Empire general on gryphon

 Flying high above the battlefields of the old world the empire general is the undisputed master of warfare, or he is until I actually use him in a game. 

Building these old metal models is never fun despite what members of the oldhammer community may tell you. Plastic will always be my preferred material for building with although they never seem to have the same charm and character as their metal counterparts. After a lot of drilling, pinning and bending I finally got the wings into a stable position I was happy with and through a little trial and error I was pretty sure the general would fit nicely as well. Turns out he never but more on that later.

My main focus, and worry, about painting up the general was the gryphons wings. I've been improving my dry brushing so that's the main technique I was planning on using but I wasn't happy with the results. For the brown I used gashraks(?) sewer, the cream was skeleton hoard and apothecary white for the white. I was dreading what came next and every feather got two highlights but once I got started it went quite quickly. Once that was done I went round the edges with a wash to help with the contrast. The white still looked like it needed something so I added the black parts to break them up. After that I've been looking at the wood elf war hawk riders think they might be fun to paint up.

I couldn't remember what paint I used for the demigryphs so thought this would be a good chance to try and remind myself. This kind of worked I used the army painter ochre set on the gryphon which turned out more yellow than I expected which reminded me that I used the army painter and two thin coats bone sets. I should hopefully be able to match the colours on one of my painted demigryphs but I really need to start making a note of my colours.

The general himself was a straight forward plate mail guy the only thing I tried to do differently was his sword. I'd bought some blue fluorescent paint and wanted to try it out for magic weapons, I normally use contrast paints for that kind of thing. It turned out ok but I had hoped it would be a bit more vibrant. I probably could have spent more time on it to make it look better but it's fine. I was also going to go over the wings and body to remove the gloss but I think it looks fine as well.

When it came time to stick the general down I decided against pinning. Its already a hassle but trying to line up his butt pin with the saddle seemed like a problem I didn't need. Despite sitting him in place before painting I just couldn't get him to sit right. Against my better judgement I started bending the wings trying to get the general to fit without snapping anything off. Luckily I'd done a good job of pinning everything together and while I would prefer it if his sword was over the wing I'll take it.

One final thing. The base is a weird GW one with lots of little circles on the bottom. To get my magnet's to fit I had to snip them off then tidy it up with my hobby knife before gluing them in. In the interest of lack of hobby time and bath time safety I had to do this job at the top of the stairs. A couple of times the gryphon went flying out of my grip and had to be saved by a quick pelvic thrust against the wall. Luckily there was no damage to the gryphon, wall or other areas.

Thanks for reading