Throne Of Blood

Blasting back into blogging with the ferocity of a tank-mounted daemon. I hope this smashbashed Blades of Khorne Herald of Khorne on Blood Throne will make up for my long absence.

Hi all. It's been a while. A combination of a spot of illness around the start of 2023, and the tempting quickness of Instagram have kept me from either finishing hobby projects or posting them here. Frankly I've been spending all my hobby energy on making, and neglecting the blogging side. But the blogging side is important to me (some of my favourite hobby blogs are what got me back into the hobby in the first place) so I will make an effort to pick it up again. The first thing I'll show off is a new one-off Khorne tankbash, and soon I'll fill in on some of the things I've been making but not blogging about.

88888888 KHORNE THRONE-TANK 88888888

The seed of this idea came from a single panel in the webcomic Kill Six Billion Demons (an incredible source of inspiration for demonic sci-fantasy worldbuilding). In this panel we see the demiurge Jagganoth at work in his workshop, forging weapons of war. And tucked into one corner is a badass metal tank. The idea of a cast iron tank in a fantasy setting captured the hobby bit of my brain, and the nicest fit seemed to be Khorne, who is first and foremost a war god.

A panel from Kill Six Billion Demons

This idea was at the back of my mind for a while, because I'm already levels deep in side projects, and I wouldn't know where to start with scale model tanks. But then, with some weird luck, I was getting my groceries in Lidl when I saw a bundle of Airfix starter kits in the mythical treasure trove that is the middle of Lidl. One was a Sherman tank, its "actual size" handily illustrated on the box. It looked about right, and it was very very cheap, so I decided then and there that Project Khorne Tank was a go, and into the basket with my groceries it went.

So what Khorne units in Age of Sigmar could proxy a tank? A Skull Cannon seems like a good fit - the official model doesn't work for me, and a mechanical wheeled beast could easily become a tank-like warmachine from the forges of the war god. Perhaps also a warshrine or a chariot allied in from Slaves to Darkness? At a stretch, a Juggernaut? I decided on a Herald of Khorne on a Skull Throne (the Skull Cannon's equally weird-looking sister kit), because I loved the idea of an insanely violent demon getting an entire tank to itself as a sort of demonic mount.

Assembling the tank, I tilted the top chassis forward to increase the forward-ness of the build, communicating the aggression of the tank's demonic pilot (the base is also sloped forwards). I left off the turret, and turned the round hole into the demon's access hatch or hidey-hole, using the rim of a plastic tube and the outer circular part of an old Chaos 8-point star banner. I bulked out the sides of the tanks with some very rough Aves Apoxie Sculpt, so that the edges of the chassis would look like unfinished metal slag, as if the whole thing was cast from a solid piece of iron. And then I added tons of greebles. The goal was to make it look either steam-driven or diesel-driven, so no electronics, but loads of pipes and valves. I also added lots of spikes and protrusions that might look like the hand-holds the demon uses as it impatiently scurries around on top of the chassis.

I knew I had enough bits to cobble together a Khorne demon, mostly from the excellent Warcry Chaotic Beasts kits. The default Bloodletter sword is appropriately huge. I perched the demon right on the front of the tank. It's impatient to get close up with its foes.

Painting was fun. I like trying to simulate materials perhaps more than I like painting traditionally. I built up layers of texture with some GW texture paint, then a thickly sponged undercoat, then thickly stippled graphite powder (ground pencil lead) onto a layer of wet matt varnish (then sealed with spray varnish). After that, a ton of weathering with different shades of brown and rusty orange, as well as metallic scratches applied with a normal pencil. The demon was painted with multiple layers of stippled black, red and bone. The text "MEGAKILL" was applied with some Letraset, which is certainly not the best way to add text to a rough surface. But the resulting roughness worked fine in this case.

I've given thought to expanding this project with maybe other daemon engines of Khorne (a crewed Skull Cannon tank? A mechanised Warshrine?). For now I've got enough projects on the go that I should finish before taking this one any further. I'm going to be more disciplined with blogging about them, since I do enjoy deep diving into projects like this.

Thanks always for reading,

Hek