Runewars: Reanimates

The foundation of a Waiqar army are its undead reanimates, the foot soldiers of the army and as such, most of us are going to paint quite a few more of these than any other miniature in our collection.

My friend and I split 3 core sets so the challenge for me has been to pain a whopping 48 skeletons.  Suffice to say for a guy that isn’t exactly a mini painter, this was going pretty hard core right out of the gate.

The first order of business was of course assembly and while I found it a bit fiddly, it was considerably easier to connect and glue minis than cutting them off sprus and posing them.  Call me a novice, but I greatly appreciated this in Runewars.  It saved time and got me to the point of priming quickly.

When I looked over the available color schemes, I have to admit, I was mostly thinking about “how hard it was” rather than “how much I liked it”.  Oddly enough however after reviewing the Waiqar Painting Guide, not only did I pick the easiest to paint color scheme but it also turned out to be the one that I liked the most aesthetically.

This novice got a lucky break and found the ghost theme, one that is both easy to paint and looks great.

My choice was the “The Ghost Army”.  It requires few paints, comes out looking pretty ok and most importantly it was very easy to paint even for an unsteady hand like mine.

Priming the units with Necron Flesh I stuck to the program, a nice thin coat and I had 48 miniatures drying inside of a couple of hours.

Primed and ready in under 2 hours, not bad.

I did make some minor changes to my paint job compared to the guide and perhaps you may or may not notice the subtle differences here.

For the armor, I actually started things off with “Gunmetal” instead of “Rough Iron”.  This was largely because I really felt I wanted the armor to shine a lot more then it did in the guide, so a dark under layer didn’t seem a good start.  I also wanted the green from the upcoming “Green Tone Shade” to actually be visible on the armor as “green rust” is kind of a real thing.

I wanted a rustic look for the armor, I found it too shiny with “Shining Silver”.

After the “Gunmetal” I did a full body, nice and thick layer of “Green Tone Shade”.  Really making sure to get the crevices so and making sure the model was nice and green.  I followed up as instructed in the guide with a “Necrotic Flesh Highlight” on the skeleton body parts and a highlight layer of “Gunmetal” instead of “Shining Silver”, again because I wanted the tone to be darker.  This gave it a darker shine you could say.

I then went through with “Chestnut Ink”, very lightly, on various areas of the metal parts of skeletons, making sure to not do it everywhere, just kind of a splash here, a line there.

In natural light the greens are greener making the skeletons appear even more menacing.

Then I did highlights with a variations of light beige colors, going from “brain-matter” to sometimes more fleshy tones as far as almost white in some places”.  I left the shields a bit greener, so the highlights mainly went on the face.

I finishes off the models with “Blood Red” on the eyes.

The red eyes was my own idea, it seemed appropriate but it was an extra step that needed to be taken very carefully. Shakey hands beware!

Finally I did two layers for the base, plain green grass and jungle grass.

All and all each model takes about 10 minutes of actual painting and about 30 minutes total (with drying).  I did 4 models initially but will continue with an assembly line for the rest.

A bloody Axe, a small touch to make this skeleton a little unique. I laid the paint on thick to make it appear chunky and slimy.

Dedicated To All Things Gaming