Transcript
So, Les Chasseurs de Cauchemars is being deployed again.
Buried in the orders they successfully retrieved from that fallen unit out in the haunted woods <snap> are a handful of notes from their fallen supernatural investigator detailing a hidden route to a long-abandoned chapel. Fragments of the journal mention possible artifacts that may lay in the ruins. Artifacts that may possess power of some kind.
There is also a stained and torn map that bears an esoteric symbol, and Ottilie tasks Jolanda and Vermont with deciphering its meaning. But before they can come to a conclusion, something happening up the battle line has the local command in a hurry for artifact acquisition. So Ottilie rallies her band of nightmare hunters and they prepare to set out once more in search of that from which most regiments flee.
When Ottilie asks her occultist and supernatural investigator what they think the esoteric symbol means, Vermont responds with, “Possibly sacred, or perhaps blessed.” Jolanda adds in a softly correcting tone, “Yet more something of the inverse of that.” Ottilie is confused. “What does that mean exactly?”
Jolanda crouches and picks up a handful of dark soil, lets it run through her delicately aged fingers. The rest of the warband watch with piqued interest. She glances up. “It is uncertain, mistress.”
Today, we raise the dead!
INTRO
Greetings good humans and welcome to Tabletop Alchemy, where sometimes we gotta paint up some new enemy models for another round of skirmish game combat! And we thank our patrons for their continued support in the face of such extreme battle conditions!
Hey, so we get lucky today – lots of games need some zombie miniatures, right? So painting up some shambling undead is a great investment in the future. And that’s what Les Chasseurs de Cauchemars is gonna be facing out in the haunted woods very soon.
If you’re new to the channel, there’s a playlist detailing our first foray into Joe McCullough’s The Silver Bayonet skirmish game, and that’s where you can find out all about the warband, their leader and their first skirmish scenario. <snap>
But Ottilie and her stalwart badasses are not just facing zombies, oh no, our intrepid warband of Napoleonic nightmare hunters might run into some true gothic horror in the form of vampires!
So I had a brand new box of Games Workshop zombies in the Pile of Opportunity, which is perfect. I built up ten of these little Revenants – which is what zombies are called in The Silver Bayonet rulebook. But as for vampires, initially I was like, huh, I don’t think I actually have any of those. Which is dumb, right? Everyone should have some vampires, I mean, for D&D or whatever. But then the Pile of Opportunity: Primed and Ready Edition stepped up to the plate – I have these all ready to go from the Cursed City box set. These will be perfect too AND I get to knock a dent in that Primed and Ready stash, don’t I?
We must be full of tiger’s blood today, cause we’re winning left and right!
And on top of all that winning already, we’re gonna put a lesson from last month to use this month – we’re gonna do another batch of oil washing! Sometimes stuff just works.
So while I painted up 10 of these cute little undead monsters, we’re just gonna see a couple of them on camera for most of the painting process. And again, since they’re just zombies and there needs to be bunch of them, we’re just gonna go easy and have fun. We know the oil wash is gonna come in clutch and fix anything we don’t like anyway, right? Right?
We’ll do a handful of them with this greenish skin tone, using express colors to keep it simple. I just mix up a batch and I’ll put it on three or four of them off-screen and then we’ll go with a different shade for some other ones later.
Now this guy is having trouble keeping his insides on the inside so a little thinned out purple can do a trick of us and bring home the gross factor, right?
I wanted to add some discoloration to the skin tone, so I mixed up some violet and magenta and medium and put that into some of recesses. Carrying forward our mindset from a couple of videos ago, I’m just having some fun and experimenting with colors, ain’t no stress. You can see I used some burnt umber ink on this guy’s scythe blade too.
I opted to flesh out some of the wounds on our guy with the stomach ache with a different shade of purple, just to see what it did.
And you can see I’m still struggling with how to keep my hair out of the camera. Maybe I should just shave my head and be done with it.
I used some thinned down blue ink to shade this guy’s skin, again, just throwing different colors around to see what they do.
Some burnt umber ink tones down some of the wood elements on this guy and then I just painted up his pants with it too.
