The Empress's new Groove

Welcome back to my little Blog of creativity.

After my first venture back into miniature painting, and some painting off the grid, I have decided to give a more detailed model a go. And so this time I am painting the Lich Empress by SteamForged Games.

This is a beautiful, large and detailed model from the Epic Encounters series that I instantly fell in love with seeing it in my local game store. As soon as I laid my eyes on it I knew, that this will either be my best, or my most horrible model to date

Now, without any further ado, let us begin with the painting process.

The beginning process of painting this figure was largely the same as my previous models. Because of this I will avoid getting to much into detail on this. All I did was give it a good cleaning and giving it a nice coat of black primer

Now onto the actual fun part.

Base of the mode

I began the process of painting the base quite simply. The stone sections of the base were painted a nice layer of a darker gray colour. On top of that I painted the ground a nice brown colour. To finish the base layers I gave the flying skulls and the flames they emit a base dark green colour.

Already just with the base colours the base was starting to look quite beautifully

After the base layers were complete I started giving the base more details. On the rim surrounding the figure I added some bronze layering to help it pop out.

On the flaming skulls I added some new technical paints I have never used before, those being the Tesseract Glow from the Citadel line. In my humble opinion this technical paint made the skulls pop in a way I never expecting. Afterwards I experimented with some inks I had left over from old projects by using a dark green ink as shading for the flames and skulls. After the shading was done I tried to illuminate some of the stone to create the effect of the flames glowing.

To finish the base I gave the stone some dark wash and light dry brushing to enrich the details hidden in the mold.

And with that, the base was complete, and it turned out beautifully. The green flames turned out to be gorgeous while not overshadowing the rest of the base

The Empress

Once the base has been complete, it was time to start painting the Empress herself

Once again I began the process with giving the miniature a nice and quick base coat. While working with the base coat I tried to think ahead of how I wanted to finished product to look. Any future bronze/gold areas I painted a nice bright brown colour. The dress I wanted to make red, and was instantly reminded just how difficult it is to work with red paints. However, after a few coats, and a couple of tears, I finally managed to give it a looks I was somewhat going for.

Finishing off the base layers, I gave the banners a dark green coat. The stone pillar enjoyed the same dark gray as the base. This concluded base coating and I could move on to detailing

My detailing process was similar to the base of the figure. I gave the red dress a layer of red ink to make it a bit brighter while also fixing some imperfections. Moving on to painting the metal bits, parts of the throne I painted bronze, while the jewellery - gold. I also took some creative liberties and decided to make the Lich Empress sit on a throne made of bones, so I painted it the equivalent colour.

This was the result of the miniature before applying any washes and shading.

Final look

Once I gave the miniature some shading using washes, I could put the Empress and the base together to bask in it's beauty. And in my opinion the figure turned out quite wonderfully. Looking at it now I possibly could have made the details on the Lich a bit darker and worn out, but I also like the look of a powerful entity that shows it's power and authority with clean and expensive metals.

Please take a look at the final product of my work: The Lich Empress; The Velvet Goddess, waiting to exert her influence and dominion across the entire world.