Hey there! Welcome to part one of my Work-in-Progress blog on the Games Workshop Forge World Leman Russ model. This one is for the folks on the Warhammer Reddit who had such nice things to say about Leman. Thanks everyone! Now you get to see all the photos of how he came together. :)
Here’s the start of the cape! I base-coated in an off-white and then did a heavy wash of Reaper Mountain Grey from the Bones paint line.
The cape was the part I started with because I really liked the details on it and the shield. When I’m doing a complicated multi-part model like this, I find that if I work on the main body first, I get tired and really, really don’t feel like working on the accessory pieces after it, so instead I start with the accessories. That way I don’t get 30 hours in and really feel like I’m hating painting a sword…instead I just get to attach those finished parts near the end. Small psychological distinction, but when you know it’s going to take you a long time, you trick your brain in whatever way you can to keep going and keep excited about the project. :)
After I did the Mountain Stone wash, I kind of wanted a colder feel, so I took a promo Reaper color from this year’s ReaperCon, Black Indigo, and I did cold bluish shadows with it. At this point I was still thinking I wanted a frost wolf coloring, near white. I revised that very shortly, as you’ll see in the following photos.
Here’s the cape posing with its shadow color, Mountain Stone. :) Was easier to prop it up for the photo than to hold it!
I thought I wanted a frost wolf cape, but then realized that a pure white cape would be really distracting on the model. I didn’t think it would look very good, in the end, so I introduced some brown coloring in the part of the cape that would have been the wolf’s back. I also put in some really dark shadows behind the accessories and details, which helps to make them stand out later on. I think I used Reaper Master Series 9136 Walnut Brown for the dark shadows, but you could use any really dark brown. I don’t like to use pure black because it tends to make the model look cartoony and I wanted a more naturalistic look.
Highlighted the fur, glazed the whole thing a bit lighter, and painted the accessories.
Finished cape!
In the two photos above you can see progress on the cape. I highlighted the fur with an off-white, a couple of layers built up on top of each other, and then decided that the hairs stood out too much against the shadows.
You’ve got two choices when this happens; glaze to knock everything down darker or glaze to bring it lighter. A glaze is kind of like a thinned down wash, but you don’t let it pool; instead, you apply it thin and fast to put a thin layer of color down. It acts like a filter on a camera—it will bring everything under it closer together in the direction of the glaze.
Here, I decided to go with my original vision a bit, and glaze everything lighter. This made the shadows a little lighter, but everything still stood out okay, and it did make the clumps of hair blend in a lot better. Light glazes can be titchy because they can go streaky, and if you have to go back while they’re still wet you can screw everything up very easily! But I was lucky, and it all worked out.
The client had already requested NMM but I thought a straight silver axe blade would have disappeared into the cape, so I went with a darker cold steel look with a lot of blue in it.
To make a complicated model like this look good, I find that it’s useful to repeat the use of the main colors. So the color for the brown leather is also the brown I added to the fur of the wolf cape, and it’s repeated in the accessories and as a shadow for the NMM gold when it comes along. The red of the axe handle and gem I already knew I would be using for other accents around the model. Even the gold of the NMM shows up a little in Russ’s hair highlights, and all of these colors plus the armor colors are used to paint the base, so everything looks like it belongs together!
You could call this a “limited palette” painting style, where you try to do everything with a set selection of colors. I think that all told Leman only utilizes about ten colors. Maybe a dozen at most! There’s a lot of mixing.
Face detail.
I worked a bit more on the eyes after this and the hair, but the above is pretty much finished on the skin tones. Reaper MSP 9044 Tanned Skin is my go-to skin color base for almost everything; you can mix so many things into it to tune it one way or another, it’s extremely versatile.
Wolf Accessories!
Every good wolfing wolf has wolfy accessories, though these are less wolfy than many. :) Here again I’m repeating colors, the red and the browns and the golds. I do paint this sort of stuff on the sprue to give myself something to hold onto. I could clip them off and mount them on wires, but I find it’s just handy to use the sprue. These Forge World sprues were nice and beefy and easy to hold onto, and the contact points were well-placed and easy to clean up.
Starting the axe, the handle wrap and NMM on the geometric side.
Gold NMM on the sword, close-up.
Weapons are my least-favorite thing to paint, so I wanted to get those taken care of so I could get to the fun part—Leman himself! On the previous two photos you see me setting up the gold NMM. It’s worth mentioning at this point that the NMM on this model, taken in total, was easily 15 hours of work by itself!
So, shortly after I took the above photo I fitted the axe onto Leman’s arm and realized—wait. What do you mean, the cool wolf-head detailing is on the UNDERSIDE of the axe?!?
I immediately decided to slice the axe head off and reposition it so the awesome wolves were on the upside and not hidden. :)
I’m afraid that I didn’t even check with my client before I did it, either, because I knew that More Wolf was Better Wolf…at least I hoped so.
NMM on the cool wolfy heads, and more on the sword.
I started really dark on the sword and axe blades because I wasn’t yet sure what I wanted to do with them, but that would shortly be resolved. I do this a lot—kind of go in and just wait for a good idea to come along, and then run with it. It makes the model more fun for me to paint to not quite be sure where I’ll end up sometimes!
Shield and cape together.
Shield and cape blue-tacked on to check fit.
I’m afraid I managed to delete my work in progress shots of the shield! But above you can see it complete, and I tacked it on to check the fit and the look, to see if I liked it. After that, I figured since I was already working on the gold NMM on the weapons, I should use the colors I had mixed and work on the armor!
The detailing on the armor on this model is just flat-out fantastic. Hellish to paint, but fantastic. You hate it, and you love it, and you really can’t decide which you feel more until you start humming Fenrisian battle hymns under your breath.
Got through a bunch of the leg and chest and shoulder stuff, couldn’t resist tacking his head on to see how it all looked!
So here you can see I’m playing with the highlights on the leg armor to settle on my colors for the main body of the piece, and I’ve blocked in a lot of the shoulder pad colors in addition to working on a lot of the NMM gold. Notice that I’ve also lined the model—put dark lines in around all the little details. Doing this now means I can be a little messy with it, and I can neaten them up later with highlights. :)
Side note: I really loved doing the little wolf head broach piece there on his chest. What a great little detail!
Leg armor and blocking in the wolf pelt and head on the hip.
Now stuff started really coming together because I was starting to be able to attach the accessory pieces. This is where I get excited because I can really visualize how the model will look finished and that keeps me going!
Here’s a succession of photos where you can see the pistol get attached in its holster, the fantastic belt detailing finally coming together (I won’t even tell you what a pain it was to paint that in NMM…but I ended up loving it), and then the finished pelt and head on the hip.
Holster on! Now he can shoot someone! Well, he could if he had hands. D’oh.
Belt NMM not for the faint of heart. Don’t try this at home, kids.
Little better picture of the pelt and head.
I was so happy to finally be attaching things I figured it was time to figure out what I wanted to do with the axe. In messing around with the blade I was thinking maybe frost, but I liked it better painted dark steel like the small axe on Leman’s back. Then I was like, wait, it’s a power axe…IT NEEDS LIGHTNING (so it got lightning).
Testing the fit before I snip it off the sprue!
A little blurry here, but you can still see it.
“…and my axe!!”
Axe attached! Mission accomplished! Blog post finished!…well, for the moment!
I hope you guys have enjoyed this! I didn’t realize how many work-in-progress photos I’d taken until I was downloading and editing them all, and I have a bunch more, so I decided I’d split this into two posts and put up the other one tomorrow. :)
Have a very wolfy evening and do check back for part two!
—Anne ;)