Intermission: Archers of the Living City

I’ve unfortunately suffered from an inflammation of my wrist for the last few weeks and have not been able to paint while I wait for it to recover. While the cause was my work and some heavy mouse use, the repetitive motions of painting also trigger those bits of my arm that are currently inflamed. I figure then that I may as well show some old work while I can’t produce anything new. Fingers crossed this is the only such post I’ll have to make, but we’ll see how we go!

Today I’ll showcase this unit of archers I painted a few months before I started this blog. I painted these just before my son was born, and therefore was at home a lot with a heavily pregnant wife and had a lot of painting time on my hands (This was 2020 and I was in full work from home mode due to covid too which meant I was basically at home 7 days a week). I’ve always loved these Empire archers, I think the models are extremely characterful and they were a joy to paint. I spent “character” amounts of time on each effectively painting them one by one, which meant I wasn’t particularly quick, but it was a very enjoyable process.

At the time I was really enjoying the background of the Cities of Sigmar faction for Age of Sigmar, especially with the idea of the Living City, a city in the realm of life, part human-built, part elf-built, and overgrown with trees. I decided to paint these archers as if they can from there, hence the greens of their tunics and the mossy basing.

The mossy bases were done by painting sand in greens, which was quite a lot of fun and I quite like the effect. If you’ve followed the blog for a bit you might have noticed I quite like my forest bases, and this was another attempt at trying something different in that genre.

I spent a lot of time on the tunics, having a few weeks before watched a video by Sergio Calvo on YouTube where he ran through his process for leather. Going from cold brown, to warm brown, followed by ochre and bone for the final highlights. I loved the look and wanted to try it hence why these models are covered in scratched up leather!

After painting these models and having enjoyed the process so much I toyed with the idea of making a full army for the Living City and I painted up a couple more models, first up this character model my brother in law printed for me as a gift (thanks!).

This was my first time painting a resin 3D printed model and I was blown away by the detail available on what was a relatively cheap resin 3D printer.

This was a very fun model to paint, lots of details. If you look really closely you can see some of the print lines but you have to know where to look.

The final model in the collection was a bit of an experiment and got a bit rushed if I’m honest, and I think is the poorest paint job on these models. This is an old conversion of mine, with the upper half of the plastic Karl Franz riding griffon glued to a pair of Empire Greatswords legs. This was right at the start of my playing with GW’s contrast paints and I was keen to see if I could get a convincing peacock feather effect by using them over metallics.

The result is ok, it looks a little bit better in real life, but photographs a bit poorly. If I were to do it again I would make sure to not let the contrast layers dry, and make sure to blend them a bit better, you can see some rather drastic transitions between the colours there at the moment.

I hope you enjoyed looking through this small collection, and on my end I hope I can get back to painting soon, I’ve been missing it!