Tahlia Vedra is many things – an upstart ex-mercenary, the originator of the Castelite formation (and probably its greatest critic), and a hero with the fortitude to face down and tame a mighty winged manticore.
She has an absolutely fantastic miniature that lives up to her status, and makes for a jaw-dropping centrepiece in any City of Sigmar army
Tahlia’s furious mount Infernadine is posed with wings outstretched, so there’s a lot of feathery real estate to cover – which can be a little intimidating for painters. It needn’t be, and the Warhammer Painting Team has filmed a video showing you how to achieve great effects with minimal fuss.
Adam was kind enough to share a few further thoughts on how to paint Tahlia – and other big, mounted heroes.
Adam: For this video we decided to focus on the wings, because they are the largest feature of the miniature. People can be extremely daunted by centrepieces, and don’t know where to start, so we wanted to make it clear that you can make something this big really easy by splitting it into a few simple steps.
When you’ve finished painting the wings, that’s the miniature mostly done – but it can feel like a difficult thing to tackle. The ‘Eavy Metal box art is incredibly intricate, but I wanted to break it down into the core colours I could see. I took a recipe of about 15 to 20 paints, similar to what ‘Eavy Metal would use, including glazes and mixes – and boiled it down into just six.
This helped keep things within a fixed range – the primary colour of Mournfang Brown, the slightly lighter Baneblade Brown, then Ushabti Bone for the highest tone. Abaddon Black proved too stark for the deepest colour, so after some testing I went with Corvus Black instead. This slightly off-black paint can take on the hue of shades applied to it, so worked really well with an all over wash of Agrax Earthshade. The final step is a drybrush of Screaming Skull – an instant reward after the rest of the hard work.
The only really time consuming element was applying fine layers to the pinions – and that was largely to show how far you could push this simple scheme without needing lots of different paints. You can apply principles like this to any large model – find the largest element, find a simple way of painting that, and then tackle it in stages.
You can add more complexity to your recipe to make it look even better, but if you just want to get your miniature ready to play with as fast as possible while still looking great, then this process is a great way to achieve that.
Thanks for the tips, Adam. You can pre-order Tahlia Vedra, Lioness of the Parch now, and put this advice into practice yourself.
