Undead - Einar Haugen, Wight

I'm still enjoying painting the living dead at the moment, so today I present the wight Einar Haugen of the Order of Dust.

I've had this fellow since he was first released back in the 90s. He was one of eight spectacular wights sculpted by Gary Morley. Each of them looks like an undead warlord in it's own right. I needed a couple of wights for my undead warband, so that seemed like a good opportunity to finally paint them up.

The Hateful Eight. Also, check out that vampire.

This was also my first outing with the new Games Workshop contrast paints. My own take on contrast is to integrate it into my existing way of painting and see how it fits in. I wanted the wights to have black iron armour, and having seen a very helpful tutorial from Tyler Mengel on black armour, I set to work.

I've found painting black armour a bit of a challenge in the past. Priming with Leadbelcher spray, I applied two coats of Black Templar paint mixed 2:1 with contrast medium. Contrast medium is a must have when using the new paints. It opens up so many more options to control the translucency of the paint. The effect of the black over metallic was to give the armour a black, oily, metallic sheen. Something that I'm not sure I could have achieved by simply drybrushing over black. I am very much sold on the contrast paints as another arrow in my painting quiver.

I also used Nazdreg yellow to tint areas to look more gold/brassy. Again, this saves me a lot of time without any loss in quality, and that, my disciples, is the painting grail. With washes of red, yellow, brown or green you can add rust, verdigris and filth to further tint the metals. So, with 90% washes and an all over drybrush of Mithril Silver the metal is done. It took about half the time I would have expected.

The wight blade took a little more thought. Several glazes of Waywatcher Green and heavier washes of Scorpion Green mixed with Lahmian Medium built up the colour. I wanted it to look like the metal was suffused with the magic of the wight blade rather than glowing. Again, a drybrush of Mithril Silver over the top finished it off.

Einar here is the first wight from my latest version of the Order of Dust. Their ancestors fought in ranks through several editions of Warhammer, but now it is time to pass the banner to a new iteration of the Order.

You can rest now grandad, I'll take it from here.

My next wight will be hot on the heels of Einar, and has a helmet any undead king would die for. Again.