"Though the methods of its reanimation were no doubt crude in comparison to those employed by the soul-blighted Deintalos in crafting the loathsome 'Arcwalkers', the deadwalker known as 'Regulus' served his master with no less loyalty, or lethality... "
Haskel Hexbane, Agent of the Order Azyr
Coming hot on the heels of the Skaven Warlock, is the next mini for New Year New Challenge in the form of a character for a Warhammer skirmish game.
I actually went back and forth on where to go with box on the bingo card, but as I absolutely love the sculpts of The Exiled Dead warband from Underworlds and Regulus is probably my favorite of the lot, it ended up being a relatively easy choice in the end.
After cleaning the mini up and popping it together, I kept it separate from the base as I wanted to be able to get at the everything a bit more easily when I started painting. Speaking of the base, I began working on that first, partly because I knew how I was going to paint all of the elements on the base and partly in keeping with the principle I adopted while in the initial stages of my Garrison of Ithilien project back in 2023, which is to paint bases first while the enthusiasm and excitement of getting started on the project is still there.
Like all of the Exiled Dead, Regulus' base is made up of large, rectangular flagstones, though on his, one of the stones has been pried up, exposing the earth beneath along with a badly damaged skull. I painted the slabs to look similar to quartzite before playing with some glazes of thinned Mortarion Grime and Athonian Camoshade to bring both the large flat surfaces of the stones and the crevices between them to life a little more.
Because the area of exposed soil at the back of the base is quite small, rather than drybrushing the texture and potentially making a mess of the flagstones, I stippled increasingly light tones of brown over the area instead. This helped keep more control over things while still building up texture and depth with each layer. Once I was happy with how it was looking, I took a little of the Athonian Camoshade glaze I'd used on the stone slabs and worked it into the areas where they sink into the soil to help tie the two elements of the base together. To help tie the exposed skull into the soil around it, I used a glaze of Dryad Bark around the very bottom where it meets the ground to dirty it up a bit.
I drew heavily on the 'Eavy Metal team's version for inspiration in painting Regulus himself, but with a few variations in places. One of these was using Gal Vorbak Red for the base tone of his tunic rather than Khorne Red (which is what I think was used on the 'official' one) as I wanted to bring a deeper hue to the garment as I felt that would work a little better with what I had planned for his armour.
Another change I made was to add some corrosion to the shield. I felt this was a bit more in keeping with the filthy, rusted armour plate that Regulus is wearing and it also gave me the chance to try out a wee experiment as well. Typically when weathering brass, bronze and copper I use Nihilakh Oxide, but a lot of the 'Eavy Metal painting guides in the most recent issues of White Dwarf have featured thinned down Sotek Green, so I thought I'd give that a try on the shield.
I was pretty pleased with the result, but thought I'd go a step further and go back in with Nihilakh Oxide in a few places to add some brighter areas of verdigris and give the impression that some of it was more recent - after all, many of the Underworlds of the Mortal Realms are cold and damp, but the chill of the grave wouldn't have done Regulus' shield any good either!
Less of a departure from the boxart and more of a personal change was in using glazes of Skrag Brown to carefully build up a layer of rust on the plates of Regulus' armour and the blade of his halberd. This was a little extra work, but I felt it was worth taking the time to do on top of dirtying these areas up with shading because it would add to the atmosphere I was trying to capture across the mini as well as tying all of the metal areas together in being corroded to one degree or another.
One other aspect of painting Regulus that I did differently to my 'norm' was when finishing up his face. Ordinarily I glaze the lower lip of a miniature with a pink tone and the eye sockets with a blue-grey to more closely resemble living skin, but as Regulus is a deadwalker and the dead aren't known for looking healthy and vigorous, in his case I inverted the two. A few layers of a thinned mix of Flayed One Flesh and Drakenhof Nightshade worked a treat to add a deathly pallor to Regulus lip while Flayed One Flesh and Berserker Bloodshade helped to accent his eyes.
I really enjoyed painting up Regulus. It was great to be able to just relax and have fun putting paint on to a mini, especially one that I've fancied having a go at for a while, but never quite found time to get to.
With another square now marked off the bingo card, I'm beginning to contemplate the next challenge, and there are strong contenders in both the Your Choice (maybe the Striking Scorpion miniature of the month) and the paint a character from Warhammer 40,000 (possibly also something Aeldari, or maybe Astra Militarum) categories at the moment, but I'm not rushing to choose as I'm hoping I can settle on something that will be just as enjoyable as this project.
Until next time, thanks very much for reading and happy hobbying.
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