Blood Knights finished!

Well the first half of the massive ten Blood Knight unit is completed!

Previous entries in the Blood Knights chronicles can be found here and here. The only remaining models were the last lancer and the banner bearer. I also had to do the shields and attach them to the unit:

I chose shield designs to complement the blood dragon vampire vibe. A mix of wolves, dragons, bats, fanged skulls and just plain fangs. By painting the icons in the same bone white that the scroll on the banner is painted avoids adding another colour and ties the unit further together.

While the original commission plan called for the Drakenhof banner the new vampire book kinda threw a spanner in the works. Fortunately I hadn't spent hours painting it already so no harm done when the client asked to change the banner to the Banner of Blood Keep. I took the design cues of the studio's original Blood Keep banner design and added some tweaks of my own. The bats flying across the blood toned sky and the halo around the moon. I wanted the red of the banner to be more intense than the armour to help it stand out. It couldn't be too scarlet though as it would loose the "vampire vibe". In the end I settled on a deep bloody red, this was achieved through a smooth basecoat of 50:50 Mechrite and Blood Red glazed in a 3:1 mix of Red to Chestnut ink mixed with Vallejo Thinner medium to help the glazing process. The moon was Rotting Flesh - going for Morrsleib - with darker patches and highlights created by adding black and white respectively. The halo was created with thin washes of the white and Rotting Flesh mix.

To finish off I wanted to show the lovely dynamic effect achieved through carefully positioning the charging, leaping horses to create a "flying wedge" of cavalry. Makes them look much more aggressive and interesting than just being in a straight line. This only really works with horses modelled at the gallop, most horse models (Empire knights for example) are sculpted as trotting and as such should be trotting shoulder to shoulder in formation. Orc Boar Boyz by comparison are wild nutters and would look really nice using this method.

Well, that's it for this commission, next up for commission work are some purple Emperor's Children and a High Elf griffon from the island of blood box. Good times.

TTFN