Now on this guy we’ll mix up a different skin tone from blue and green and express medium, and I’ll slap this on a handful of other zombies.
Then to bruise up the flesh a bit on this guy I added some thinned down purple in the recesses.
And then went in with an even thinner, lighter purple to add some color to the overall skin, I think it was looking a little too blue.
Sepia ink seemed like a good choice for all the roots these guys are sporting, must suck to wake up and find yourself tangled in roots instead of bedsheets. Kind of a bummer I guess, being a zombie.
And now I reached for a bottle of some actual paint for this guy’s pants, a light beige, which should shade down nicely under the oil wash.
I love using this Sooty Black Ink for leather belts and straps, it’s one of my favorite techniques now, at least for weathered up sorta figures.
Now, Express black lotus is actually a blue tone and not super dark, so i added some black ink to try to deepen it a bit, and I put it on all the metal objects.
Typhus corrosion from Citadel is an awesome texture paint, I actually really like it and I’d forgotten I had it. I just threw it on this dude’s pants, but I probably should have put it on his lower legs and feet too. Ah well.
Here’s some pale sand for the scroll parchment color, and it just occurred to me while writing this script what I need to do for this thing. We’ll see if it turned out at the end.
I used some very thin pale gray to add some subtle highlights to the skin texture on this guy. I didn’t do a lot intricate highlighting or shading with most of these guys, you know, we’re just chilling and trying to speed paint a bit, not get bogged down in too many details. But, that’s the cool thing about all this – if I feel like I want to something, I just do it.
Targor rageshade goes all over the pants, which is probably unnecessary because of the coming oil wash but if you weren’t doing an oil wash, this is a great weathering color from Citadel.
How about a little bit of thinned magenta ink for the open wounds? It’s a nice touch, right?
Then some little touches of gunmetal grey from vallejo metal color for the belt buckle and the axe on this guy’s mind and then I’ll thin way down a couple of pro acryl colors for rust and some sepia ink to shade up the sword and armor bits.
I got these Golden high flow paints when I bought all those inks just cause I saw them on the shelf and was curious to see what they were like. They’re pretty cool, but I only got a few colors and i’m starting to use them on bases because they don’t really need thinning. I need to experiment with them on actual miniatures some more to see what I think overall. But for bases, they work great.
And now we go with the oil wash! Typical burnt umber and black mix, and I got some Gamsol thinner and we just douse these guys with it. I kinda made two washes of different thinness and went back and forth wherever I wanted to add more color or density. Again, just playing around, and if you wanna see more about how to have fun trying new things, you can check this video out right here <snap> to see what I’m jabbering about.
After 20 minutes I go back in for the wiping stage. And again this process was super easy and produced pretty good results. I still need to try painting up a miniature without any weathering to see what the oils will look like, but yeah, this is kind of a staple process for me now to have in the toolbox. It’s just the tip of the iceberg concerning oils for sure but it’s so easy. Aside from the equipment management hassle of having an oil palette and brushes to clean and the 24 hour drying time.
Now onto the vampires, and these I decided I wasn’t going to do an oil wash on. I don’t know why exactly, they actually would be fine to do more tests on, but for whatever reason i just figured i’d do these without the oil wash. I can always go back and add a wash if I want.
I went for a blue gray skin tone using the xpress colors over the zenithal primer coat. You know, undead vampire skin tone right? Super original.
My only plan for these guys was red armor. They don’t have very much armor so I felt a punchy color was warranted here. I used some pale gray to clean up the armor bits in prep for the red translucent paint that would be coming along.
I used some full strength black lotus xpress color to darken the feet but you can’t see that because I exceptionally good at getting my hair in front of the lens. Without looking even!
Still winning!
I mixed up a red color for the base armor tone knowing i would be going in with a darker color to crush the shadows afterward.
I added black to a darker red, both xpress colors, to glaze in the shadows and it worked pretty good, like it was kinda what I had planned.
Then sooty black of course for the straps holding the armor on and then I really wasn’t sure what to do with these guys’ modesty patches, this strategically placed fur, right, so I just went in with a lighter warm gray to highlight it. Apparently I missed hitting the record button before I dropped some Nuln oil wash over the fur following the highlighting.
