Heresy & Heroes

Abandon hope, all ye who enter…

Many of us have a Drawer of The Dead, or a Drawer of Doom, or Box of Shame. Above, you can see mine (it’s the one at the bottom). It is my shame and my punishment. The first army that I built and painted when I returned to the hobby a couple of years back, were the Emperor’s Children. Nearly all of them now reside in the Drawer of Doom. Haphazardly assembled with more enthusiasm than skill, the paint was splashed across them in thick, clumsy strokes and when they sit next to my other armies, all proudly displayed on the shelves above my hobby space, they look so sad. Just so sad…

Well, I have resolved, this year, to do something about this. There are hundreds of pounds of minis in the Drawer of the Dead and I don’t like wasting money. Every month, I am going to launch a daring rescue mission and reclaim one of my wonderful minis from this nether-realm. And I started with my Chaos Sorcerer.

This is what he looked like when I fished him out of the drawer. Oatmeal sand on the base, uneven lines, no highlighting, no shading, and no texture worth the name. I like to think I’ve come on some way from this, and this was my opportunity to prove my growth – to actually measure it even. I’ve painted hundreds of minis since his day, and these days I’m delighted that I actually receive compliments on some of my work. This is how his resurrection began…

Once I pulled him free from the dark clutches of the Drawer of the Dead, I doused him in this stuff. In a frankly uneconomical action, I covered him in an excess of Fairy Power Spray. There’s nothing wrong with using an excess. FPS, as it is known widely in the hobby community, is pretty harmless (unless you’re stupid enough to drink it or rub it in your eyes), and besides, I thought Slaanesh would approve of the excess. He sat in it for 20 minutes, and then I took an old toothbrush to him, applied the correct amount of elbow grease and the top layer of paint sloughed off really easily. Another 10 minutes in the FPS and a bit more elbow grease, and I got him to here:

Then I took a hobby knife and spent half an hour picking the last stubborn bits of paint from those hard to reach places. When I had finished, I had an almost new again model! It was like a free model, and that’s a great feeling. The FPS even stripped the oatmeal sand from the base so I got to improve that a little too. And so, I set to work. After a couple of night’s of painting, here’s the finished, resurrected and much better painted Emperor’s Children Sorcerer!

Emperor’s Children Sorcerer

It’s not the best thing I ever painted – a long way from a show piece – but here’s a direct comparison to prove the worth of this exercise.

I always liked this old sorcerer mini – one of the most evil masks worn by any space marine in the 40k universe. As an HQ, I gave him some great fluff and he was excellent as company for my old Daemon Prince. There was a lot of bone on the model which got a bit tiresome and that pink is starting to hurt my eyes now – I will probably be blind if I do a whole army of it! I’m particularly happy with the cloak, and the sword (which was unexpected) but there’s plenty of areas for me to improve – particularly making red things glow – didn’t really get it right with the eyes, but I’ll keep practicing that one. Next up for resurrection will be my Forge World Sonic Dreadnought, but I need to test to see if their resin remains undamaged when using FPS – really don’t want to mess it up. Onwards!

Comments, thoughts or questions – add them below!