The first batch of stars I did were deliberately varied, after spending months converting I wanted to paint as wide a variety of models as possible. After that I tried to be more efficient, working on all Nurgle stars in one go. This had limited success, due to them all having slightly different coloured skin and armour.

The Dark elf stars would be a better choice for batch painting, since in the illustrations they all had the same uniform and less variation in skin colour. There were 6 dark elf stars still outstanding and these were painted in 2 batches of 3. The first batch consisted of Asperon (shown in the last blog), Elijah and Kiroth.


Elijah Doom

Elijah was a pretty difficult star to make as he doesn’t have much in the way of gimmicks to make him stand out. On top of that the illustration was a small picture only showing him from the chest up. The main areas to work on were his bare arms, pose and helmet decoration.

For all the dark elves I mixed grey in with pale elven flesh. A lot of fantasy dark elves from other settings have actual grey skin, which I do like the look of. But wanted something more natural looking, a pale and slightly evil flesh tone. I made certain to give him a very serious and sneering expression on his face as he is supposed to be very no nonsense.

The rest of the model was standard colouring; purple armour with silver edging, dark grey bodysuit, brown leather boots and straps along with green cold one hide. The one thing that did differ from other stars was the gold decoration on his helmet. This was very detailed and only showed the side view, so I did my best to paint decoration close to that style.





Kiroth Krakeneye

He is based on the runner, with some extra scales on his shoulder pads along with a fin behind his head and on his thighs. The big stand out part is the gold tentacled mask, which I modelled to be carrying the ball.

Most of him was painted in the same way as the other stars, he didn’t have any exposed skin, but did have more green than other stars. I went for a slightly colder green to represent him taking hides from ancient seas creatures rather than cold ones.

The most attention was spent on his mask, I’ve been experimenting with mixing normal colours with metals for a hybrid NMM. It’s had mixed results, but does look better when I don’t get the shading quite right compared to pure NMM. This is particularly noticeable with silver, which always looks grey if not done right.

The extreme shading of his helm turned out really well, but the tentacles holding the ball were a bit off. Due to them being so this the shading was much harder and I struggled with the shadows, this makes the tentacles look a little soft. Not a disaster as they are supposed to be more malleable than the rest of the mask.




Jeremiah Kool

The 2nd batch had Jeremiah, Roxanna and Mordrix in it. All these 3 models had a lot more skin showing and batch painting that saved a lot of time since it is always one of the most time consuming areas.

Jeremiah rivals Hubris as my favourite of the converted dark elf stars. I was really proud of how I had merged elements of both the classic 1st edition illustration along with the new BB16 one. Extra care was spent on his skin and instead of modelling long gloves these were painted on, ending slightly below his shoulder. Black hair is always hard to paint, it needs enough highlights to not look flat, without turning it grey. He also has a grey streak, which added a complication. White was added to his shoes to brighten up his lower half as it was looking a bit drab.

The parts which turned out the worst were the straps across his chest, these got a bit messed up when gluing spikes and the greenstuff wasn’t very good.

The parts I am most happy with was the silver, in particular the spikes on his shoulder pad, they looked very sharp and deadly. The weird bird/vulture thing on his belt buckle from the 1st edition illustration turned out pretty good too.






Roxanna Darknail

I had done a conversion for her a long time ago, but it was when I was a lot less skilled and the Forgeworld model looked pretty good so I’d bought her. Aside from the skin I was not very happy with how she turned out. The paintjob wasn’t bad, but I largely followed the same colour scheme as the model from the Forgeworld site. This does match the illustration too, but I don’t like just copying other people and wish I’d added some differences. The purple armour and clothing in particular looked very bland and was certainly not my best work.




Mrdrix Hex

The final star was Mordix and she was a very early conversion from BB16. Back when I went more for the essence of the star rather than trying to match the illustration as closely as possible. She had a blood red “shawl” which was a welcome addition, along with a gold mask, gold edged armour and white hair. These all made her very distinct from Roxanna, despite them being the same position.

The biggest headache by far was painting her hair, there was so much of it that it was really hard to get to without getting paint on other parts. I’d started with a light greyish purple and steadily added white to that. This is an added difficulty with conversions, the parts don’t always fit together that well and require filling with greenstuff. With standard models you can often paint the bits separately and then assemble them. It’s something I may need to factor in for the future, possibly fully assembling and filling the model and then part dismantling it is places where the join can be hidden and using pins.




With these stars done I have now completed all those from Spike magazine 2 and am about ¾ of the way through the 80 BB16 stars. I would like to go back and improve on the Eldril and Horkon models I did a few years back, but there are still a lot of BB16 stars to go, some new ones in BB20 and new teams keep being added too.

My painting has slowed down a bit of late and I’ve been eyeing up some cool new models. It might be time to switch back to converting for a while to avoid painting becoming a chore.