Sláine - Warriors of the Earth tribes

 

Hey all ! So I managed to finish the last project for 2023 out of nowhere ! Having tidied the desktop a bit because I was feeling overwhelmed, I took the opportunity to put some comitments back to the front and mongst those this Band of Erth tribe warriors for a gaming week end later in March ! I had first painted Sláine a while ago after playing the first 3 scenarii of the book and since we're going to Tir Nan Og for our reunion, I obviously picked the Erth tribes and more precisely the Sessair !

The Incredible Bazpaz offered me plenty of heroes and some dark age irish sprues so I had almost everything I needed to build me a good warband.
I was extremely happy to finally paint a warped Sláine, because let's face it, he is the most gruesomely joyful character to watch !

For warped Sláine, I wanted to try to give the skin some verdaccio undertones to evoke the work of Simon Bisley and obviously Frank Frazetta.

The undertones were done using blue and kaki washes, the aim was not to have an academically accurate Verdaccio but to give some nuances to the skin tone on such a large model and to echo those coloured bit you can see in the pictures above, it was a fun intuitive process I sometimes do on larger models to give richness but with a light colour on top, it was even more powerful.

The rest of the work was mainly done using contrast paints because I had set myself the goal to finish all the models before the end of the year ! It was also a great occasion to learn more about how to place contrast paints the most efficiently so a double win and gratifying experience for me.

I didn't have the model but one thing I immediately got when I received the other guys was to get me a model of Cathbad and the sacred Cauldron. Cathbad is an intersting character and his horse skull mask is an absolute staple for the look of a proper Sessair band to me. To make my goal achievable, I kept a very tight palette so Cathbad got the same colours as the others and hence yellow clothing which was very efficently done with an undertone layer of contrast skeleton horde followed by a yellow wash, two steps, one bright yellow, brilliant.

Along with the othermodels I was given, I had this version of Nest, I got to say I love the Bisley version the most but as I was painting, i gradually realised the model looks very much like a frien of mine so I grew quite fond of it and was happy to have her take care of the Cauldron when Cathbad's not around ! (And rules wise, she might come in handy when big targets like Balor come in).

The Cauldron is a centerpiece really, I immediately LOVED in my teens that the "good guys" were using necromancy and dark magic and that the earth goddess had very different sides, from giving endless supplies of food to bringing the dead back to her service. I was also VERY influenced by the Black Cauldron as a kid (first movie I ever went to see).

So I kept those ideas in head and painted the revenants along the cauldron reborn (later in that post) with washes, worked on a bright enough but still weathered brass and painted the smoke like a magic fog with green undertones.

Then obviously if you have Sláine, you HAVE to have UKKO around because he's probably one of the best sidekicks there is, he's vile, he's got no morals and is in a way the ugly part of the hero we don't want to see. In addition, he's quite fun in games, practically impossible to kill and he can trigger Sláine into Spasms or let you earn blood points by insulting your opponent, I love him.

The model is incredibly detailed for a model this small (he's on a 20mm base here).

So here are my heroesso far along with the King of the Celts Sláine I painted a while back. They look cool together despite the obvious scale differences I reckon.

Now to bulk up the ranks I used some Dark Ages irish to build 2 groups of 3 warriors.
I used the most naked bodies I could fin on the sprues and kept the fancy bronze shields but only had 4 so gave the 2 group leaders (no difference in game) larger shields which I decorated without thinking about it too much.

The paintjobs are crude and simple, mostly contrast work. The tartans were done (a bit too) hastily because I wanted to keep it fast and tabletop good, They'll probably only ever get a week end worth of gaming so target first !

And last but very much not least, the cauldron reborn ! I really love the sculpts, they're pretty evocative of the artwork with their facial expressions, they're considerably taller than my warriors because SCALE CREEP. In my head canon though I've decided Danu only picks the biggest warriors to send back from the Cauldron and the corrupt magic probably alters them and their weapons like the warp spasm does RIGHT ?

All in all this was a very fun project, it's renewed my hobby mojo by getting some fast rewarding achievement, lifted some of the pressure from having 15 models to do for March and I learnt a fair bit along the way.
I hadn't painted any of the Warlord resins yet, it's a weird material, very bendy yet still snappy if not handled properly, the details are almost too thin but if you paint them with mostly contrast and washes like I did, they do most of the job for you. I've only integrated contrast paints occasionaly in my process but building some experience over time on such projects really helps me find where I want to go and most importantly when.

15 models in under a week is something I'm glad about and the quality if not fatastic is pretty much where I wanted it to be and that's the main thing, finding the quality/quantity balance is always a big focus for me so having some range in that domain is crucial to me.

Anyway, I wish you all the best for 2024 and what's ahead, happy painting y'all !