"When we can take green from grass, blue from heaven, and red from blood, we have already an enchanter's power." JRR Tolkien
My wife doesn't normally take a whole lot of interest in my miniatures hobby. She understands that I enjoy it and occasionally buys me some models for Christmas or Birthdays (she got me the plastic King of the Dead for Christmas last month) but other than that leaves me to my own devices with it. However, at the end of last year she happened to pick up a model I was working on and said something to the effect of, "Why do you never paint models in colours I like?"
Challenge accepted.
It just so happened that a couple of weeks later we happened to be near a Games Workshop so I dragged my wife inside, pointed her towards the paint stand and told her to pick her favourite. After several anxious minutes, she picked...
Great, turquoise.
Now I just needed the right model to paint with it. It just so happened that I was planning on returning to my Harad army (that had been interrupted by the birth of my son) as 1 of my projects for this year and I needed a model that could be used as a King. Digging through my pile of shame I found a spare Mumak Commander that could work with a little conversion (quite how I ended up with 2 of these and no Mumak I'm not sure).
I removed the head and replaced it with one from the plastic Eowyn, gave them a sword from the Easterling Kataphrakts, replaced the spear with a Haradrim bow and added a Warg Rider quiver. With a little bit of green stuff to fill the gaps, a little resculpting of the chest plate and a face covering to match the Harad Warriors I had a model fit to be a Queen.
So then onto painting. I knew that the turquoise had to be the main colour so that would be on most of the cloth. I started with a base coat of Sybarite Green that was then washed with Anthonion Camo Shade. I then highlighted with Sybarite Green, before mixing in some white to the base colour for brighter highlights. The rest of the painting was done to tie into the rest of the Haradrim I'm painting, so NMM weapons and armour, dark grey trousers, red gems and desert bases.
And (naturally), what started out as one model swiftly grew into a warband with a few more simple conversions of the plastic Haradrim to create a Karna Battle Company.
