Painting the Throng of Nog

Colours of the Throng

Ah, dwarfs. My inaugural game of Warhammer was 3rd edition, played with my freshly-built skeleton horde against my brother's orcs and goblins and our friend Andrew's dark elf and skaven army. We didn't use the psychology rules, because they were 'a bit complicated'.

Fast forward a few weeks and – in the spirit of bitter, defeated younger brothers everywhere – I shelved the unpromising undead and instead er... 'liberated' the models left over from the Warhammer Regiment set – namely the dwarfs...

I haven't really played Warhammer since 3rd edition, instead getting into various iterations of Epic with Andrew's own little brother, and 40k – my adventures in which you can read over at my personal blog +Death of a Rubricist+. The appeal of a dwarf army, however, has stuck with me. To my beard-rending shame, I literally binned my old lead army at the age of 14 or so. I built a new army, based on then-new plastics around 2005ish, though again that has been lost to time.

Spool onwards to recent years, and the PCRC have had various spurts of enthusiasm for Warhammer. I picked up the models here during one such surge, though again they've remained unpainted. Perhaps this, then, is the point at which the dawi say 'No more! Paint us, you ***** umgi.'

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Painting the most recent sculpts of GW dwarves dwerin dwarfs appeals to me. They're small, and have an appealing combination of plate armour and naturalistic areas like beards and skin. I'd prefer a few more bare-headed sculpts, and I dislike the sculpted detail on the the shields – I'm at a stage where I enjoy, rather than dread, painting freehand – but overall, these are lovely models.

I primed one half of this regiment red and painted the metal bits black. This half was sprayed blacka and is having the red bits painted. I'm sure the end result will be a bit motley, but that's proving wonderfully freeing.

The whole army is second-hand – and that means that a substantial portion was already built; some undercoated. Trying to get a coherent effect would have meant stripping and re-priming the figures, a dull task that I didn't fancy. Instead, I thought I'd lean into it. These are, after all, pseudo-historical models. They're not – as, say, Space Marines are – served by armourers and chemists and craftsmen who strive to create as uniform an effect as possible. No, they're independent, subject to the vagaries of supply lines; and naturalistic. With the possible exception of elves and similar, Warhammer armies aren't as concerned with uniform as a modern audience would be. Getting it 'near enough' is all a petty warlord can hope for – unless he's willing to pay for the batch of fabric himself.

With that in mind, painting these figures is led by experimentation and play. While batch-painting has never appealed to me, being able to break things up and go with my instincts instead of sticking rigidly to a 'recipe' is proving to be a lot of fun.

Sprayed silver on receipt, these figures are being lavished with washes – like the purple over bronze here. I'm tempted to break out the oils and use them to experiment, too. The more variance on a basic scheme, the better!

That freedom is a big part of why Age of Sigmar appeals to me. Beyond painting, I remember 3rd edition Warhammer seeming like a huge exciting universe as a nipper. It combined all the best bits of different mythologies and pop culture – Jason and the Argonauts-style skeletons versus Tolkein's orcs, while a giant from Norse myth stomped across the field... That all seemed to get increasingly stratified and ordered as the editions went on and it all became familair to me. Even though I wasn't playing, I read in White Dwarf as all the bits of the map got filled in, all the weird details on sculpts got explained as a particular specific... everything got explained. I loved reading about it at the time, but looking back, a lot of the appealing mystery and distinctive strangeness somehow seemed to get lost.

With Age of Sigmar, a lot of the grand magic is back for me. Sure, the metaphysics of the Realms is explained, but it's got a mythic scope again. Somehow, GW have managed to satisfy both my desire for things not to be explained, and my hunger for detail. There's simultaneously space for Tolkein-style 'Dark Ages with a dragon or two' low fantasy and crazy mythic 'Teatime of the Gods' affairs.

Norse myth and Tolkein tropes have a lot to answer for.

Anyway, enough jabbering; these figures aren't going to paint themselves. I'll post updates as I go, and leave you with a work-in-progress banner bearer. As an example of the very loose approach I'm taking, I decided I'd just go straight to the bits I like best: skin and hair. I'll just have to be careful when painting around them.

Both skin and beard here are made up from combinations of Vallejo's Black Red 70.859, Off-white 70.820 and Citadel Flash Gitz Yellow.  I used touches of Citadel Leviathan Purple wash to add a little age to the eye-bags and to differentiate the nailbeds. Both of the pictures sculpts are Forgeworld pieces kindly picked up by Lucifer216 just prior to them going out-of-print – they therefore represent some of the few models in the army bought new.