"They Caused All of This" - Orc Necromancer

"My commands shall echo forever in their dusty skulls"

- Xathrid Necromancer (MtG)


Hello and welcome back to The Art of Caesura!

Last week we took a little break from our Zombicide: Green Horde coverage to look at Painting Tutorials that I have found useful. This week we're right back at it and cracking into the baddies of Zombicide: Green Horde.

The boss of the baddies (but by no means the scariest - that spot is reserved for the abominations) are the Orc Necromancers. When they appear on the board, they bring a new spawn zone with them (meaning they invariably spawn with a few other gribblies). 

Call me traditional, but I like my orcs green, so I wasn't a huge fan of the box art for the Orc Necromancers which painted them with a mauve skin-tone. When I painted this guy, the only green paint that I'd ever owned was Warboss Green (well, and its "Goblin Green" precursor) both are quite pure greens, and I have found that I could mix most other greens I might desire from it. So to paint the necromancer I did just this.
 

I started by mixing Warboss Green and Steel Legion Drab in approximately equal measure. I then mixed in a little Ushabti Bone and a smidge of Abaddon Black. Anyway, the long and the short of it was I painted this guy's skin tone with a relatively convoluted mix of paints. This was fine for one model, but there are over 50 orcs in the box - maybe over 70, I actually can't remember! Point being, it is time to invest in some new greens!

So with the mid-tone pastel green, I shaded his skin with diluted Contrast Militarum Green. I then highlighted him up by adding Scale 75's Pale Skin to the original mix. 

Before I move on from the skin, I just want to comment on how beautifully sculpted this guy's musculature is. All of it really. I am used to painting GW orcs which typically just have slabs of meat where muscles would be (especially the old models), but having studied a lot of human anatomy (even having taught it for a few years!), I really appreciated (and was surprised by) the attention to detail on this model. I could go through each element: from the accurate fibular head and tibial tuberosity to the nicely detailed forearms and shoulder insertions but really each element is well rendered, only let down a little by the soft(ish) plastic. 

The outside of his fur cloak started as Contrast Wyldwood and received several drybrushed highlights of Doombull Brown and then Skrag Brown. I painted the inside of his fur cloak at the same time as his skirt. They both started as Steel Legion Drab, but where the cloak was shaded with 2 layers of Seraphim Sepia, the skirt was shaded with Agrax Earthshade. 

I had a blast painting the magical stones around his belt. They all started as Contrast Space Wolves Grey, but then I coated a couple of them Aethermatic Blue - one with one layer, another with two. This made the stones seem a little more mystical and unique. 

I painted his obsidian sacrificial dagger by first painting it black, then stippling spots on it with Gauss Blaster Green. To increase the value of the green, I then filtered the dagger with Biel Tan Green, before coating the whole thing (minus the wrappings) with Gloss Varnish. 

You can barely make out the thing on his head, and neither could I! I thought it was an ornate headpiece at first, and in a way, I suppose it is. I went back to the artwork from CMoN, and saw that it is, in fact, a crow! So I used my feather recipe: I first painted it Abaddon Black then picked out the highlights with Vallejo Metal Medium and then washed the whole thing with a 1:1 mix of Nuln Oil and Drakenhoff Nightshade. This gives the feathers a subtle blue-black iridescence that you see on raven feathers. 

And that is pretty much it! A nicely sculpted mini for the boss of the baddies. I'll see you next week for some of his not so mini minions on The Art of Caesura!


Reading: Death Masks (Dresden Files Book 5) - Jim Butcher
Watching: The Last Kingdom - Season 3


Next Week:

The master of hidden places...