Solonavi Themed Miniatures

These guys are nearly finished. I just need to tweak a few details and highlight the bases and I'm done. I don't often paint fantasy miniatures, so these were a nice break from Sci-Fi and GW minis in general. Size wise these are a little bit smaller than a space marine, but crammed full of detail. The posing of the figures, in particular the middle one, is pleasing. These are also the first Reaper Miniatures I've painted and all in all, its been an enjoyable experience.

As mentioned in my earlier post, the inspiration for the colour scheme comes from the Wizkids game, Mage Knight Pyramid, and the four Solonavi Seeker heroes. Their colour scheme is predominantly purple with facemasks to match.

As I said, they're crammed full of detail. I've guessed that the two bottles at her side hold poisons of some description.

I kept the skin deliberately pale as it seemed to suit her. Just a wash of ogryn flesh and then repaint with a very pale skin tone. The armour for all three was done via the tried and trusted approach of boltgun metal (actually Reaper Master Series Blackened Steel, but they're pretty much identical), wash black, drybrush Mithril Silver, line highlight with mithril silver where appropriate and then a wash of Asurmen Blue into the recesses. I've also tried to drybrush and highlight with a zenith approach.

A special note for the hair, as I'm really pleased how this came out and was decidedly simple to do. Paint hair Bubonic Brown as a base, then wash with Gryphonne Sepia making sure the darker shade gets into all the recesses. The next step was kinda accidental, but I drybrushed a highlight of a pale skin tone, thinking it was white. This worked so much better, as the creamy skin tone (and anything like Kommando Khaki or Bleached Bone would do) blended nicely over the washed Bubonic and the final drybrush highlight of Sunburst Yellow. I think white would have flattened the final  yellow highlight and also turned it a weird lemon colour, whereas the yellow worked with the cream perfectly, giving me a rich natural looking highlight.

This character (Seeker Elydia) isn't as dynamically posed, but I love the variety in his outfit as it gave me the opportunity to take some different approaches. The tabbard I did as black, using black, then the Reaper Master Series Dark Elf Skin tried to bring out the highlights.

The Solonavi are crystalline creatures and they gift the four heroes with crystalline weapons. On the original figures, these weapons are clear plastic. This spearhead mostly clearly shows my attempt to recreat this effect, with mixed results. It looks ok, it just doesn't look crystalline. A lot of line highlighting went into this, followed by some careful washing with Leviathan Purple. I might apply the effect to any Space Marine power weapons I do in the future.

Seeker Mock doesn't lend himself so well to being photographed, but he's a nice pose all the same. I need to do something to make his sword crosspiece and hilt more interesting but I haven't worked out what yet. Originally I was going to do the entirity of the weapons as the crystal effect, but it was just too much, so I scaled it back to the blades.

You might recall from my earlier post that I was having difficulty getting the purple colour right for the cloth, it was just too dark. I went back and redid the cloth with a mix of Scab Red and Reaper Imperial Purple (about 50/50) and then wet blended Reaper Nightshade Purple (which is a lovely dark colour) into the recesses. The Scab Red added a bit of warmth to the base purple, which was otherwise too cold. And then built up the highlight by mixing in more Amythest Purple to my scab+imperial mix and did a final highlight with the Amythest before washing the whole thing down with GW Baal Red, just to bring a bit more warmth in. I'm very happy with the end result.