Hounds and Spectres for the Barrow Legion

 

Work on the Barrow Legion continues! After a great start this spring and early summer, other interests and responsibilities took over and progress has slowed. I painted these units over the summer but never gave them a proper blog post. We’ve got a map campaign planned for this winter so I’ve got to get some momentum and try to finish a few more units by the end of December (not to mention finally finish preparing the actual campaign).

After one game of TOW, I realized how terrible an army comprised exclusively of skeletons was going to be and scoured the army list for any units that would need less babysitting. Dire Wolves provided some much needed mobility and the skeletal models from Highland Miniatures were perfect for the Legion. My time in TOW was short lived, but they are now a staple in my Regiments lists. With Scout and Fast, they can threaten turn 1 charges and sport enough attacks that they can usually win combat against small melee units or ranged support. If there are no good units for them to bully, they’re great roadblocks or late game objective grabbers. The process for painting these hounds was identical to how I painted all my blocks of skeletons.

My army had been a mass of greys and browns where everything ended up blending together. It needed some color and different unit types to really start to stand out. Ghosts of some kind had been on my mind since I started the army, as they were a key part of the Army of the Cairns that inspired me. In addition to providing some color and different textures, I was in need of a more elite melee unit to fight the increasingly deadly monsters and chariots being fielded. These have seen play as infantry shredding Ghosts from the Neutral Undead community list and great weapon wielding Ghost Revenants from the Ghostly Undead list. Both varieties have been performing really well for me except when facing Brad’s deadly Orc crossbows! Painting these excellent sculpts from Satyr Art Studios was a ton of fun. I wanted to avoid the airbrush look of GW’s Nighthaunts and went with a more old school look. I washed the models with diluted Nihilakh Oxide over a white prime, making sure there wasn’t too much pooling in the recesses. I then applied some Aethermatic Blue contrast paint mostly in the folds of fabric and hard lines of armor. Finally, they got a white drybrush to bring back highlights a bit.

Hoping to finish up my barrow king on chariot and newly acquired grave guard before the end of the year, but most of my free time will be dedicated to wrapping up PORTCULLIS MAGAZINE! I have a few ideas for posts about Regiments, too, so more to come soon!