Journey to the Silver Tower

I finally got a chance to pick up my copy of Warhammer Quest Silver Tower last weekend and have started work putting together the figures. I decided yo start with the Questor as I had some ideas on how I wanted to paint him to avoid the golden statue look of the official paint job.

The first thing I noticed about the miniatures is how well they go together. These are probably the first of this new generation of plastics from GW that I've worked with and I'll be honest they really blew me away. All of the parts go together perfectly and layer over each other to hide seams and mold lines. They remind me more of a Japanese model kits than the clunky models that GW used to put out 10 years ago. The downside is that there is really only one way to easily assemble the models which is going to make the second half of the monsters a bit harder to make unique.

My plan on the Questor was to make him a literal white knight. So I went with a cool white for the armor and a warm white for the cloak. I kept to some gold to break it up a bit. I also wanted to give the impression that he's been out fighting evil for a while so I scuffed up the paint on the armor and gave him a bit of wear with some weathering powders.

I'm still undecided on how I want to do the bases. I want to have them all match so I decided to hold off on his till I figure it out. Making it more difficult is that rooms in the game are pretty random ( as befits a Tzeentch chaos tower) and I really haven't figured out a good choice that might blend in to all of them. I'm considering a tile or mosaic looking but I might just fall back on simple stone slabs too.

Next for Silver tower will be some of the cultists.

More Stone Heads

Two more Big Giant Stone Heads for the collection. Both of these are modelled after later generation hybrids and represent nobles, viziers or something like that. Anyways they're a bit more human looking overall. I really wanted them to give them that beatific smiling Buddha face that a lot of Khmer statues have but I just couldn't get a smile to work with the genestealer look. Of course GW art was no help I don't think they have a single picture of a smiling Genestealer Hybrid. In the grim future there is only scowls and people shouting. I settled for more of a frowning face and maybe a kinda disappointed guy?

For the first one I took some inspiration from a video game I played recently ( Torchlight II -  I'm about 4 years behind on my gaming) which had a ruined temple with a stone face sticking up out of the ground. So after sculpting the face I cut the back off at an angle so it would look like it mysteriously sank into the earth.

The second head is a bit more massive as I wanted it be be free standing. I wanted to give it a design that mimicked both the cowl that the genestealer Magus always seem to wear and the border that surrounds a lot of the Khmer statues. The teardrop design was pressed in using a plastic straw that was creased into the right shape and then I went back over it to firm up the lines. The back got a lot more DAS clay added to it to round out the shape of the cowl.

The rest of the build went as normal adding the flexible base. For the paint job I took some inspiration from the red rock formations from our trip to Colorado. In particular a rock face in Waterton Canyon that had some great weathering and color to it.

I started painting them a dark brown then mixed in orange and green into it for more color. Then worked my way into the grays. When doing rocks I always stipple on the paint as it tends to give a more natural textured look. They ended up much grayer than the actual rocks back at the canyon but I like how they came out. With a much richer tone then my first stone head.

I have plans for at least 3 more heads but I might do even more as they are really fun to make.