Almost two years have passed since I last updated my blog. The last two years were busier than expected and sadly, I didn’t have enough time for the blog. Probably the best thing to do is to pick up exactly where I left things: with the Broo Warband, which is basically the Brash horde from Lucid Eye Publications.
I closed the post with the sentence “The shaman will be painted soon but by next Christmas the very latest”. Retrospectively that sounds a bit naïve: It was Christmas indeed, but one year later than expected.
Back in 2022, I painted a horde of broos with 12 warriors, 2 champions and Bethamel as a leader. It was a Christmas gift for a Runequest-fan friend and one miniature was still missing: the shaman. The size and the design were consistent with the rest of the warband. The figure is very nicely sculpted, and the quality was great, there were no imperfections or mould lines. There were so many details that after basecoating the mini with grey, I decided to drybrush it with white to better capture and understand all of it: there are skulls, feathers, bones, and fur pieces everywhere and it’s very easy to misinterpret some of them. Once again, it is an amazing sculpt, I haven’t modified anything on it.
The colour scheme was a relatively simple question I used the same approach and colours I used with the rest of the warband:
• Bronze instead of steel, as these minis should fit into the bronze-age setting of Runequest
• Earthy colours with dark washes to emphasize the dirty look
I used mostly The Army Painter Warpaints: Witch Brew for the skin, Hemp Rope for the fur, Desert Yellow for the Staff, Leather Brown for the hooves and the horns, Uniform Grey for the loincloth. The Fur coat was very big and I decided to apply a two-tone colour scheme with Neutral Grey and White. For the details I used Combat Fatigues, Arid Earth, Hydra Turquoise, Goblin Green, Khorne Red (GW) and Sun Yellow) (Coat d’Arms), Bronze and Brass (Vallejo).
After applying the colour coat, I washed the mini with The Army Painter’s Quickshades: Military Shader (for the skin), Light Tone (for the lighter colours), Blue Tone (for the feather) and Strong Tone (for the rest of the mini). Once they dried, I highlighted the minis with the base colours and with their lighter variants.
Varnishing is always a bit of a pain but I think I found a way that worked well: two thin layers of Matt Lucky Varnish from Ammo by Mig Jimenez applied with airbrush.
The base had to match with the rest of the warband, so I did the same thing as in 2022: Stierland mud, with Desert yellow and Arid Earth drybrushing, plus a piece of self-adhesive Deadland tuft.
It was a Christmas gift for a friend, who really liked it and now he has a complete warband. That leads to the next question: what shall be my warband that can confront such a threat? I’ll need a primitive fantasy warband with heroes, magic users, simple warriors and maybe some support. But that’s a good problem to have.