WIP - Minor Demons

I've been doing a little assembly work on my Undead Chaos Army, which includes, as noted before, two bands of minor demons.

These three demons are conversions, which I don't normally like to use. I like to play figures "as is" (otherwise there'd be no end to the converting). However, I was inspired by these conversions for the 9th Age project which I thought looked really cool and would help me fill out that second band.

These are simple head swaps for Mantic's heavily armored Elohi models. The original pics show Elohi bodies with armored skulls from GW's Grave Guard set. I actually did obtain some of these skulls, but upon further reflection, I thought that these would be an ideal use for my Burning Skulls from puppetswar.eu.

I originally bought those flaming skulls to use with my conversion of my GW mounted Chaos Knights, but the skulls were far, far too small to use with the more robust GW models. However, they fit right in with the Mantic figures and give a really cool infernal feel to these undead demons.
The Mantic Elohi are larger models, somewhat ogre-sized, but not enough to put them in the range of "Greater Demons".

Pictured below are the various parts primed in black (excepting the skulls primed with pure white.

Assembled (sans skulls) and awaiting zenithal highlighting

Assembled and zenithal highlighted.

First pass at the flame effects. I'm going to have to go in and directly apply some more yellow in the recesses and frost the tips with charred black.

WIP Skeleton Chariots... Old School!

Been testing out a few things including my new air brush and some instabond accelerator for superglue - which, by my eyes, is the greatest invention of Western Civilization. It's miraculous. So I've been on a tear gluing together a bunch of old models that I can never seem to keep together. Some of which are these old school skeleton chariots back from the days when GW models were called "Citadel". While I was assembling, I also figured out I'd do some painting as well.

C22 Plague Cart

This is the old Citadel "Plague Cart" from the early 80's. A funny little model, sort of a precursor to the current plague cart. The ox cart is driven by a wraith, but I'm not partial to wraiths or other ethereals in my army - nothing but bone! But that's solved with an easy conversion. I just clipped an appropriately sized plastic skull in half and glued him into the void in the hood. Now he's a Grim Teamster!

Assembled, primed and painted with the zenithal highlighting technique.

Grim Teamster taking shape!

Pile of corpses washed with Agrax Earthshade.

MD8 Skeleton War Machines

This is a chariot from the Citadel Skeleton War Machines boxed set released in the mid-80's. In addition to the chariot it also came with the "skull chucker" catapult, and were the first chariot and artillery piece in my Legion.

I always found this big hunk of metal to be a bitch to keep together however, but using the instabond it fit together easy peasy. So here it is assembled, primed and zenithal highlighted.

In the original set, the hero was a bull-headed beast man by the name of "Longhorn". But Longhorn is doing duty in a beast man unit in my Undead Chaos army so I had replace him. I wanted to keep it in the Oldhammer Citadel family but most of those models are already in units. But I did find this model loitering around, and early 90's Citadel wraith/banshee.

Normally, I'm not a banshee guy because I'm not into ethereals, but she's pretty skeletal so I picked her up at some point. And when looking at her the idea hit me.

Long haired woman hero in a chariot? Boudica!

I've been listening to the British History Podcast, which is a fantastic show, and that turned me on to the story of the Iceni queen who led a rebellion against the might of Rome in the 1st century A.D. This would be a lovely representation of the doomed queen who I could plop down in my 1st century A.D. Undead Roman Legion. Romans... defeated enemy... all winding up in service to the dark arts in the end!

WIP Skeletal Hydra

Well, I got my hands on the new skeletal hydra from Ral Partha. So here are some updates.

The various individual parts of the model, primed and base-coated with Scalecolour Thar Brown using my new airbrush!. The model can be fitted in a five or seven headed configuration. It also comes with eight separate skulls.

Base-coated and assembled. I went with the seven headed version. After the base-coat I used the zenithal highlighting technique using Vallejo Air Bone White and then an almost pure white to highlight the very top.

Washed with GW's Agrax Earthshade. The all purpose undead shading technique.

We Few. We Infernal Few. We Band of Demons.

As has been noted before, 30 plus years of collecting has left me with more skeleton models than I could ever hope to field in any one game. Unfortunately, games are rare these days with me traveling the world over. But in the ever renewed hope that I may actually have to field a bunch of these figures on the tabletop at some point, I've started an organization scheme that divides my Legion into smaller specific armies. For example, I have my 5th century BCE Classical Greeks - which I've just about put the finishing touches on. I also have my 1st century CE Imperial Romans, my 15th century CE Sengokku period Japanese (samurai) army. I have a New Kingdom Egyptian army (Tomb Kings...duh). I have probably about three Medieval European fantasy armies. I also have my 17th century CE pirate army (probably the least useful to me). With those wonderful Mierce Miniatures Jutes now coming online I think I have enough for a small Dark Age Anglo-Saxon army - well at least a brigade. Plus I have a brigade's worth of demi-humans (orcs, dwarves, halflings, skaven, lizardmen, elves) - although not enough of each. I probably have almost a brigade worth of undead orcs. Elves I can't even field a unit without some conversions.

The latest army I have been putting together is my undead Chaos Army. Granted the line between regular Chaos and undead is sometimes a little iffy to begin with. A lot of chaos models can do double duty. But I have been able to put together, without "counts as" models from Chaos and just a few conversions, a large Chaos army that is specifically undead.

Chaos armies are interesting because they are comprised of a lot of different elements - each of which could have an army based around them on their own; beastmen, chaos warriors, and the element we will be looking at today...demons.

Demons are a staple of Chaos forces, and in at least my experience, generally classified into two types; Greater Demons and Minor Demons. Greater Demons are the large, super powerful, super dangerous creatures who represent the actual fallen angels and lead the armies of chaos across the battlefield. Then there are the Minor Demons who, while still very dangerous to know are less powerful than their masters and usually fight in recognizable units.

Minor Demons

Right now I count 23 Minor Demons in my Chaos Army, just short of the 24 needed for two bands of 12. Mounted on skirmish trays and fighting in a war band formation, these "minor" divinities are the rock solid elite troops of Chaos. Expensive points-wise in Piquet, they are six slot creatures that have extraordinary abilities like "flight", "toughness", and "cause terror" balanced by "formed troops" (so they can fight as a unit) and "weapons skill" (so they can use weapons).

First up is the beautiful, if somewhat diminutive "Judgement" from CMON sculpted by Pedro Fernandez. This is a really detailed and well proportioned sculpt, although it can look a little dainty next to more robust figures.

 Judgement

Dark Sword Miniatures "Death Knight with Scythe" sculpted by Dave Summers.

 DSM7527 Death Knight with Scythe

The following are not produced as demons, but rather conversions. I don't like to field conversions much, as I like to play figures as they're advertised. But I saw these figures which had been converted to act as winged reapers for the 9th Age project and thought that I had rarely seen a simple head swap work so well. They're Mantic Elohi (angels) with the heads swapped with GW Vampire Count Armored Skeleton skulls. They look pretty sweet.

Greater Demons