The Great Taurus

This probably isn't one of my best paint jobs, but I'm really pleased with it anyway. I'm pleased with it basically because it involved me stepping waaaay out of my comfort zone.

I nearly chickened out and painted him red, ala the 90s paint job. But I didn't want to do that: I envision the Great Taurus as a near-molten mass of burning embers. It isn't an animal in any true sense, more like a daemon of the harsh landscape. I imagine that when it moves, it does so with a fizz and hiss and crackle, furnace heat blasting out of its joints. 

The thing is, this effect called upon me to do everything in completely the opposite way I normally would. The recesses would be brightest, and inconsistencies were actually desirable. This was going to be a ... hair raising experience. 

So I sprayed him black, then... uh... Averland Sunset yellow. I looked at what I'd done with a dull, distant sense of hysteria. If this went wrong, it was going to go very wrong. With a sort of crazed reckless determination, I grabbed a drybrush and heavily drybrushed the whole model Fire Dragon Bright. It looked unutterably horrible. Before I could cower out, I grabbed the Mephiston Red and hammered the model with a heavily drybrushed layer of it. It looked like a film of a John Blanche nightmare directed by Gary Morley. But I was committed now.

I did a sort of rough wetbrush layer with Eshin Grey over the top. Mercifully, it was starting to look like something. I then applied two layers of Nuln Oil over the grey areas to give it the uneven impression of ash and coals.

I picked out his horns, nose ring, hooves and eyes in brass colours, and applied small amounts of Carroburg Crimson, Fuegan Orange and Ardcoat to soften rougher edges and give a bit of a glow. 

It's worth noting that this is a very beautiful model to work with, which is puzzling for a model that was sculpted 25 years ago. It remains an imposing, ferocious and distinct monster which I'm pleased to have been able to get hold of. 

Warhammer: Age of Rebuilding - Interlude the first

Bet you thought Valten was dead. Again.

But nothing seems to keep the Wolf of Sigmar down for long.  Of course, he’s now in a city filled with evil dwarfs who want to torture him until they figure out what makes him tick. This should go well…

Read what Valten's up to

This is the first of my ‘interlude’ supplements. The plan is to do these between those bigger supplements which take a long while. ‘Thunder over Nuln’ is taking a while, so I thought it was time to catch up with the man who just won’t stay dead.

Note: Valten’s peculiar condition will be familiar to some readers of Black Library novels. However, even the most eager consumer of lore will be slightly bewildered to that Valten has this unusual gift. This is entirely my invention. I’ve never wanted to decanonise the Storm of Chaos, which is why Age of Rebuilding is peppered with references to the invasion of ‘Surtha Lenk, the False Archaon’. When debating how to account for the fact that Valten has apparently died twice, I decided to embrace it.

Veteran readers may smile at the return of another badass of yesteryear, who finds himself debilitated in a way that deviates from the original lore. You’ll understand when you come to it. This apparent contradiction is because unlike the Storm of Chaos, this character’s two timelines were not possible to blend. So instead, I retconned one and decided to retell the other one in a slightly different form.