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Prince Duvalle leads the coterie of Soulblight Gravelords known as the Crimson Court, a band of merciless hunters united by their cruel appetites. They found their way into Direchasm through a splinter of the spreading Katophrane Curse, intent upon taking full advantage of the rich variety of prey promised by the living mountain's depths. Each of these vampiric predators brings their own skills to the hunt; Duvalles dominating will leaves his victims defenseless, while the towering Gorath relies upon might as often as his own enchantments. Vellas von Faine is a master duellist who wields her twin blades with uncanny skill and speed. The curse-twisted Ennias fights with barbaric ferocity. All but unstoppable when drunk on the blood of their victims and terrifyingly savage should they be denied it, the Crimson Court revel in their new hunting grounds...
I've been playing Warhammer Underworlds since shortly after Shadespire was released and without a doubt it's now one of my favourite games from Games Workshop - the combination of cards, dice and miniatures had an instant appeal, as did the fact that it's a game that's easy to learn but tricky to master.
While the Warbands during the early seasons of the game were quite nice, they weren't actually designed for the game (the game was designed as a way to use the easy to build miniatures) but by the release of Beastgrave the miniatures designers had really hit their stride and were successfully distilling the essence of entire factions from the Mortal Realms into incredibly dynamic and characterful Warbands.
With the global pandemic disrupting gaming opportunities for the last couple of years, I haven't really played very much Underworlds and so while I've continued to collect Warbands for the game, haven't really been inspired to put paint to any of them for quite a while, though I did paint up Morgok's Krushas in 2020.
With the release of Harrowdeep and the lifting of social distancing restrictions over the last couple of months, I've had the opportunity to play a few games of 'Rivals' using the Kunnin' Krew (who I want to get painted up soon) which got me inspired to get some paint on one of my favourite Warbands from Direchasm, The Crimson Court:
Ever since the warband was previewed by Warhammer Community, I knew that I wanted to paint them as they perfectly encapsulate the fallen majesty of the Soulblight Gravelords, with each miniature dripping with character. Gorath 'the enforcer' is my favourite I think, his haughty pose conveying his absolute confidence that in facing any threat he might encounter he will emerge victorious. I do feel that Vellas could have been a bit more dynamically posed to show that she's a duellist, but I understand the coherence of each of the characters being poised for action rather than in mid-attack and how this adds to the feeling that they're restraining themselves in an attempt to appear more noble than they are.
As I was assembling the models, I decided that I would paint the bases separately and all at the same time so I could maintain a coherent look across each base and would have easier access to the wee details on them like the fragments of bone, toppled candelabra and shattered wooden stake. For the stone, I've tried to create the impression that the slabs and the fallen statue are polished obsidian as that seemed to fit with the aesthetic of the Soulblight Gravelords and would provide a nice contrast to the bright red armour I was planning for the miniatures themselves.
A little unusually for me, all of the highlights were applied to the bases 'manually' which is to say that nothing was drybrushed as I wanted to avoid any chalkiness on the flagstones (NOTE: there's nothing 'wrong' with drybrushing for bases at all and I use it a lot for more textured ones, I was just after a specific result here to which drybrushing is ill-suited) and though it was time consuming - the bases probably took around 7 hours in total to paint - I think that on balance it was worth the investment although at the time I worried that perhaps I was spending 'too long' on them.
As I was leaving the bases separate I also decided to build Duvalle and Gorath in subassemblies so they would be easier to paint - for Duvalle this was quite easy as it just meant not attaching him to his base as his left leg is already joined to the shattered statue, however for Gorath I ended up keeping both his arms and his cloak separate which made sense to me at the time, but figuring out how best to attach them to flying bases to hold while painting took more than a little trial and error.
Although there are only four models in the warband, I opted to split them into two 'batches' for painting - Duvalle and Gorath have a lot of common elements and colours so I felt it made sense to tackle them at the same time and this would also give me the opportunity to nail down some of the elements common across all four members of the warband, especially their unhealthily pallid skin.