Now this pillar was freaking me out, I wanted to try to find some color that worked as a compliment to the overall colors of the vampire, but I also just wanted to throw some crazy paint down to see if I could create a cool mottled stone effect without just using a straight color. So I started with an alarming yellow, watered way down.
Then some sap green ink to make it even crazier, also thinned down a bit.
And then some snakebite leather contrast paint to add in some browns to this clown suit piece of rock. But hey, trust the process right? We can always paint over something if it doesn’t work.
I dry brushed some pale gray to pick out the edges and add some texture and some calming down of the clown colors and then more Targor rage shade to seam it all up and then a final dry brush of pale gray over the top of that to bring back some of the highlights and texture. I think this actually turned out pretty cool for a stone texture.
Then it was time to clean up their hair with some pale gray thinking that with the bluish skin and the red armor, I might have to leave the hair as white. I didn’t like this idea much, their hair is so cool, sculpt-wise, but I was having trouble envisioning a color that wouldn’t clash too bad with the existing palette.
And the swords presented the same problem to me, I originally thought I’d make them some kind of magical color but that seemed like a mistake too as far as the palette went. Then I hit on using this exhaust manifold color which is like a slightly burnt silver color. I kinda like the idea that these vampires might be running around with blades engineered to take out their mortal enemies, the werewolves right?
And then I found an old bottle of dark metallic color called steel I forgot I had and this is a great metallic for base metal color.
I used wildwood contrast on the sword hilts, don’t ask me why, cause I’m not sure exactly. I could have used black but thought that might be too contrasty and require some metallics over it and i wasn’t sure i wanted to make the hilt metallic in addition to the blade. So I don’t know, I’m just rolling with it.
I tried highlighting up the hair with pro acryl white. Now everyone on youtube seems to love this particular brand of white, and I do like pro acryl’s other colors but this white just doesn’t work for me. It turns into a gummy mess on the wet palette within seconds and it doesn’t thin down right and it goes on very rough even after thinning it with water, which is all literally the opposite of everything I’ve ever heard about this white paint. So I don’t know what to say but I’m getting rid of this bottle and going back to using my P3 white which was my favorite.
Oh, here we go, here’s a shot of putting nuln oil on the modesty patches. Just in case, you know, you didn’t believe me.
Then I kinda rushed through another batch of clown painting on this vampire’s fallen pillar and just started working on the base along with it, same sort of process, just trying to conjure a color that wasn’t too similar to the vampire herself and still looked like interesting stone to set it apart from the general ground texture.
And after some more consideration of the white hair, I decided to try an hombre using blue express colors. I don’t know if in the end this was a good choice – I thought about going from black to red to sort of counterpoint the red armor and I’m not even a hundred percent sure the white hair was really all that bad to begin with, but here they are getting blue hair dye.
And there we go, a bunch of zombies and vampires hungry for Les Chasseurs de Cauchemars. I do like how the oil wash came out on these guys, and the variety of ways you can build these zombies is actually pretty cool, there’s a lot of choices on the sprues in this box. And I’ve still got ten left to build. But yeah, they should be fun on the table. Ah, and here’s that little idea I had – it’s cheesy but I think it’s too perfect. I mean, the guy has a scroll nailed to his back, what else could it possibly say?
And here are the vampires with all their bases tufted and done. I’m still not sure about the hair color, I should have done one in black and red just to see what it looked like. Their skin tone is super flat, I know, I just didn’t feel courageous enough to try tackle highlighting the musculature. I will soon, never fear, we gonna learn things together. Or, you know, you’re just gonna yell at the screen about how I should be doing things. Hey, I aim to please – if nothing else, I provide you with a venting range. You’re welcome!
So, prepare to play a skirmish game, and prepare for the next chapter in The Silver Bayonet narrative series. Ah, but there’s gonna be one more video coming up with some more prep before we get to the actual battle report, so keep an eye out for that.
And, you know, go raise some dead!
See ya!