Deathrattle Army - The Sons of Velmorn

 

The Sons of Velmorn from Warhammer Underworlds add some nice variety among the new GW skeleton designs. I painted them up in the colours of my Deathrattle horde and gave them some matching shields. Pics below the jump...

 

Velmorn himself is a nice update on the plastic Wight King model - a great sculpt that still holds up to this day. Much of his design calls back to that sculpt - which I noticed because I converted and painted one up a while back as my skeletonised Necromancer. I painted this one up exactly the same way. Although the details on this new King are more slender and dynamic in 3D space, making him a little harder to work with. The only modification I made was to add a Hexwraith fire-pot to his helmet (which is perfectly shaped to receive it). Brazier hats are in style for skeletons.

The Sons themselves are updates on the Grave Guard models, going some way to solving the discrpency between the old sculpts and the new Skeletons. My solution for the old Guard models was to give them the lower half of Empire Flagellants. The Sons borrow some design cues from the new Deathrattle Skeletons to bridge the two designs.

I like them, and the only change I made was to replace their Grave Guard style heater shields with shields from the Deathrattle Skeleton warriors. Skeleton arms are so flimsy this required replacing the Sons' arms with ones from the Deathrattle kit (luckily the kit comes with a lot of spares).

Painting was quick, because I've got the bronze recipe down to a fine art after painting dozens of other skeletons.

Fortunately this Son doesn't have a shield to replace. I left him as is.

Finally, the big draw of this group, the giant son who I think is supposed to be half-ogre or something. It's great to have a huge guy for the army, since a pure Skeleton army doesn't look like a very diverse bunch. He adds some much-needed variety to the massed horde.

That's a 40mm base he's on.

I replaced his shield with one from the Warcry Chaos Legionaries. I removed its spikes and replaced them with round knobs from weapon hilts. This is a style I've used across the army, trying to add a touch of psuedo Bronze Age ornamentation. It was difficult to extract his shield arm from his original shield, so I had to totally destroy the original shield by cutting it away from the arm in pieces (no way I was going to find a replacement skeleton arm that matches his giant size).

The whole group together is pretty neat. A mini taster of the Deathrattle faction with Grave Guard, a Wight King, and a characterful one-off Big Guy.