Today I would like to show you my Tzeentch Sorcerer Lord on Disc. I painted him for the monthly painting competition of my local Games Workshop. This time, the theme was ‘fire’.
I generally enter with conversions, but this model fit the theme so well that I could enter it as-is. The only thing I added are the fire spirits on the base which I bought from Ebay. They are either from the Spirit Host kit or from Nagash / the Mortarchs.
I tried quite a lot of new techniques on this model. The flames on the sorcerer and his disc were done by what felt like endless glazing, but they turned out very well. I initially tried to bring in some object source lighting too but it didn’t look great. The outside of the cloak near the flames originally was blue and I struggled badly with getting a smooth pass between the yellow-white of the flame and the cloak without making it look like a stark line. In the end I repainted the cloak to purple and mixed in more and more orange/red the closer to the flames I got.
This model taught me a lot: mostly that glazing can give very nice results but at the cost of a lot of hours. I did the fire spirits on the base in the last week and I didn’t pay as much attention to them. They are a tad roughter than the rest, with only a few layers mixed in. I may eventually return to them if I’m doing something else with fire and have the colours all ready.
For a model of tabletop quality, I think the work I put into the spirits would suffice. A few glazes, a couple of hours total, especially if models are in a unit of 10+. Too much detail can be overkill too.
The second thing I learned from this was to be even less hesitant with extreme highlights. I tend to be too afraid of bringing in stark contrast and painting this model showed me how to do it, especially with glazing to tie it all together. The flames run all the way from thinned white in the centre to thinned black at the tips.
The base of this model was fun to do. My other warriors of chaos have snowy bases, but snow doesn’t go well with fire. I painted the ground around the spirits as charred black and brown, with short, cut off tufts of grass. These were washed heavily with black too, and then stippled with vermin brown and orange to give them a smoldering look.
