Valius, the Keeper Aqshian

I recently finished* painting the Valius model from the Saviours of Cinderfall boxed set and am really happy with how it turned out.

Having finally assembled and primed a bunch of minis, this model stood out to me and I was keen to try a slightly different colour scheme to the box art. The more unique Stormcast character of Valius seemed a good opportunity to try out a darker, bronze-like armour scheme.

With the model primed Wraithbone, I started with a Balthazar Gold basefor the armour, shaded recesses with Agrax Earthshade and then experimented a little with highlight colour.

Liberator Gold was far too yellow (see the kneepad above) and so I switched to Stormhost Silver for edge highlighting.

As for so many new painters, I find faces really difficult to paint, both in tones and just the tiny details involved. I had watched a tutorial on an ‘easy’ technique for faces and began with a dark base of Catachan Flesh for his head, intending to work up the layers to a much lighter tone. His beard got base coated in Dawnstone, to be layered up to a light grey later.

Next up I based the gold elements: sword pommel, skull brooch on his chest, parts of the huge key over his shoulders and the rims of the shield. 

I wasn’t sure on an accent colour to go against the bronze armour, for the shield base and his cloak. A blue-green oxidised copper tone felt like it could work well, so I painted the shield base/background in (I think) Baharroth Blue. Once on though, it felt way too bright and light so I worked on deepening it with a couple of washes of Kroxigor Scales contrast paint.

Painting the cloak a similar green-blue and deepening the gold with a Reikland Fleshshade wash, then some edge highlighting with Stormhost Silver again, began to pull it together.

With the Catachan Flesh as a base for his head, I actually liked that darker skin tone and decided to keep it, just using Bloodreaver Flesh and Bugman’s Glow as layers and highlights. Some Corax white carefully layered on the beard — a good first test of my new Artis Opus series S brushes — worked nicely to give the grey beard effect I was after.

Layering up the shield details, I really didn’t have a plan and felt my way into it. At a certain point, I had the strange idea of doing a wash of Kroxigor over part of the gold Stormcast face on the shield front. The green colour that resulted didn’t sit well with the darker blue-green behind it which panicked me slightly, so I left that and worked on the scrolls which came out really nice.

While doing the scrolls, I decided to drybrush some of the same off-white (Pallid Wych Flesh I think) over the green and it started to look OK, so I went with it. Using Agrax with a very fine brush to go round the edges really helped differentiate the details.

The sculpted base was relatively simple paint-wise but by the time I was done, I’m really happy with this paint job.

I’m still very early in my return to the hobby (around 20-25 minis painted) and am pleased to be getting much better results than I did as a teenager 25 years ago.

* Well, mostly finished: I’ve spotted a couple of small details I missed and need to go back to. Back to the content