Kainan’s Reapers and finding a colour scheme for Ossiarch Bonereapers

I’ve just begun painting my Ossiarch Bonereaper warband, Kainan’s Reapers, after struggling to find a colour scheme that inspired me  .

I like the general aesthetic of the Ossiarch Bonereapers — a less fragile, more stylised version of more traditional skeleton armies. If the Stormcast Eternals are basically space marines in a fantasy setting, then the Ossiarchs appear to pull similar inspiration from the Necrons.

A couple of months ago I picked up the Ossiarch Bonereaper battleforce box, adding a nice chunk to the ‘pile of shame’ in one fell swoop. I don’t live too far from the North East Model Centre, who offer 20% off everything Games Workshop, making big boxes like this even more attractive.

I’ve only assembled 10 of the Mortek Guard so far while I’ve been more distracted by Stormcast Eternals and some other bits though. I began painting one Mortek to match the box with contrast paints and I can see that these models lend themselves nicely to the speed painting style — bones suit contrast paint really well. I couldn’t decide what colour to use for the greyer armour edging though, which rather pathetically stopped me in my tracks for a while.

After moving onto other models for a while and looking at different paint schemes for Stormcasts, I came across the Crematorians legion of the Ossiarch Bonereapers: charred black skeletons with glowing embers burning within that looked really cool.

Searching for guidance on how to paint them, I came across  a nicely explained scheme posted to Imgur and decided to try replicating that. My first attempt wasn’t great: it feels like the over-brushing technique probably works better on the larger models but is difficult on the tiny little Mortek Guards, especially when I’d made the mistake of already gluing on the shields!

So, another Ossiarch left half-painted. Not going well…

Painting Kainan’s Reapers

Finally, we come to Kainan’s Reapers. In amongst my various purchases so far this year, I picked up the Warhammer: Underworlds starter set — partly because the game looked interesting and partly because the Underworlds warbands look really cool and can be cross-played in Warcry.

Eventually I managed to pick up a copy of the Kainan’s Reapers Ossiarch warband on ebay. They were already assembled and primed white, though the primer looks like it was applied in the cold and the surface is quite grainy.

This is a mistake I made with my Kurnoth Hunters, rendering them extremely difficult to paint although thankfully this set weren’t so bad.

Searching for examples of how other people had painted up their Reapers, I came across a gorgeous colour scheme that’s towards the Crematorian style (unfortunately a link to X, formerly Twitter, which I avoid as much as I can but it’s where the photos were) while being both a bit more muted — no glowing — and richer in colour — warm armour, leather and sandy base.

This got me inspired to try something similar with my own miniatures and that’s what I’ve now begun.

Unsure on colour matching, I picked the Hakor figure to go first and have been pleased with my results so far:

The bones

I went with a base of Eshin Grey for the bones, which I wasn’t convinced would be dark enough but am actually quite happy with in the end. Layering up from there, @BasedMiniatures’ scheme had a slight blue cast, so I mixed 1:1 Eshin Grey and Thousand Sons Blue to drybrush a rough highlight.

Later on, working up the green on the sword, I experimented with a rough drybrush of Sybarite Green over the top and that’s stuck for now. It could perhaps do with being dialled back a little, though the green cast is growing on me.

I’m still not confident with edge highlighting, but I’d like to get some edge highlighting done, particularly around the face to pick out more of that skeletal detail.

Armour

I’m not quite happy with the armour as it is: it’s ended up a bit too shiny and metallic so I need to work on dulling it down. For now, it’s a base of Screaming Bell, with Fulgurite Copper drybrushed over and Agrax Earthshade in the seams and to shade certain areas.

I like the dark brown accents in the reference image, so I might look at knocking the brightness back in the same way and see if that helps balance it. My other option is to just work on pulling more shade across all the armour but maintaining the all-over bronze look.

The base

The deeper-than-usual sand colour on the bases in @BasedMiniatures’ scheme really pulled the look together for me, so I tried to replicate something similar. I used a base coat of roughly 2:1 Morghast Bone and Skrag Brown and added a little bit of Armageddon Dunes technical texture paint to the already-sculpted base to try to reinforce that desert feel.

At the moment it’s probably coming across more clay-mud, though I don’t dislike it. I need to pick out the details like the skull in the sand and will perhaps have another pass at the general ground colour when I do that.

Moving on to the rest

I like this broad paint scheme, so now I need to paint up the rest of the warband. I’ll see if I end up adjusting the green hue to the bones and the armour shade as I see more of them together, while I’ve got a little temptation to have one of the band stand out by having lighter bones, although that may not work as a lot of this scheme is about the contrast. Time will tell! Hopefully I can keep up the motivation to paint all six before too long.