Kingdom Death: Storm Knight By Sven

Feeling totally inspired by having finished the Slender Man and being teased by Adam hinting at new releases I couldn't resist to paint another of the rather recently released Kingdom Death models: The Storm Knight. This of course goes against my original plan of doing a human in-between every two monsters, but I feel that this made me lose motivation after having finished the Scribe early this year.

I have been thinking about this model for quite some time now and it was probably the one that made me come back to painting KD in the first place. It isn't an easy model to paint, as you have so many different and difficult textures. First are the clouds, I've seen quite a few Storm Knights by now and with many I feel the clouds look much more like smoke, as people tend to paint them dark/black to represent storm clouds, or they paint them white and loose the depth of the sculpt, the second part is the armour. I knew I wanted it blue and had to decide whether to go for a more subtle route of painting all the pipes silver or go for contrast and paint them gold… I went for something in-between. Last, and the most difficult part, was to choose colours for were the lightning bolts. In some cases I've even seen people leaving them off the model.

I began with the cloak after watching the sky for quite some time and settled for a bluish grey for the lower parts and then highlighting to nearly pure white at the places where the light would hit. While I achieved a nice deep look, that’s not all too smoky, I still think I could have made them a bit lighter in colour. Right afterwards I got to the armour and used the same basic technique I used for my Dung Beetle Knight, painting the base with a metallic blue and highlighting it with pure metal. Then I applied a thin coat of blue ink.

I knew from the beginning that I wanted the faces on the armour to stand out and so chose copper for them, while painting all the tubes in a very light gold and highlighting them richly with white gold to lessen the contrast with the blue armour. Finally I went for the lighting bolts. After trying light blue (which basically vanished between the clouds) and pure white (which looked unfinished) I dared to apply a yellow ink to the pure white bolts. It took me some trial and error to find a nice pattern and blending it with the white, but I was surprisingly pleased with the result. So I even dared to do some lighting effects using the ink on the clouds surrounding the bolts.

For the base I wanted him to seem light and possibly able to float, so I pinned him to the very top of the highest Scibor base I had, thus making him bigger and creating a big lump of heavy base to counter the massive clouds.

Thanks for reading

Sven

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