Darklands: Ysian Infantry By Sven

Resisting the temptation of starting yet another Darklands kindred with the new Kickstarter I tried to focus on something else and took some pictures and wrote this article. Of course Darklands and its miniature range mainly live through the awesome characters and huge monsters, but to show the difference in scale and skill in battle every army needs some regular troops. It was during one of my first Khthones vs Ysians games that my opponent remarked that his Ysian commander was the only human-sized model on the field and so it seemed like the Brutes and Gorgonares weren't monstrous, but regular man-sized.

While the Khthones have no human-sized infantry available at the moment the Ysians certainly do and so I began work on the Ax-Drunes.

Being the basic warriors and backbone of a Ysian host the Ax-Drunes shouldn’t stand out from the army and blend in nicely with the desert theme, but that’s basically true for all my Ysian models as I aim for a really monochrome theme. As you’ve seen in the last article even Carrowek has no fancy colours to make him stand out. But don’t let yourself be fooled by my unspectacular colour choice! The Ax-Drunes are wonderful sculpts and rival the heroes of many other manufacturers in terms of details and character.

So the skin, metal and horns were all painted in the standard Ysian colours and I painted the loincloth black, so it adds depth yet no harsh contrast to the models. The most intriguing parts to paint were the coats made of skin. I honestly can’t remember how I developed the mix I used for them, as I normally use another approach for skinned skin, but the result was great.

I began with a base coat of terracotta, dry brushed with a dark redish skintone (GW Bugman’s Glow), followed by Tallarn Flesh and a final coat of bone/elf flesh. The whole skin was then washed with a mix of flesh tone and brown washes and finally given different hues using purple, red or flesh tone.

Such an amount of washes resulted in a glossy finish in several places and I had to use some Matt varnish to dull it down.

The command group as obviously done with the same approach, just the banner was taken more to the brown side to give it an old and weathered look. Apparently there’s foul and ancient magic in that runes, as this was the best out of 8 pictures I took of the banner and it’s still out of focus.

Finally I have my last Brute to show you. It is the champion of the unit and I didn’t paint him with the rest as I didn’t like his original head. Most Warhammer 40k players might recognise the new head as the Dark Eldar Talos’ mask. I think it fits nicely with the rest of the Ysian helmets and its size is more to my liking than the original small head.

For all those who’re interested in Darklands I’ve something very special coming up soon, so stay tuned!

Thanks for reading,

Sven

The 14th Legion