Nighthaunt

Filed Under: Hobby

Last year, mostly in March and April, I painted a lot of Nighthaunt. I was still waiting on a few more models to appear in Mortal Realms magazine so I could round out my collection - Olynder, Kurdoss, and some Hexwraiths. Finally, this February, I got around to building and painting them.

I started off by putting together the first five of ten Hexwraiths. This kit sucks so much to build, man. Just awful. And I can imagine how bad it’s gonna be to push around the table, too.

My Nighthaunt paint scheme is very simple – turquoise/blue cloth, rusty metal, and green accents, with dark blue bases – but I’d forgotten how to paint it. It took me a little while to get it back. For future reference, here it is:

• Preparation: Airbrush white, airbrush turquoise, drybrush white.
• Dark blue cloth: Shyish Purple, drybrush white, Talassar Blue. I can avoid repetition by doing the purple before the all-over drybrush step from the preparation phase.
• Use Aethermatic Blue and Nihilakh Oxide to add some depth to skulls, arms, etcetera.
• When painting the hafts/handles of weapons, leave a bit of blue-green around the hands of the wielder, to show that the weapon itself is also kind of ethereal.
• Metal: Gryph-Hound Orange, then use a grey metallic paint to pick out edges and areas where the rust has been scraped away.
• Green: Scorpion Green (sadly out of production, but it has a contemporary equivalent - a very saturated green). Sometimes, if feeling special, work a bit of yellow into the absolute brightest bit, and darken down the extremities of the flame/light with a dark turquoise.
• Bases: Drakenhof Nightshade, selective shading with a runny dark blue (I water down Necron Abyss (also OOP, sorry)). Leave a bit of white/turquoise around where the ghost is touching the base, to give the impression of a glow.

I hated building the Hexwraiths so much I couldn’t face the thought of doing another five, so I decided I’d build the next unit as Black Knights, but paint them ghostly. I think this turned out rather well.

They were still quite bad to build, though. I did a long building session putting these and the two heroes together one Sunday and woke up the next morning with a repetitive strain injury in my right wrist that has yet to fully heal. Coincidence? I think not.

After I’d painted my horses, I moved onto the heroes. Here is Olynder, in all her glory:

Perhaps one of my favourite Citadel models.

There are some Reaper tombstones on her base, which I picked up at Black Lion Games on Buccleuch Street. On top of being a great board game shop, they now have a good stock of Reaper miniatures. It’s hard to resist the temptation to pick something up whenever I’m walking by. Anyway, these lovely graves provide a bit of visual interest as well as some much-needed support - Olynder was very wobbly when she wasn’t attached to one of them.

Finally, in his rightful place at the end of the procession, floats the Craven King, Kurdoss Valentian:

I look forward to using all these shiny new spectres in battle, probably after the new Battletome is released. I’m sure, down the line, I’ll pick up some more Nighthaunt. Those new Cross-boos look fun, and the boat guy is also pretty sweet. In the meantime I’m content to feel like the collection is ‘finished’.