Hobby Update: Undead Revenant Cavalry

I actually enjoyed playing the Undead in the demo game from mid-October, and with nothing on my hobby desk at the time, I decided to hobby up a new unit for them. It has taken quite some time, but up now are some unexpected units for an unexpected army: some spooky Revenant Cavalry for my neglected collection of Undead! 

The finished units. All complete and spooky.

After poking around some storage boxes, I decided to refresh some old minis back from the early days of the blog. Back in 2016, I hobbied up some medieval Mounted Sergeants for the Kingdoms of Men, complete with special unit champions, since I had yet to really embrace multibasing. In 2017, the champs were disbanded and these units got a refresh, rebasing them as 4-model cavalry troops. As the rest of the army grew though, their knightly appearance clashed with the rest of my humans, and these have been sitting in a box with old, unused WHFB stuff for several years now. I figured the different shields and weapons and such would work really well for the Undead though, so I got to work.

The Sergeants back in 2016, with unit champions.

Three troops is a weird amount to hobby up, so I resolved to figure out a forth troop as well, which would let me run a variety of unit sizes. 

I didn't think three-strong troops would look good since the stone and mud basing scheme was just so barren. I was out of Fireforge Mounted Sergeants, since it was just one box of 12 from back in the day. I don't actually know what manufacturer or kit the remaining four minis came from - I have picked up a number of random humans boxes, especially knights, over the years, and just sourced the horses and riders from one of my humans bits boxes. That they were close but not exact matches to the existing minis was a positive for me, as I felt the incongruity would enhance the disheveled undead look I was going for. A bunch of skulls and limbs were snagged from my undead bits box (I think these bits were mostly GW), and primed, to help transform the riders as this refresh continued.

The rebased Sergeants back in 2017.

I wanted to mix the new minis into the old units, which meant I'd need to cut the old horses off the old bases. Back in 2016, these had been mounted to 50mm plastic squares. In 2017, those squares were clipped to be irregular, and glued onto a unit base. Now in 2023, I used a knife to cut the old plastic squares away from the MDF base as neatly as I could. The plastic square would be sanded down. The MDF base was flaking a bit from ripping off the plastic squares, but repaired with some slightly wetted PVA glue, wax paper and a heavy book to keep the base compressed and prevent warping with the additional glue. The MDF base was then primed, hoping to seal it and further prevent any possible warping. All this would let me re-use the old bases, as I was feeling frugal. 

WIP shot. 

The super glue was old, and a number of the riders popped off when I was working to remove the plastic squares. I was also able to detach a number of limbs, and then was able to use clippers to distress the head join so that the human heads could be popped off as well. I started mixing in the undead bits, gluing things that looked good, and then got to painting.

A nice mix of bits for a spooky unit.

Coming from the Kingdoms of Men, the tunics were a mix of purple and white, which I painted over to get a more uniform coat for the touchups. I have played a fair amount of D&D 5E over the last decade, and the tunics reminded me of a stock photo I had been using as a token for a Knight of Myrkul in one of my online games, so I decided to run with the idea, going with a dark tunic and dark shield.

GW's Grave Guard kit has a lot of fun bits. The helmets are all great.

Myrkul needs a skull though, and I didn't trust my free hand skills (nor want to attempt that across an entire unit, even if it was a smaller cavalry unit). Fortunately, I had come into some 40k decals, and found some suitable skull ones to utilize here. 

WIP decal work.

Applying decals proved to be easier than a lot of internet folks make it out to be. Yes, you can use chemicals and stuff, but plain old water worked just fine for me.

For working with decals, one cuts the decal (and backing) out with a sharp knife, staying as close to the icon as you can. You let the decal and backing soak in a tiny bit of water for about one minute. Wet the surface of the mini. Fish out the decal from the water. Push it off the backing piece and onto the miniature. Then push the decal around until you like where it is, and wait for it to dry. Excess water can be carefully soaked up with a dry paint brush. There are apparently (much) fancier ways to apply decals, but using just water worked perfectly well for me.

