Vampires Chapter 5: Happy Skeleton Day!

If you've been following my recent posts you'll know I've been painting up a bunch of skeletons for my Vampire Covenant army. (If you haven't been following then now's a good time to get in on the ground floor of my readership, and tell your friends you knew the blog before it got big.)

Well, it took a while but here's the finished unit!

And a shot of just the command rank:

I'm very pleased with how they turned out.

As it takes me so long to paint stuff, I often find that my painting style and quality have changed by the time I paint a new unit for an army (or, in this case, the second half of a unit). I think with these skeletons I managed to stay very close to the original while still exploring some new things in my painting. Here I wanted to be a bit bolder with my colours, and I think the new batch of skeletons look more vivid, but not so much that they look out of place next to the older ones. Here's all 50 on a movement tray I promise to replace one day.

Together the whole unit looks cohesive, if a little hard to get all in frame.

I also spent a little extra time on the banner, on which I've painted a freehand design of a vampiric skull with a ribbon of yellowed parchment. The motto on the parchment reads MORS IN VICTORIA (Latin for "Victory in Death", or so the internet tells me), although it is hard to make out as the banner is old and tattered and also I need more practise writing on models. (The skeleton banner is also way too narrow for my liking, and the curve in it made it very awkward to freehand.)

Now I need to replenish my grass tufts so I can finish basing my barrow guard and put them on the "finished" vampire shelf.

Until next time, happy Samhain!