Drakon-Sul, Male Elf Hero - Sidhe for Celtos

I've had this figure for many a moon. Like others in my collection, I bought it because it looked cool. The whole thing has a great Sidhe feel to me. Something like out of Naudia of the Silver Hand bit going. The whole range has some great Celtic feel to it. Some of their barbarians are top notch and would make great heroes for any RPG.

I did this guy with a lot of Andrea Paints. Mostly known for their high end miniatures, Andrea also makes paint and other miniature hobby tools and utilities like putty. Several of their boxed sets come in one color with six variants. It's what I used to paint the blue cloak, the silver and gold armor and face. Mind you the metallic colors only have three paints with the other three being inks and I used some of that ink on the cloak as well which somewhat muted the highlighting and shading. On the face I should have painted it before putting the sword arm on but lazy me did not do this wise thing.

The base is cork with some Vallejo texture thrown over it to try and disguise it a little. Not too sure how well that worked. Also did a few scruffs of dead grass from an old Games Workshop tub I have lying around here. Probably could have given that a highlight of white or something but I was tired of looking at the thing at that point.

After giving it a spray with the old sealant, I went over the armor with the gloss again. I tried to avoid the cape and face.

Overall, the figure is fairly simple. Lots of large flat surfaces on the armor and cloak. The face is partially obstructed by the arm when assembled so make sure to paint them separately. Not a lot of accessories on this guy like darts, daggers, belt pouches, back back or other hanging on riff raff.

Game use? He fits as an elf prince in a role playing game and while he is a bit bulkier than some of the Games Workshop or Mantic Elves, I don't think I'd have too much problem throwing him in one of those games or even one of Reaper's Warlord games.

Texture Testing

Okay, here we have three Reaper Miniatures. The big green guy is an Orc Warlord leader for the Even Faction. The two lizard dogs are from the Dark Haven line. I've owned both for years and decided it was time to paint them. That meant a repaint on the orc whose armor was originaly black. Did I mention I'm terrible at painting black? (Yeah, go ahead and snigger internet. I hear you say "it ain't just black." The lizard dogs I just used brush on Army Painter strong tone after using Vallejo brush on primer that was like German Green or something along that nature.

I decided I wanted to test Games Workshops new Texture Paint. I'm not one of these corporation haters who won't use a product just because it's from company X. On the other hand, GW does tend to be more expensive and well, their decesions from an outside view can sometimes look stupid.

Anyway, Hobbytown had a coupon for $10 off of $40. I figured I'd pick up the new paint set with the high elves. They didn't have that of course. And their starter set they did have was the old one. Not a bad deal if you wanted to hoard that stuff. Anyway, I decided the one thing I didn't have a lot of was something like the texture and the black primer. I'll discuss the black primer in another post if my squirrel brain can remember it.

Anyway, they did have all of the new paints and I picked up the texture, the primer, and a few shades or washes or whatever their calling it these days.

I then used the Lustrian Undergrowth Texture on the lizard beasts and had the Brown Earth by Vallejo on the Orc already.

Interesting.

The GW stuff is like $3.50+ a bottle for very small quantity. The Vallejo is like $12 something for like six times that amount.

But they are different. The GW stuff is almost like dry paint with some large pieces in it to give it some texture. The Vallejo material is almost all texture. Both can go on with a paintbrush and both benefit from multiple layers. But the Vallejo material is almost more like a layer of highly textured material like incredibly fine sand while the GW stuff is like popping down some big hunks in some paint. I'm not sure which one I enjoy more but think that both will have use in my table. If you want some real texture though, be prepared to use a lot of either of them.

This picture is pretty similiar to the other one but with a Celtos elf hero on some cork. I wanted to use the Brown Earth to try and disguise the cork a little. I don't think it really did anything of that nature.

Looking forward to trying out the Snow Texture. I've always had a problem with that as well. Yeah, I know, can't paint black, can't do snow texture on a base, is there anything I can do? Time will tell!