Most went on fine. One decal split and started smearing. Oddly enough, it was the only significant error I made while working with decals, and it happened near the end. I am still not sure what I did, but things were wet enough I was able to just wipe it away with a wet paint brush and then use a dry paint brush to get rid of anything else that remained.

At this point, everything was looking really good! A few of the riders reminded me of the skull-faced alien from Worf's holodeck fighting programs in Star Trek TNG. Apparently the mask was reused from the He-Man and the Masters of the Universe movie from the late 80's, which was a neat factoid (to me at least). 

While I had done up some full-bodied horses for my Soul Reaver Cavalry, I felt like skeleton cavalry should have skeleton horses, and therefore had been hesitant to hobby this kind of unit up. However, I saw a Facebook post that used normal horses just painted green and normal knights just rusted up, and honestly it looked pretty good as generic undead cavalry. I figured I could take that idea and run with it.

Hey, it's unit that reminded me of Worf!

The horses were pretty well-painted (for me). To turn them undead, I messily pained over most of each horse in grey or white. Good coverage wasn't desired. I tried some of the Army Speed Painter colors, but they were much too vibrant. So, each horse got drowned in a variety of washes instead, with the uneven base color leading to a eerie and disordered looking unit overall. The finishing touch for the horses was a simple red blob around the eyes of the horse, and a more refined almost-white on the eyeball to make it pop. 

Some good horses here!

I would assume that the necromantic magics for raising both horse and rider is the same, so part of me is bugged that the horses have the eye effect and the skeletons don't, but that is a Pandora's Box for hobbying that I do not want to open! Practically-speaking, many skeleton sculpts don't have eyeball bits, so I am in the clear, for now at least.

I have felt for a very long time that my basing for the Undead was too barren. It's a neat look, but too spacious. I had explored a few options for zazzing up the basing, but nothing quite clicked. The final touch for the unit here was a basing upgrade idea stolen from Lazy Pirate Painting, a youtube channel recommended recently here on the blog. I don't know the exact players, so I cannot credit them more than that, but one of the Undead players that throws down in the channel on occasion had created a fog effect from cotton balls.

Disaster.

The cotton balls seemed too recognizable, and too white. After a quick test, I settled on using Poly-Fil for my fog, though I did try to color it, to absolutely no success. Painting or more likely spray-painting the fill was possible (similar methods are used for explosions), but with multiple tufts tucked around each base I didn't think I could get a uniform appearance. So I tried mixing up small containers of watered down paint (black, dark grey and light grey), to see if I could get a shaded gradient thing going through absorption, but that was a complete bust. The paint pigments fell to the bottom of the container, and were smeared around the bottom of the fill, which didn't really absorb the water at all. It was a mess! In the end though, I don't think the fill it needs to be colored. The fill is darker than a cotton ball already, which is what it was going for, and the darker color on the fog effect looks like and sinister on the table.

For creating the fog, I would tear off a chunk of poly-fil, and roll it around a few times in my hands to roughly shape it. The fill is a tangle of strands, so this was a must to make sure it all stays within the dimensions of the base. I wasn't sure how PVA or super glue would work (leaving a glue spot or residue), so I used an acrylic glazing medium (the same thing I use for making the mud shiny) as a glue, pushing the tuft fill into the medium for stability and around the minis for the effect. If the shape was too round, the fill could be teased out a bit using a tweezers to fit better around the minis. 

Yowza! These units took a while to complete, but it was great to repurpose some older units. I think they all turned out well! While the project started out small, in my typical fashion I did get distracted with my bits boxes and started in on a few more new units. Additionally, now that I have the fog effect, I'll need to go back and add it in to the rest of my Undead collection. Personal time is still in shorter supply than I would like, but hopefully I'll have a few more updates (and games) to post here before 2023 closes out!