Vlad Von Carstein

I am currently painting Vlad for a friend. The sword was in pretty bad shape so needed some work; in the end I did what I could and was ready to paint.

I have tried to keep genuine to the GW colour scheme which maximizes the distinction between the black and gold armour. The gold was an attempt at NMM, but it has come out quite dark. I was hoping it might pop a little more, but wanted to keep a natural look. I had some trouble deciding on a hair colour and this is the third attempt. In the end I went for quite a dark colour to draw attention to the pallid colour on the face.

Hope you enjoy.

straightening the vampires sword

I have a longstanding arrangement with my friends in the local gaming community. This is that I will agree to paint any figure they want, so long as it is only once per lifetime...


Well, a good friend from my local gaming club decided to take advantage of this offer and passed me a Vlad von Carstein model from GWs Vampire counts range to paint

The only problem with this is that it is a fine cast model and the sword was in pretty bad condition.

The sword was not only bent out of shape but had a pretty strange split near the end. The owner had already assembled it, so I could not swap it at the GW store ( I understand that they will swap with no hassle), so I had to try some repair work....

I have heard that you can reshape finecast by first placing in boiling water, putting into the shape you want and then putting into cold water. I tried this and found that once the sword was put into the hot water it became very floppy and I could put into any shape I wanted. The problem was trying to make a straight sword and holding it straight long enough to put it into the bowl of cold water. Eventually I got it as straight as I thought I could get away with.

I then filled the sword with green stuff, let it dry and filed it flat. Not great, but better than I started with. Next up I will get to throw some paint at it.