Apologies!

It’s been a long time since I last posted, I’ve just not been 100% lately and painting takes a back seat.  However I’ve been a busy bee in the last week and finished a unit of Temple Flame Guard.  The photos below show the finished product, hope it was worth the wait!

Temple Flame Guard unit - front view

Temple Flame Guard unit - front view (zoomed)

The Temple Flame Guard are a basic melee unit for the Protectorate, they have fairly basic stats, but their redeeming features are that they are a cheap points cost, fairly quick with reach.  They have Set Defence and Shield Wall order so can be a very effective tar-pit unit.  Spells such as Defenders Ward make this unit excel in this area.  I find that in games they seldom get back their points, but end up drawing a lot fire as people just want to kill them, maybe it’s because they wear skirts to battle, who knows! 

Regarding the painting of these models, I tried to take my time and get them looking as good as solos, which is obviously very time consuming, partially adding to the long time between my blog entries.  The skirts were painted using the Menoth Base to Menoth White Highlight layering technique I’ve used on all the Protectorate clothing so far.  Similarly the Sanguine clothing technique was used – both are detailed in the Protectorate faction book.  What was difficult about these models however was the boundary where the white meets the sanguine colour, it was very easy to allow the shading washes to bleed into the other colour by mistake.  I ended up painting both the white and sanguine together, i.e. base-coat both colours, then wash both colours, tidy up the bleeds, re-basecoat and wash until the join was good.  I applied a black lining technique between the two stark colours to aid the neatness of the joins and hide any tiny mistakes.  See photo below.

Temple Flame Guard trooper showing white/sanguine join

Once the major base coats were done the rest of the model went as normal, finishing up with the finer details last.  I used two different methods of shading the gold, to differentiate gold armour and the weapons’ gold.  It might have looked a bit ‘samey’ without this.  The armour was washed with chestnut ink to make it a warmer shade, whereas the weapons were dulled with a black wash – basically I wanted the man to stand out from the weapons.  Prior to painting I decided to crack off the shields as painting these separately would be easier, as well as looking better in the long run.  The drawback is that the join is less strong than when assembling the model in one go.  Some of the shields will undoubtedly fall off during the rigours of the gaming board!  One tip I picked up recently regarding the gluing of pre-painted components is to use super glue acceleration spray as this sets the glue before it can 'fog' up the paint work, plus it is really quick!  I have heard however that super glue acceleration spray makes for a weaker bond, however I haven't noticed this and I'd say more the opposite (in my personal opinion).

Some more photos, 360 degrees: