The last miniature painted in January, but not quite the last of my January Catch-up! (Yes, I’m conscious we’re nearly halfway through February)

After painting up all those skeletons earlier in the month, I needed something to lead them. I’d had one of the heroes from Cursed City sitting on my shelf for a while, intending to use it as a Necromancer in the bigger Soulblight army, so it seemed a natural choice.

Apart from the mask/gold trim and the staff, everything was painted with a Contrast Paint or equivalent, over a zenithal primer + white drybrush starting point. I wanted a fairly “classic” feel, so I stuck to the pallete of purple (Arcane Purple), blue (Ultramarines Blue), and red (Life Red), which were all over 4th Edition Undead armies. Most areas are unhighlighted, but those that were were done by mixing Ivory into the original starting colour.

For something that took less than an hour to paint, I’m really happy with how this turned out!

I’ve made a start on my Black Templars Crusade forces – the first Crusader squad, Marshal, and Emperor’s Champion have been assembled. Tentatively, I’ve got another Crusader squad, some Intercessors, and 2 Dreadnoughts to build, then I can start thinking about how I want to expand. This is going to be my main project for the foreseeable, and you’ll see one of the ways I’m planning to add some flavour to the army in the pictures above.

Each unit is going to receive a squad banner of some description, reminiscent of regiments standards from older editions of Warhammer Fantasy Battle. One of the things which struck me from a lot of the Black Templars artwork was the amount of banners, standards, and pennants visible. This one below in particular caught my eye:

So rather than just do “regular” back banners on sergeants, I figured I’d turn things up to 11!

Of course, if every unit has a standard, I’m going to have to do something extra special for the Ancient carrying the banner representing the entire Crusade…