The best looking, worst playing model.

Here's a few pictures of the Eldar Phoenix Lord Baharroth I've been working on for the monthly painting comp at GW.

He is purple and yellow - not the codex colours, I know. Basically he's modelled after this version, a far superior paint job to be sure. I really liked the contrast of purple and yellow/gold (yeah, I've been a big fan of Prince in my younger days) in Shabowy's mini so I decided to give something similar a go.

The purple was simple. Undercoat black, base of 50:50 black and hormagaunt purple, mid colour of horma purple, blended highlights of mixes of the same purple with increasing amounts of white. The final edge highlight is Space Wolves Grey. Everything went down fine until I got a small chip on one of the pinions and touched it up with the Grey. Silly me, I didn't water this paint down for the patch, hence it has gone on much thicker than the other highlights. Noob mistake - I wanted to get it done quickly so I rushed and now there's an imperfection in the work.

The blue parts were basecoated with the same custom mix I use for my Space Wolves armour, shaded with shadow grey/black, and highlighted with the base colour mixed with space wolves grey. I wanted to avoid dirtying up the pieces and consequently over-diluted the shade. Its not a total disaster, but I would have liked more shadowing on the rifle parts in particular. The choice of colours for the yellow areas was more difficult than the application. I really liked the blending I had done on my wulfen's shoulder pad and figured the same effect would go well with the blending on the purple parts of the wings in particular. The complication here was that in Shabowy's pictures he appears to have used the same palette to paint NMM (on the gun and sword blade) and non-metallic materials. My NMM technique is frankly non-existent though so I had a choice to make. In order to keep with the mono-chromatic motif I could either paint all the yellow parts with metallic paints and aim for a yellow gold finish. Or go with the shoulderpad yellow. The feathers on the headdress decided the issue for me - I couldn't imagine Baharroth having metal feathers on his helmet - and I went with non-metallic paints.

The base has a resin part from the Citadel 40k basing kit, and two small rocks I picked up on holiday in Finland - the sand is from my local beach :)

Overall I'm quite pleased with the mini. The purple bits came out especially well and I did a good job on the powersword blade too. I'm not entirely pleased with how the yellow came out on parts other than the wings - I think it suffers from my lack of versatility and techniques, but, hey ho, it looks good enough to put on display.

Competition is next Saturday - here's hoping for another golden grot in my future :)

n.b. Baharroth won :)