Hobby Update: Abyssal Tortured Souls

Oof. These minis took some work! I like varied, combined arms armies over spammy lists, and wanted some new, faster elements for my Abyssals, since the Abyssal Horsemen regiment I have been running just has not been delivering. Online chatter was positive about these, and seeing a cheap Chainrasp Horde bundle very cheap on ebay, I picked these up in the late fall, priming them in brown on a warmer day.

Three regiments. We'll kick this off with a group shot.

I must admit that the Nighthaunts are actually really neat minis, and also that the typical paint schemes of lightening both the faces and the lower spectral wisps make for an army that looks very striking. As I can be a bit of a contrarian, I opted not to go for this approach. I didn't want to buy any new paints, or mess around with blending. I just wanted a quick paintjob that looked ok for the table.

Being phantasms, one could simply ignore the different elements entirely, like I did with the Herd's Spirit Walkers. There, everything got some Hexwraith Flame technical paint and a few layers of light and bright drybrushing to make for simple, convincing spooks. I did not want to do that here though, as I figured all the cloth and spooky bits would make for great tests for some of the Army Painter Speed Paints. As I saw it, the minis had four elements that I would need to tackle:

1. The humanoid face and hands.
2. The hood/cowl thing covering the head and shoulders.
3. The long, full spectral robe underneath forming the ghostly torso and non-existent legs.
4. The "extra-but-normal" bits, like weapons and chains and tombstones.

I originally primed them in brown back in October/November, since that was what most of my Abyssals were primed with. But these are souls and stuff, and aren't going to be painted the pink flesh of all the corporeal things in the army. I donked up. I tried painting over them, but there are so many sticky-outy bits and empty torsos that I figured that would take too much time and effort to get good coverage for any other base color. So, I tried re-priming in white. I think my white primer has something that makes it really hydrophobic. After the second prime, I threw on a Speed Paint to play around with some color schemes and the paint would just would not stick to the mini. So, I primed them all a third time in grey. This finally "stuck", and I was able to dry brush on a lighter grey, and then a very soft white, building up the high points on the mini so things would hopefully play better with the Speed Paints. 

Suck? Or success? One coat vs two on the cowl.

Things sort of worked? Working backwards on the list of elements, the normal bits like weapons were painted as such. The robe underneath was going to be more Hexwraith stuffs. The hood/cowl would be black, and I'd leave the skin drybrushed for now. The "Gravelord Grey" Speed Paint was a bit disappointing, though this could be user-error trying to start thing and get used to the new paint. I needed at least two, usually three coats to get good coverage on the cowls.

Oof. Yep. Suck. This is a worse copy of the normal paint scheme, given all the extra work required.

With paint on the weapons, robe and cowl, I was pretty disappointed. I liked the Hexflame gradient, but taken together, this looked like a very shoddy copy of the box's paint scheme! What's worse is that these would not mesh particularly well with the rest of the army either. Just bad all around.

The paint job really stumped me, and trying to link them to an existing army was difficult. Originally, I was thinking I'd try out some greyscale spirits, but they wouldn't have meshed at all with the existing collection of Abyssals. Then, I was going to take inspiration from Age of Mythology and the Shades of Hades, having the lower robes black and the hoods a color - but I realized that my Abyssals are mostly pink flesh and dark grey robes, which wasn't going to be enough colors to make that idea work either.

Dissatisfied, in a bit of a Hail Mary attempt, I decided to try out the "Blood Red" Speed Paint, hoping that red bodies would help tie the units to the army more. With a finer brush I was able to pick out the faces and hands, and get this final result. I'm not entirely satisfied with the paint job, but these are far better, and I am really not sure how to do this differently, so we're calling these good for now. Maybe I'll get a new perspective and touch them up in the future. 

To finish the units up, I snipped the slots of each mini down to as little as I could, even trying to sand some of the slot nubs down. I put a little of the basing paste along the top, painting this with a black and then a dark gray to help disguise it. I had painted up the bases separately, with the dark rocks and bright lava pools, and so the final step was gluing the minis to the bases. Some of the joins are better disguised than others, but overall, the units should look fine for the table.

And speaking of the table, I think these will do well. They don't cost too much, so I should be able to run a few units in any game I want them. Comparing them to the Horsemen I had been using, I can fit two of these in for the same price! I am hoping I can spread out on the table a bit more, and with fly, I am hoping that my threat range can be a little more difficult to box out, allowing these units to get into unsuspecting flanks and such. They seem like fun units, and I am eager to see them on the table and to test them out!