Here's what's next on the painting table:
My competition spirit host ready for paint:
Hopefully I'll get it done before the deadline! Got a fairly busy week ahead though… so we'll see what happens!
And the three spirit hosts together:
I'm a bit unsure about the basing for these. I'm wandering if the tall trunks look OK or out of place here...
I'd heard these were a chore to put together but they were pretty straight forward (the instruction book was necessary though) and a nice break from skeletal units. They are quite fragile though
Now, there are a few new things for me to paint here – glowing ethereal colours, fire, OSL... So I did a few experiments between painting skeletons & other stuff.
I've tried a few ways of painting standard and blue fire:
Completely new to this, I'm still not content with the majority of my efforts. Getting the colours in the wrong places can completely alter the appearance of the flame, making it look too intense or not intense enough, or even a bit cartoonish/pastel-looking if the 'highlights' are off. The third scheme is more or less what I'll be using on my spirit hosts.
While this looks kinda fine for things like fire and spirit hosts, I tried something similar on a skeleton (since they have harder edges) and I'm not too sure what to make of it – it made it look like a negative and didn't translate as I'd hoped for. It was also quite time-consuming and left little room for error:
After seeing
@Borgnine 's spirit base for his Coven Throne, I asked him how he went about painting it and decided to try his scheme out a little after swapping the washes to suit my army:
I went for a slightly darker blue wash and a thinned light blue glaze.
After trying out the light ethereal scheme, I went about using it on (half of) a wraith and applied the dark inverted scheme to the fire to see how they'd look side by side, and this is the result:
Right now I think my flames need improving and perhaps the bones could use a slightly lighter glaze (see the flaming skull on the right for comparison).
I've left the robes black for now as I'm not sure how I'd like to paint them. Black or dark blue would definitely break up the light ethereal colours at work here, while brown would add some warm colours to the miniature...
Let me know what you think, suggestions & comments welcome!
@Borgnine Cheers buddy! Yeah, the trees do seem to be buried in spears in this unit. They are actually a little taller (about 1cm more) but I have to chop an ugly part off the top. I think they could be taller though, so I'll bare this in mind for the next filler I make
@edwardvlad Thank you, kind sir! Glad you like them

Before starting this army I'd been thinking about something different for the bases, and so went for autumn forest bases - they contrast nicely with the blues in the army
More stuff on the way, cheers for taking a look!