Hobgoblins And Golems And Paint, Oh My!

Thirty greenskins ready to be sent to their doom.

So, the Hobgoblin archers are all done.  Twenty seven repurposed Night Goblin Archers and a real metal Hobgoblin Command Team are in place and ready to do.... well, whatever their Chaos Dwarf masters tell them to do.

If they know what's good for them.

Close-up of metal Hobgoblin Command Squad

While still on a Fantasy sort of kick, I decided to paint up some more figures for the Chaos Dwarves.  This time round it was three Lesser Obsidian Golems from Mantic, which as you may recall my chum Priestly Paul donated to me.

Remember them?

Rather than paint them in flat earthy tones I was quite taken with the idea of giving them a lava effect.  At the start of the year I even posted a link to a gentleman who had posted lovely looking Lava Bloodthirsters which I wanted to try and mimic.  My hope was that they'd get a look akin to the Pyroville from Doctor Who.

Yeah, like that.

So how do I go about this?  Well, read on my friends and you'll see!

Stage 1: Basecoat With Vallejo Flourescent Orange / Army Painter Lava Orange

Compared to some of my other slow progress affairs this was a pretty quick paint job.  The slowest stages were the start, actually - the figures were sprayed white and, after that had dried, were given a good and thorough basecoat with an even mix of Vallejo Flourescent Orange and Army Painter Lava Orange.

This mix was partly to lessen the neon glow but also because the Fluorescent Paint is quite thick, so it would flow better this way.

Stage 2: Wash With Vallejo Flourescent Orange / Citadel Yriel Yellow

Next stage was another even mix, this time of Flourescent Orange and Yriel Yellow.  I thinned this down to the consistency of a wash and let it cover the whole figure.  This would add some variation to the colours and also catch any white sections in the cracks or folds that I'd missed with the first run.

I did this wash rough and ready in the morning and then went out for a couple of hours.  On my return I could basically do every other step which was just progressively darker and lighter drybrushes.

Step 3: Highlight Heavilly With Citadel Mephiston Read

A heavy dryrbsuuh of Mephiston Red followed at which points things were starting to look very fiery.

Step 4: Highlight Heavilly With Coat d'Arms Rust

I was a little unsure about this but it ended up working OK:Coat D'Arms Rust was used for another drybrush .  At this point the whole thing is looking very molten.

Step 5: Highlight With Coat D'Arms Shadow Grey/Army Painter Black.  Paint Base Adeptus Battlegrey

The base gets the usual coating of Adeptus Battlegrey.  For the top layer of the magma I originally was going to use Shadow Grey from Coat D'Arms but it was too light - mixed fairly evenly with Army Painter Black, I got it down to the dark bluey-grey hue I wanted for cooled magma.

Although the grey ended up overpowering the shades of red and brown, there is still some gradation of colour left  and the whole things have quite a nice, natural shade as opposed to if I'd just gone for grey straight over the bright orange.

Stage 6: Glue Poppy Seeds To Base

And then all you need to do is wait for the base to dry so you can glue on the poppy seeds whereupon you are basically done!  The bases could do with a wash to make them a little less flat looking and of course the whole thing needs a varnish, but it's all pretty straightforward.

So straight forward, in fact, that I'm trying to resist the urge to buy more...