From the frozen North they came...

Hi all! In a bit of a blast from the past article and to share in the general excitement of the new Warhammer I am showcasing one of my favourite armies: The Warriors of Chaos. This is one of those armies that have been painted over a period of many years and so contain a variety of different levels of experiance. To avoid a 6000 word epic I have split the army into Warriors (the armoured chaos warriors), Servants (the cultist marauders) and Masters (the characters). To open hostilities... the warriors!

The theme of the army is very much Slaaneshii in tone. Slaanesh - for the uninitiated - is the patron of lust and desire, any desire, if you wish to be rich or the king of the world or simply posess personal power Slaanesh is your man. So to speak. I decided on bone armour with a rich purple and gold accent.

The bone armour is reletively simple, a basecoat of Khemri Brown shaded with Devlan Mud (used to be three layers of Graveyard Earth over Scorched Brown) is streaked with 1:1 Khemri Brown and Bleached Bone and then again with pure Bleached Bone. The banners of the Warriors are more interesting;

All of the banners in the Warrior element of the army are produced in the same way. I chose an old image of a daemon from one of the books and traced the rough outlines onto the banner. Next I painted in the design using ordinary acrylics highlighting and shading to provide definition to the line drawing.

The Chaos Knights are another example of this technique:

Their armour is painted in exactly the same way as the warriors (one of these days I must get around to replacing them with the snacky new ones). The banner, likewise, was another daemon picture turned into a rough design and coloured:

On these old models my favourite elements are the shields. The standard bearer above with the nailed on hands is a good example, the others leave lots of opportunity for customisation (such as the bloody runes on the parchment below).

Finally in the Warriors section is the chariot. Especially now that the "magic S7 hit" has gone the way of the dodo Chaos Warrior chariots are properly hardcore. I decided that this warband had spent time in Naggaroth and so decided to go with a Dark Elf chariot as the base of the model. The slightly more elegant lines of the Dark Elf design fitted the Slaanesh theme.

I'm really fond of the old fashioned cold ones drawing the chariot. They have more of beast of burden feel than the lithe, fierce, new versions. I added a slaanesh icon to the front with green stuff and then turned to the problem of the crew...

Technically there should be two chaos warriors crewing the chariot. Unfortunately, as anyone who has made any of these models knows, they are huge! There was no way on earth that two of them were going to fit into the cab of that chariot. I hit upon using a summoned daemonette charioteer - mostly to save space but also to continue the theme. The Dark Elven charioteer whip arm actually fit on the daemonette perfectly so that was a plus.

Well, that's it for the oldest element of the army, next time, the mortal slaves...


TTFN