Miniatures > Miscellaneous > Oathbreaker
Oathbreaker
One of my good friends from high-school and university has spent quite a lot of his time making jewellery, and sculpting small items. As an avid Lord of the Rings fan, he was very interested in obtaining a number of the busts, swords, and other collectables released by Sideshow, on license from New Line.
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One bust he always wanted was the King of the Dead, from the Return of the King. Unfortunately, the only release of the King of the Dead was a statue, which didn't fit with the collection of busts he already had. So he decided to try his hand at making a bust himself.
Here you can see the result of his efforts (awesome), and the results of my painting efforts (not too bad). Note the official paintmasters (Rick) work can be seen here, and I would thoroughly recommend having a look at it.
Base Coat. First, I based the entire bust in Chaos Black. Basing in black gives a much darker appearance to the final result. If you want to paint bright colours, base in white, otherwise you'll need to paint over the bright colours a number of times before they stand out properly.
Eyes. Next came the eyes. Since Rick had done an awesome effect with glowing eyes, I thought I would try a completely different approach, and give him real eyes. They could be better, but I'm happy with them for now. I used a faint red surrounding on the eyes to make them appear a bit more unreal.
Face 1. I did the first face layer in Catachan Green. I was aiming for a zombie-ish appearance, and as such wanted the face to be mostly green. This particular colour was a good dull matte green, and provided a good starting point.
Bleached Bone was used to colour the teeth and the bone showing through the skin. I also put a larger amount of red around the eyes.
Face 2. To darken the colour of the skin, and provide appropriate aging to the exposed bone, I added a layer of Flesh Wash over the entire face. This worked much better than I had hoped, giving the whole face a look very close to what I had originally been aiming for.
After the wash, I used Bleached Bone again to make the teeth lighter than the rest of the exposed bone. The beard consists of a layer of Codex Grey, with Skull White drybrushed over the top.
Helmet. Moving off the face, I decided to tackle the helmet next. Starting with the two cheek-guards, I tested out a method which in the end I used on the entire helmet. The basic steps were as follows:
- Base in Chaos Black
- Drybrush Boltgun Metal over the entire surface.
- Drybrush Burnished Gold over the entire surface, though not as heavily as the previous layer.
- Apply Tin Bitz in various locations to simulate rusting.
- Apply Dark Green Ink in various locations to simulate tarnishing.
- Cover the whole area with Black Ink, not too thick. This makes the recessed areas slightly shiny, darkens the gold and green areas, and blends the "rust" in with the metallic colours more.
- Lightly drybrush Burnished Gold onto the raised areas.
Note the cheek-guards are attached with Blu-tack in the image, so they can easily be removed.
Armour. For the armour, I started by drybrushing the chainmail, and painting the cloak with Red Gore.
I then painted the golden cross bands using the same method as I did for the helmet.
The final touches involved more golden trim than the helmet. The helmet looks a lot darker in the picture than it actually is.
Finished? This is the (probably) finished version of the Oathbreaker kit. There are a couple of areas I might touch up a little if I feel like it. The cloak on the front are parts of that, as I'm not completely happy with the differentiation between the colours of the two parts.