Brought to you by things that go bump in the night, check out these ghosts. Literally painted for no other reason than that I fancied painting something a bit different…

These are actually GW miniatures. And no, I didn’t have to sell a kidney! Games Workshop recently launched one of those weekly magazines where you build your collection of hobby tat. Except this time instead of building HMS Victory out of matchsticks you get miniatures, paints, etc for two small armies to play their game Age of Sigmar (what used to be Warhammer Fantasy) . As is the way with these magazines the first issues are heavily discounted so I picked up the first and second which netted me 14 plastic ghosts, a pot of Citadel paint, and a nasty cheap paint brush for £9. Bargain.

You also get a sprue of their naff Stormcast miniatures, but those went straight on eBay. The ghosts come as ten smaller ones and four larger ones which I think technically are banshees. They certainly look like they’re wailing. The smaller ones are apparently called “chainrasps”, because the IP lawyers are the ones in charge of naming things at GW these days. But let’s just call them ghosts, because that’s what they are.

They are quite lovely little sculpts. GW’s digital design people have a tendency to add lots of superfluous swirly bits (because they can) but on a ghost swirly bits are definitely not superfluous and I think they look great. The idea here was a bit of a painting experiment, as I’d recently bought some of Citadel’s “contrast medium” and wanted to see how it worked on something like this. So I undercoated them all grey and tried mixing green and blue with the contrast medium. The results were…not great.

So for some reason I thought blue over a greay base might work…
…ditto with the green.

My second attempt was much more successful when I instead painted with the “corax white” paint that came with them. Despite the name this isn’t actually white, it’s a very light grey (the original undercoat had been a more mid-grey). Then I hit them with a thinned wash of contrast medium mixed with a very light green. This gave much better results, although I’m not really convinced the contrast medium did much. I suspect a normal paint wash with flow aid would have done the same thing. From what I’ve seen here I’m wondering if large smooth areas are where this “contrast paint” shines, as it will pool just like anything else, and perhaps it works better on rougher chunkier detail?

For the ghostly look I think the way to go is very thin washes of colour and light drybrushing. You don’t want strong colours, you want multiple slightly transparent layers making it look ethereal.

But it was an interesting painting interlude, and I’ll probably find a use for these as a Mordheim scenario (kind of the “rob the haunted mansion” thing, with the ghosts as NPCs).