle!). It might be the bright orange which doesn’t fit well into medieval cliché, but anyway, the color scheme is super neat and impressive in its simplicity. Well done!

 

This week’s gallery:

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Coming next:

04/01/19 Bones II Alain, Paladin (B2 Core)

Want to participate in the next post? Email the pictures of your minis until Friday 03/29/19 to

MondayMiniature@fantasymail.de  (It’s a .de domain, in case emails are bouncing)

–> Attention: The submission date for photos is about three days before publishing date, to give us a bit of time to actually write about your pictures  😀

This way you’ll have two weeks/one weekend to paint, and we have one weekend to write (which is the only time of the week where we have some open minutes).

You can of course send in pics later, but to take out a bit of the stress (most pics arrive here rather last minute) please consider the three day deadline. Later pics will still show up in an update  😉

I added tons of miniatures to the schedule now. We might still shuffle them around, do extras (like “Show me your project!”) or add more, just tell us what you think in the comments!

 

04/15/19 Bones III Were-Crocodile (B3 Core)

04/29/19 Bones III Skara, Female Skoli (B3 Core)

05/13/19 Bones – Catch-Up Monday (Your choice of Bones I-III!)

05/27/19 Bones III Eastern encounter part 3 – Kitsune! Female and/or male.

06/10/19 Bones III Gwyddis, Dwarf Valkyrie (B3 Core)

06/24/19 Bones II Sir Conlan (B2 Core)

07/08/19 Bones III Durok, Dwarf Ranger (B3 Core)

07/22/19 Bones III Wraith (B3 Core)

08/05/19 Bones II Alistrilee, Elven Archer (B2 Core)

08/19/19 Bones III Sigurd, Viking (B3 Core)

09/02/19 Bones III Brotherhood of the Seal (B3 Core)

09/16/19 Bones II Mi-Sher, Sword Dancer (B2 Core)

After that Bones 4? Or should we start earlier? Until then everyone should have had the chance to check their shipments or even bought some minis directly from the shop.

We’ll gladly accept your suggestions!

This entry was posted by Antonia & Dirk Vogel.