Imperial Guard Priest

This week has seen some pretty extensive modelling going on.  After finishing the latest update of my Background Book, fluff has been given a bit of a break for a while while I clear the backlog of unfinished models in my collection.  A while back I had a serious re-org of my modelling area, which involved putting all the unbuilt models away in a drawer.  Very tidy, but unfortunately some have sat in there for quite a while now.

One of them is the Imperial Guard priest, an old-school GW model that I bought for fear of all the metal models being discontinued (which incidentally looks likely).  It's a classic model and although the zealous Priesthood aspect is not one the Palladians go in for, it's too nice a model not to get.  On top of that, writing a Tactica for HQ Units made me realise that the re-roll on the charge is too good to pass up.

The final effort on the manuscript.

For painting, I decided to avoid the coloured robes depicted in 'Eavy Metal's effort and go for something a bit more monk-like.  This resulted in undercoating different areas of fabric with different shades of brown (like Dark Flesh, Mournfang Brown, Scorched Brown, etc) then using some Army Painter: Soft Shade to give some shadows to the whole thing.  This was remarkably quick, and left me with plenty of time and patience for the centrepiece of the model, the book-on-a-stick.

I love getting my teeth into some nice detail freehand painting once in a while.  Last year, some of you may remember I spent a week brushing up (pun not intended) on my freehand skills when painting insignia on WW2 models - I wrote a bit about it here.  I did a little research and found a page of manuscript to copy - see the results below.

The bronze-gold armour was a good
practice run for the priest.

I really like the brass edging to the book, and my Chaos commander from last week was excellent practice.  Some of you were good enough to offer some advice.  Chris from over at SOPW helped me out:

I think I can help with the gold finish you are trying for. The trick is to do a final highlight that is a mix of silver and gold. It can be a bit tricky to get the mix right but something like 1 part silver to 5 parts gold usually will give you the over polished look.

And I duly tried this.  Not wanting to end up with a nondescript metalic sludge, the silver was very subtle but I think it makes a difference.  As for the script itself, I'm generally quite pleased although the consistency of the lines of text is a bit random.  And it's a bit thicker than I was going for.  But it looks okay from a distance, which is what I was going for.

With that out of the way the rest of the model was siplicity itself.  To cheer it up a bit, I painted my favoured hazard stripes on the chainsword (love those hazard stripes!)  Also, I painted what may well be the last autogun left on a 40K model!  Anyone care to correct me on that?

Anyway, it was a joy to paint and fairly straightforward.  The whole thing took about three hours, including drying time.  I'm hoping to try him out in a 40K game soon but only as a rules experiment, as priests are not favoured by the Palladians.  Too much shouting and waving of arms: very unsoldierly.

As for what's in store, me and Headologist are planning a Necromunda campaign soon, which means lots of gang-building and terrain construction.  We've both been doing some but I'll tease you by saying Headologist has a truly stunning piece of scenery in the works - hopefully he'll be able to share it with you soon.  I've got one more update of desk-clearing models to do, then there'll be a little Necromunda spot hopefully.

Anyway, until then hope you're all well and good luck with the dice!

The Colonel