A miniature Odyssey – Dromeas

   Here, on the top of the fortress of Akrokorinth, Dromeas had a good view of the city. He knew the route well. Not long ago, he had run it several times a day when he had trained with his father for the Olympic Games. But now he was alone and without money to live on. All of a sudden and without warning his father had died.

   Three days ago he had finally made a decision. Dromeas had turned down the offer to work in the fields. He could not believe in the natural death of his father. But whom had his father made an enemy? Whoever it was, before Dromeas could find the guilty and bring him to justice, he had to change from being an athlete to becoming a warrior. He had sold the small house on the western foothills of Corinth and bought an old shield and helmet with his last money. The spear was still from the days when his father was a soldier himself.

   Now he sat patiently in the shade of a tree and waited to be picked up by Axon's mercenaries.

After having painted a small army for the Hades' followers in the summer project 2020, I am now sitting down to take on a few mortal troops to prepare them for a campaign. The beginning is made with Dromeas, an athlete who has been hit by fate and who is going through a change of life.

I have already been asked several times how I paint the skin on the models, so here I give you an overview.

The base color is Kobold Skin and was accentuated by adding Bone. The manufacturer doesn't matter, most of the suppliers have a bone color in their range, but I prefer Bonewhite from Vallejo, because it is a bit brighter. Afterwards I washed the skin with Ogryn Flesh from Games Workshop. After everything was dry I repeated the steps on the deeper lying areas.

This sounds ad hoc like quite a lot of work, but the skin areas are mostly so small on historical models that these steps are completed quite quickly. The first accent is the original Kobold Skin + Bonewhite mix, to which I added some more Bone in another run. Finally, I added quite a lot of white, highlighting places like knees, elbows, cheekbones, etc. Just everything that looks edgy on the body.

The tunic was given a base layer of Karak Stone from GW. I shaded the recesses by adding Black and quite a bit of medium, while I added Bonewhite and then White for the accents, as before. Since Dromeas is still a poor mercenary, I inked a few spots with very diluted Doombull Brown and painted some dark dots on the clothes, accentuating the lower edge with a thin dot of white. This creates the illusion of holes in the tunic.

The brown parts aren't that interesting as I did them the same way as on my Blood Bowl fans. But the spear is again a new recipe. Originally I painted it like the skeletons spears, but it looked too similar to the tunic and Charred Brown was too dark. So I took Beasty Brown as base color and added Leather Brown from Vallejo in the first run. With this I drew thin lines, making sure that they touched each other. Only in the next step, when I used pure Leather Brown, did I carefully separate the lines. The rest is the usual mixing of Bone and White, but you have to be careful to keep the line thinner and shorter.

I don't have a fixed recipe for the bronze color, but because I find that metal colors do not cover the surface smoothly and are almost a bit too shiny, I usually mix silver with another shade. But this time I tried something different. The base color was Bright Bronze from Vallejo, which was inked with a brown wash. For the accents I simply mixed the Bronze with White. Alas in the end it turned out a bit too dark for my taste, so I will experiment a bit more in the future wit metal colors.

Another experiment was the base. I got Sepia Wash from Vellejo and compared the result with GW. It is considerably darker than GWs wash. For Axon's troop this is no biggie, but for sandier bases I will probably go back to the more expensive option until I find something similar.

Next article will be a bit more mythical, as Andy Hobday from Footsore Minis made it possible for me to paint a centaur for them. So stay tuned when we tackle the more noble version of these wild creatures together.

Greetings from the Chaosbunker

Dino