This is the last final of my aesthetic ruminations. I now know that my beasts will be white (see here for why) and my ogres themselves will be darker skinned with some crazy trousers (see here for why). There’s just one more element I need to think through; freehand banners.
I should mention right up front that I’m a bit nervous about these. I haven’t actually picked up a paintbrush for a few months so I’m worried my skills have deteriorated (I don’t even have all my stuff to paint with) so I’ll probably keep these quite simple.
I’ve got three banners to paint: one each on the mournfang units and one I’m making to go on the Frostlord’s ‘throne,’ thingy.
The first decision I have to make is whether to stick with the GW ip or go my own way. The GW ip is very tribal, focusing on the lore around ‘the maw,’ (and there’s nothing wrong with that) and very easy to do (which fits with my worries nicely):
I could do this pretty easily (I think). But, after consultation with my doubles partner, we think more detailed freehand would be better to grab an army nomination.
Now, I’m not entirely without experience in freehand and I’m getting better at it too:
This is the way I want to go. My basic freehand skill set is limited to:
Skulls (thanks Richard Gray)
Climbing vines and flowers
Feathers
Now, if I don’t ever try anything else, I’ll never get any new skills. I’m fully on board with that so I’m going to look at doing all of the above and adding something else in too.
Fortuitously, an item I’m using in my army list to make my general -1 to hit is a feather. So, it makes sense to use my feather skills to paint that freehand on his banner. But what about the rest?
Each Mournfang banner has two sides (duh) and I like the theme I had for the skulls on the competition piece in the pics above. I’m thinking one blue banner with a skull and flowers on one side and the other unit with a red banner with a skull and chains on one side.
But what about the back of each banner? Hmm, I don’t know. One of the things I’m doing on the rest of the models is TMM but i do like the look of NMM. Maybe something I could do with that. The chains around one of the skulls will be NMM but is that enough?
In the Warhammer lore there are few things that go better with skulls than weapons. Weapons made of metal give a great opportunity for NMM. Let me do a quick internet search and have a look…
This. This can’t be hard to reproduce (this wasn’t the first one I came up with by the way, I did have a pretty thorough scan. I’m happy with these on the back of one banner with flowers on them and on the back of the other with chains around them.
See – wasn’t so hard after all. Now all I’ve got to do is actually paint them!