Hobby WIP: Old School Archaon

I gave myself an early Christmas gift this year: Archaon the Everchosen. 

If you've spent much time reading through my ramblings over the years, you know that Warhammer Fantasy Battles got me into wargaming, and that I played Empire for a bit at the start before picking up Warriors of Chaos to close out Eighth Edition. While I had some success as the edition wrapped up, I would argue that I never quite "got" proper list building in the game, and never really picked up any legit centerpiece models.

However, I may have timed this purchase a little poorly. Apparently GW had reset him in late November to be "made to order", an event which I missed entirely since I don't follow their announcements. Instead my "new" Archaon popped up on one of my ebay searches, and while I was mulling it over, the seller offered him at a discounted price, and so I took it. So, oddly enough this may have been an instance of a used ebay mini being more expensive that a new one, but I can't seem to find how expensive the new GW model would have been. So I'll count this as a win.

 

From the front. 

The paint job is actually passable for the tabletop, with multiple colors and such, though I will obviously be redoing it. It's now my little commemorative centerpiece model after all. Not sure yet if I will strip it down the the metal and start completely fresh or just repaint it or how best to approach this all yet. So far I've just scraped around and freed it form the plastic base, and given the model a light rinse to clean it up a bit. We'll take it slow and see how much we need to undo.

From the side. Scraping and separating the base got be down to metal, so I'm not even sure if this is primed or what. I'll need to figure all that out before I start. If I need to re-prime, this will probably turn into a longer-term project, as it is winter and generally bad weather for priming with my rattle cans.

I have only seen the model in person once before, when I borrowed one for an Mega Battle that our local Warhammer Fantasy group ran to conclude a our lengthy months-long End Times narrative campaign. Our  old "club" forum is now defunct, but I did find a recap of that event over in the WiscoDice blog archives, written up by the player across from me. 

The Mega Battle was one of the first events I had a real hand in organizing and running. Things didn't go as smoothly as I had hoped for on the day, but I learned a lot and generally speaking, I had a great time. I think this will be a fun hobby side project to remind myself of that mega battle, how I got into wargaming, and how far I've come as a hobbiest. Typically I paint to what I would call a decent tabletop standard, but I think I'd like to try and push my hobbying a bit here, and make this a legit centerpiece unit. Things like adding more highlights and such. So, we'll take it slow and see how I end up doing on hobbying up the ol' Lord of the End Times here.

More to come!