Vladimir, Dark Prince of Umbrey

Attention Komrades! Tonight vee dine on victory! Vee have krushed our enemies! Vee have stolen zier vomen! Vee have pillaged zier fortifikations! Vee... Ahem! Sorry. Got carried away there. Let's try that again...

Good evening and welcome to what I hope will be a much more regular posting schedule for the remainder of this month. I've gotten my life back into a better semblance of being organized and that means I can spend a little more time on my painting hobby (including posting).

Vlad here was actually a (belated) birthday gift for my buddy Henry. I enjoy fueling his Khador obsessions (not just because it gets him away from playing Cryx) and Vlad was the latest way to do that. This sculpt is actually the Hurricane Katrina sculpt from long ago. I've had this model sitting in my box for ages, and finally got around to painting it. I would have finished it a couple weeks ago but I got sidetracked and stalled on basing it, so things got excessively delayed.

Overall it's not a terrible sculpt, but definitely not great from a painting point of view. I don't really fancy the dagger arm being flat against his body, and the face was a real pain to get at for detail work. Overall this isn't close to a best paint job, but some parts worked pretty well. I'm especially happy with how the bronzes turned out overall. I used a lot of tonal variation on them using inks to help make them pop.
The red plating was a bit of a shading challenge for me. Normally I would use a complimentary color to shade with, but for these plates I wanted to try keeping the hue the same to emphasize them being enameled armor plates.
The color scheme was directly taken from Henry's other Khador models, just with darker colors to reflect Vlad's brooding nature.

One annoyance doing this model was the final sealing step. I'd gotten a tip of using Krylon satin sealer instead of the Testors gloss/dull coats. So of course I decided to try it out on this model. Unfortunately I put slightly too thick of a coat on it and it made the model a bit gritty. I've done some further tests and the satin coat seems to work fine, just in a lighter coat than I did with the Testors coats.

Kommander Strakhov

This is now the second Khador model I've painted. Strakhov was interesting to me for a couple reasons. I really like the skhulpt of his gun and his, uh, skhirt. Overall the skhulpt is nice: it has plenty of details without being overly khomplicated. The details are spread out enough so that the eyes khan read them properly. There's even a nice detail on his face of a skhar that adds even more expression to him.

The biggest thing I'm disappointed with on this model is aktually the basing. I used the GF9 snow basing material and it just didn't kheep it's whiteness. I think my original formulation of snow would have workhed better. In any case, this badass is ready for deployment in my buddy's armies now.

Sorcha

No, I haven't started playing Khador too now. This is a Christmas gift for Sean who is playing Khador a lot now. I've wanted to paint this model for a while and I figured this would be a good option. He's undoubtedly already got Sorcha, but hopefully this alternate sculpt will find a place in his collection.
Admitted, digressing into rules for a moment, I think Sorcha would be a really fun caster to play. However she has a reputation of being a real pain to play against and one of the leading "power gamer" casters. Perhaps if people see effort put into painting her well, it will take the sting out of playing against her. Hey! A guy can dream!
I spent a pile of time cleaning up details on this model as I went along. The white on the armor never did end up looking great to me. My blending is just not quite clean enough still to pull off white armor plates.
The coat on the other hand worked out quite well. The "imperfections" in the blending tend to create a sense of texture. That coupled with a fair variation in color created an effect I was quite pleased with.
The metals were again part of the new style I've been working on. Lots of blending in black paint to create a more dramatic shading and highlighting on metals.