In planning the project, I had a look at how others had painted up their Crimson Court miniatures and in doing so I came across Tyler Mengel's Masterclass which was amazingly helpful in deciding how I would go about painting mine. I drawn a lot of influence from Tyler's very in depth article, though have added in a few tweaks and twists to suit my own preferences and painting style, such as the skin tones, leather, gemstones and the gold trim and accoutrements. I'm especially pleased with the purple fabric of the cloaks, robes and loincloth that you can see below and it was definitely worth the effort to use glazing to achieve the blending of the hues. I'm also really happy with the Blood Vial that Duvalle carries and the bottled potion at Gorath's belt as painting glass objects can be a bit of a challenge.
With Duvalle and Gorath now complete it was time to start working on Enias and Vellas...
I must confess though, that despite planning to crack on with painting them as soon as I'd finished working on Prince Duvalle and Gorath The Enforcer, as is so often the case I got a little distracted working on another couple of projects. Nevertheless, I was drawn back to painting them quite quickly as they were staring a little accusingly at me from the corner of my painting desk...
"...And by these marks can you tell them: by the fangs of the predator; for their thirst for blood and flesh is like that of a vile beast; by their porcelain white skin, cold to the touch and unnatural to the eye; by the glow of their eyes, behind which lives the terrible Hunger. These are the marks of the blackest evil. These are the marks of the Vampire."
The Witch Hunter von Ingeheim
Much of the work was made easier by having already painted Duvalle and Gorath - the red armour plate, pallid skin tones, purple fabric, gold details and the accoutrements at their belts for example were all done in almost exactly the same ways, but there were other elements that presented their own, unique challenges that meant they took a little longer to do. The most obvious of these is of course Ennias' wings which I was more than a little apprehensive of tackling. Thankfully, Tyler Mengel's fantastic Masterclass article came to the rescue here again and the detailed deconstruction of how he went about painting them was invaluable in helping to plan how I went about working up the colours and layers to create their finished appearance.
One of the things that took longer than I'd initially thought was the hair of both of these characters - in Vellas' case this was mostly due to just how much hair she has and because I wanted to achieve a subtly different look to Prince Duvalle's by using more blue tones which were built up over a couple of layers of highlights of each individual 'strand' of hair with a blue-grey applied as a final highlight to create a richer finish.
For Ennias, the process was less about volume of hair and more technique as painting his hair involved several glazes to achieve a nice smooth tonal transition, so there was drying time to account for so as not to lift the previous layer off when applying the next one. Once the glazes were in place though, the highlights could be applied fairly quickly and looking at the finished miniatures I think the effort and time spent on all four miniatures was well worth it.
Another big difference between Vellas and Ennias and Duvalle and Gorath is that Ennias in particular has far more exposed skin, though Vellas' décolletage is quite prominent as well, and while I'm fairly comfortable painting faces, I still sometimes find that it's not something I look forward to so I did 'put it off' a bit by working on other areas of the miniatures first, but at some point you just can't progress any further until you bite the bullet and start working on the flesh tones.
One of the joys of the Underworlds warbands though is that as well as being fairly easy to build, they're composed of only a handful of miniatures, so you don't have to worry as much about painting up loads of miniatures and trying to replicate a consistent look across them all like you would with a larger army. This is already fantastic when you're a bit of a hobby butterfly like me but having a low model count also means that you can afford to spend a bit more time lavishing attention on the little details that might be lost among among an army as well allowing plenty of opportunities to try something a bit different or outside of your comfort zone which is particularly fitting in a warband where every miniature is a personality in their own right.
In fact a big bonus of this project has been that it's encouraged me to use thinned down paints and glazes to create more interesting and vibrant colour transitions on things like fabrics and hair. While I've been using glazes on things like the eyes and lips of miniatures for a long time, I've rarely used them as I have in this project before so I'll definitely be looking to incorporate this learning into future projects. In fact, I've already incorporated some of these ideas into a project I hope to be sharing very soon, but in the meantime, I'm hoping to try and get a few games of Underworlds with the Crimson Court soon, so until next time, thanks for reading!
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