Corum and Jhary - The eternal champion and companion

The eternal champion, if there ever was universes that inspired the warhammer setting, Michael Moorcock's epic saga has got to stand on top of the list !

Now some time ago, Colin suggested that we could have a game at BOYL including different incarnations of the eternal champion. That idea did hit bull's eye in our minds and like the others I saw the perfect opportunity to tick a few boxes from my ever growing "to do" list.

A little while ago, I was even mentioning something about Corum and the other champions...

Anyway, to be perfectly honest, I only really know 2 eternal champions, namely Corum Jhaelen Irsei and Elric of Melniboné.

Of the 2, I do have a strong preference for Corum because he's a cross between your usual hero and your usual anti hero (which Elric is in my view). Corum shares with the Metabaron, a sense of being "off" or out of place and playing his part reluctantly and yet perfectly...

Corum is the sort of guy who finishes writing a poem or a song before going to save his kin, he's the sort to spit to the face of a barbarian about to cut his hand and tear his right eye out, to spit to the face of a god offering the hand and eye of gods in replacement of his own, to kill gods, that sort of stuff.

Painting wise I tried to stay as close to what I could remember of him (last time I read the books was about 4 years ago...) and I wanted to convey the feeling that he's the last of his kind so wanted to avoid the regal look with too much gold.

Good challenge was also painting the Eye of Rhynn and the hand of Kwll. For the eye, I tried to represent many facets one what looks like a basic eye patch to stay close to the decription stating it looks like the eyes of an insect. For the hand of Kwll, I tried to go for something alien with jewels encased :

I just kept all the jewels blue because I'm lazy and I don't like to have too much colours really.

Now to be completely honest here, althoughI'm a huge Goodwin fan, I have to confess Corum might very well be one of his weakiest sculpts, some wrong proportions (the arms especially), the face being very far from his usual excellent elvish faces... I don't know, maybe more than one sculptor was working on this one but it's more a miss than a hit to me.

Just while taking the pics, I suddenly realised I had actually already painted an incarnation of the eternal champion in the form or Erekose ! His model at last since he's part of the champions of Law but anyway, that's still 2 champions ticked !

Now Corum's story is also very excellent because his eternal companion is Jhary A Conel. He's quite different from Corum actually with his cheerful yet dutyful character but he's a real bad ass in the books. It took me a while to track that model and I was very pleased to get it from the hands of one of the great names of the early days ! I tried to keep things simple with him although I'm still a bit puzzled by the alignment of his eyes (which I tried to correct a fair few times until I had to admit it might come from the model itself...).

Funnily enough I had already painted Friskers (his flying cat companion) before, a private commission.

I have to say it felt quite funny to paint 1987 lead after all the plastics of late, a bit like changing shoes from a season to another. I do realise that in the short to mid term I'll have to focus on a few things "I have" to paint for events I'll be attending and all but being my usual self, I won't be able to refrain from painting totally unrelated stuff...