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I love placing human-scale minis underneath larger minis, it really helps to set the scale even when they're sitting on a shelf

Herald looks great, and love the idea.

Well thank you for the kind words.
Painting the beast proceeds apace. I'm not done yet, but I have blocked out the main colors and effects I want to use, to test whether the thing would hang together. What I have so far is this:


Still a long ways to go, correcting mistakes, sharpening the details, painting out specific smaller dramas swirling within the whole....


Right now a lot of the painting remains crude, even notional....


But if I'm honest, I'm not a particularly skilled painter. More of a painterly, "overall effect" kind of guy. (Euphemisms!)
Still, the overall look and feel of the thing, that I do confess I'm pleased with, at this stage. It does look, if nothing else, harrowed.


As always, thanks for looking and pitching in with feedback!

Already looking gorgeous ! Keep it up !

All looks good, the scheme certainly works. You could do the base now and many people would assume it's finished

I pick away at finishing up the painting on the first knight.
And meanwhile, a second benighted knight (see what I did there?) takes form. This one also deeply corrupted, but given to a different form of ruin: a rampager, its machine spirit filled with ravening rage.


As you can see, I've begun laying in the first few base colors on this one, too, though the painting is still in its early stages:


I haven't yet decided on the second color for its two-tone scheme (for the pauldrons and cowl), though I'm leaning toward some version of red -- maybe a deep, rich, Mechanicus kind of red, but applied in the same shimmering, glowy style as the blue shades on the main panels of the hull...


One decision that held things back a bit for this one was what to do with those pauldrons. I began by chewing them up around the edges with some dremel-sculpting -- but really didn't like the effect. (It turns out a dremel really does make for crude sculpting. Who knew!) And my first few efforts to improve them via greenstuffery were not satisfying either. Then, two days ago, I hit on a solution I did like, here:


and here:


So, soon I'll have a pair of knights ready to walk -- and the third (that Tzeentchish double-dragon-headed beast) will come next.

Thanks for looking!

Scary stuff!

Really impressed by these scary knights! Once the paint's one them the full effect of the gribblification is plain to see. I know you've said you're more of a tinkerer than a painter but I think that these guys have been painted very effectively. The color choices in particular help all the details pop, rather than blending together - so the paint helps us appreciate all that lovely conversion work you've done!

Second knight looking good, and pauldrons looking suitably harrowed. (Surprising news on the dremel )

@Malika2: Thanks, man!
@Don Qui Hotep: Kind words. I appreciate the charitable description!
@monkeytroll: I know, right?

Well, the project lurches unsteadily forward. Some painting progress on the first two knights -- but no sharing yet -- I want to get things just a little further along before posting on that.

On the 3rd knight, meanwhile (meaning, the truly Tzeentchian creature with the twin dragon/bird heads), I've been working on sculpting and converting details, managing to (pretty much) finish up the two shoulder pauldrons.

Here's a look at the first:


and


On the other side, I took a different approach. I have always loved one of the shields on the old WHFB chaos knights: this one:


So I decided to try to craft a similar look for my second pauldron. Since the process was so involved, and since I've so appreciated some of the step-by-step hobby documentation in other project logs that I've admired, I thought I'd offer a detailed look at how I went about this part of the whole.

I started by drilling a random spray of holes in the pauldron:

(As you may also be able to tell here, I also "painted" the smooth surfaces of the pauldron with a thin coat of plastic cement, to melt and subtly misshape it -- though as things turned out, I didn't really need to have bothered with this step! )

Anyway, next step was to superglue small balls of greenstuff into the holes, for the eyes:

You can see the tin of greenstuff bits I drew from for this: when I'm sculpting, I frequently end up with excess already-blended greenstuff after finishing with a particular round of sculpting. In these cases, I use the leftover (which would otherwise go to waste) making small spheres that might serve as eyeballs or bubbles, as well as rolled, sharp-tipped, curls that might serve down the road as claws or talons or teeth -- as in my case, there is always more harrowing to come!

Having already dried and hardened spherical eyeball bits makes it much easier to then layer in folds of flesh/harrowing, like so:


... and then (I find this is best done in multiple stages), like so:


And again and again, layering things in, and leaving plenty of time between sessions for the greenstuff to dry, until I ended up with this:


and (from another angle), this:


Anyway, there's some progress, and a look at how I got there.

Thanks for looking!!

Thanks for the update! I agree, it's really fun to see the process. That's a brilliant idea for extra greenstuff - I wish I'd thought of that ten years ago! I always end up with that thimbleful left.

Shoulderpads looking great. You successfully translated the original concept to the new piece. How useful was drilling the holes for the eye blobs? Do you think you could pull off the effect if the piece was too delicate to drill?

Pauldrons looking good. I have a big bag of tentacles that I add to with my leftover greenstuff - you never get just the right amount mixed