Ghost dwarves: developing the theme and colour scheme

 In my previous post about my ghost dwarf army, I talked about how I came up with the idea of an army based around undead dwarves and Sylvaneth that had fought a battle against each other years ago. Today I'm going to cover how I developed my plans for the army and worked out a colour scheme for them.

I focused on dwarves rather than Sylvaneth for planning purposes, because since I wanted to run the army as Living City I’d only be able to have a few Sylvaneth units, and I wanted to start off by painting dwarves.

The first thing I worked on was how to make the dwarves look undead. I considered both skeletal dwarves and ghost dwarves, but decided to go with ghosts because it would allow for a more interesting colour scheme. I wanted the scheme to have some interesting contrast, so I decided early on that I would paint the armour as ‘real’ rusting armour, while the weapons and any exposed flesh would be ghostly. Including the weapons in the ghost part of the scheme meant both that I’d have more of each model looking ghostly, and also avoided any awkward questions about how rusty thousand year old guns could still function.

I spent quite a lot of time thinking about how to make the dwarves look more spooky, I considered replacing helmetless heads with skulls, but that would leave the problem of what to do with their beards. A quick poll of my friends revealed that beardless dwarves would not be a popular choice, and I wasn’t sure my greenstuff skills would be up to modelling scraggly decomposing beards. In the end I went for the very simple approach of drilling out the eyes and removing the nose, to make the original heads look more skull like. I tested this on some spare fyreslayer heads, and it worked pretty well.

For the rusty armour, I did some research into different approaches to painting rust, and tried out a few different things on some spare bits. The one I settled on involved painting all the rust colours first, and then drybrushing silver over the top. This created a super rusty approach, and also had the advantage of being quick and easy to do. I largely followed this tutorial.

I wanted to have some plants growing out of the dwarves, to emphasize that the suits of armour were empty, and also to hint that some of them had died from being strangled by vines, or having their armour pierced by branches. I took the easy option here, and picked up some Citadel Barbed Bracken and Creeping Vines, which gave me plenty of plastic plants bits to use.

Finally, I needed to settle on a plan for the ghost scheme. I did some test models using the Wild Hunt Underworlds warband: I painted each one using a different Contrast paint, to see what colour I preferred. After a basecoat of Contrast I added some extra shading in the recesses, and did two rounds of highlights. You can see the results in the picture below. 

The two I liked best were the light green second from the left, and the pale blue in the centre. I opted for the blue because I thought it would go better with the rusty armour colour. It uses thinned down Aethermatic Blue contrast, with Sotek Green for recess shading, a first round of highlights of Coelia Greenshade mixed with Ulthuan Grey, and final highlights of pure Ulthuan Grey. I regret using the Coelia Greenshade and Ulthuan Grey mix to an extent because it doesn’t mix well and tends to split horribly on the palette, but I do like the colour it gives.

At this stage I decided I’d done enough planning, and did a complete test model. I was really happy with how he came out.

In my next posts in this series, I'll talk about the lore I've come with for them, and what I've got painted up so far.