My Warhammer Fantasy 6th ed Tomb Kings Project
A short story about the beginning of my 6th ed Tomb Kings project for Warhammer Fantasy.
This is my first story here on Medium and while this one is about my personal Warhammer Fantasy hobby project, I will use my space here to write articles about the history of Warhammer and wargaming as well as all sorts of other hobby related topics. In between those I’ll write stories about my personal projects, like this one where I write about my 6th edition Tomb Kings project and other more personal stories about my years in the hobby. If you enjoy so called “Oldhammer” or “Middlehammer” related content, I’m sure you’ll find plenty to enjoy around here given time.
Now enough of the introduction, what is my Tomb Kings project about? In short, it is a project to build a Tomb Kings army using strictly miniatures released during 6th edition of Warhammer Fantasy Battles (WHFB). This is because I vastly prefer the older style of models compared to the later 8th edition miniatures, but also due to personal nostalgia, as this will be the army I dreamed of as a 13 year old boy. Back in 2003 when the Tomb Kings were released the first time as a full blown army of it’s own I bought and mostly built and painted around 1000 points worth of them and my current project is based on those same 20 year old models. I have since then purchased over 2000 points worth of models second hand on top, so I now have enough models to build a decently sized army with some options. I’m still missing a few units that I will get eventually to fulfill my goal of owning at least one playable unit of each unit type from 6th edition.
Repainting Old Miniatures?
Once I had decided to embark upon this project I had to experiment on what I could do with my original miniatures as I hadn’t worked with already painted or second hand miniatures before. I thought I’d need to strip all the models of their original paintjob and while I have done that for the metal models, I discovered that it’s not necessary at all for the plastic ones! That was a relief, since I have no experience with stripping plastic models and I didn’t want to risk damaging them as they have a lot of personal value to me.
I discovered that all I needed to do was to scrape and sand the moldlines that were still on the models and sand any rough areas on the surface of the miniature to ensure an even surface for the new paintjob. I’m sure if the models had been painted with a somewhat thick layer of paint this wouldn’t be possible, but luckily the 13 old me hadn’t done that. There was no loss of detail with this method at all and most of the surfaces are smooth and nice on these models after the rework, although some of the models were a bit rougher as they were originally from my 1999 Vampire Counts army but as these are undead skeletons, that doesn’t matter too much.
Even with that, the scraping, sanding, fixing and cleaning up still took me at least a couple of hours per model or even more, but someone who isn’t quite as meticulous as me can certainly do this much faster. For some of the miniatures I did add brush on primer to the areas where I had sanded all the paint away, but not for all of them, the paint sticks well enough with out it and all the models are varnished with multiple layers of extra matt varnish in the end anyway (except the metal parts), so I’m sure the paint will hold just fine for plastic models.
Painting My Tomb Kings
I’m quite a slow painter and as this is sort of my ultimate hobby passion project, I really want to be happy with the outcome, add to that the time spent cleaning up the models for repainting it currently takes me around 20 hours to finish a skeleton. I have now done 25 skeletons with this working method and spent all that time, but as there’s over 120 more skeletons of all kinds that I need to finish for this army, I will need to come up with ways to speed up the process a bit. I don’t mind this taking a few years, but I do eventually want to move on to my next project (which will be Dwarfs, more on them in another story).
For the main colour of my army I chose a paint which has a stunning tone, Bloodfest Crimson by ScaleColor, a sort of rich wine red or crimson. For the most part I’m only using this one army color on my core units, but I have added a bit of my secondary army colour here and there and this secondary colour will be much more present on elite units and characters. That colour is a dark teal / jade, using ScaleColor Despair Green as it’s base as that paint has a wonderful rich blue green tone to it. The verdigris that is quite heavily present on all the models acts as a sort of secondary army colour as well, as the Tomb Kings are a fantasy version of a bronze age culture, all the metals are bronze or gold.
Luckily early on I found a way to paint the bone that I’m really happy with, that’s very important as almost all the units in the army are mostly bone. Although just now having used this recipe for the bone on all my models for about 10 months I came up with an addition that makes it look even better. It’s just a subtle change which I’ll use going forward, so luckily I don’t think I need to go back over the finished models to add that. I’ll mention what it was below as I describe how I paint the bone.
The basis for all the bone in my army is a nice dark and warm bone colour, Thar Brown by ScaleColor. I basecoat all the bone with that paint, after which I do a recess shade using Aggaros Dunes (Citadel, contrast paint) with just a small drop of Payne’s Grey ink by FW. After that I go over with Thar Brown any areas where I didn’t want the shade and then paint the first highlights with a mix of Thar Brown & Mojave White (ScaleColor). After that is done, I glaze in all the shadows with a very diluted mix of Aggaros Dunes and water (around 1 to 5).
As mentioned above, the new thing I found is to add a hint of rich orange to this glaze, that adds just a tiny bit of colour to the shading and bone to make it more visually interesting, even though the actual orange tone is barely visible in the end. I have only done this with the skeleton horse mount for my Liche Priest which I’m currently painting, but I will do that going forward. That was achieved by adding a tiny bit of Gryph-Hound Orange (Citadel, contrast) to the glaze mix.
After the shadows are glazed in if there’s any spots where the glaze got a bit patchy or the transition isn’t smooth enough, I glaze in Thar Brown to smooth those areas. After that it’s back to highlighting with adding more and more Mojave White to the mix until at the end just the most prominent highlight spots get just pure Mojave White. All this gets you a nice warm slightly yellowish bone tone, which I think suits the Tomb Kings very well as they originate from the Deserts of Nehekhara or the barren areas of the Old World.
That’s it for the painting side for now, I’m sure I’ll write about how I paint the other areas in my future updates on this project.
Army Build & Future
So far I have finished 20x Skeleton Warriors with Hand Weapons and Shields, 5x Skeleton Warriors with Bows and one Tomb Swarm. This army will mostly be focused on all sorts of troops, mostly or fully excluding the constructs like the Ushbati and Bone Giants. I will certainly add those units with time as well, but for now I like the more regimented and “realistic” style of army with lots of Skeleton Warriors, Skeleton Horsemen, Chariots and Tomb Guard. For all of those I have enough models for now as I have around 150 Skeleton Warriors models (some I’ll use for Vampire Counts in the future), 25 Tomb Guard, around 30 Skeleton Horsemen, 11 Chariots, 2 Screaming Skull Catapults as well as all the 3 different variants of the original Tomb King / Prince models and at least 4 Liche Priests as well as other various models of which I’ll write more once I have finally finished them.
That’s it for this story, next time I’m planning to write an article about the history of one WHFB unit where I cover all the versions of miniatures released for that unit, who sculpted them, what were the influences and so on or possibly about what I think makes Warhammer Fantasy original and so good. In any case I will write about topics like those in the future along with many other topics.
If you made it this far, I really appreciate that, hopefully you found it interesting and please check back to see my other stories.
Thank you and all the best!
