Purple Sun of Xereus

I picked up the Malign Sorceries expansion when it came out last weekend. The spells look amazing and its nice to have them represented on the battlefield again, just like in the good old days of fourth and fifth edition. They were removed I think, as templates at least, once sixth rolled around and this was probably for the best. However as models these work excellently on the battlefield. Not only do they look cool but they have a big impact on the game. I suppose that's just conjecture on my part as I haven't used them yet but it does look like they'll be huge.

I was mainly interested on the Grave Tide but for some reason I probably did like everyone else and glued the Purple sun together. This was easy enough as the internal frame worked a treat. I guess they might begin to use this on other bigger models in the future as it makes them very sturdy. Everything pushed together well despite the smaller spikes being a little too sharp for my delicate thumbs. The kit has a big problem with gaps and while I filled them all using the Gloss Varnish method it just wasn't enough. I should have done a coat or two more to really smooth them out. As this was the first time that I had tried the method however I can't expect great results. Next time I'll know. As for painting I didn't want such a dark orb as is shown in the picture and I didn't want to go and buy a load of purple paint that I'll barely ever use. I had a purple wash and that was going to suffice! With that in mind I sprayed the Sun white. Over the purple plastic it was hard to get a solid colour so in the end I had to brush a layer of white on. Over that I added some diluted Druchi Violet. This came out quite pink and so I gave the recessed areas a second wash to deepen the colour and bring it up to a more purple hue.

The fun started next with a simple line highlight of white along the most raised areas. I could have targeted this better but the effect I got is good so I'm happy with it. At that stage I had the Purple Sun basically done but as it was essentially all one colour it looked really boring. To change it up a bit I started blending the tips of the spikes out to Incubi Darkness. This worked really well on the downward pointing spikes but on those that pointed upwards it was hard to control the wash and prevent tide lines. Again it came out good enough that I didn't really worry too much about fixing any errors. For the base piece I decided again that going purple with it wasn't going to look that good so I went for a blue green. Its subtly different from the spikes but not much and most people won't notice it. Finally when it came to basing the model I went with a fairly standard basing scheme to match my armies and the board. However I guess that the passage of the Purple sun must have some effect on the ground behind it and so I used one of the crackle texture paints to give that effect and I painted it to look like ash. All in all this model was good fun to paint and while it won't see much board time sadly it will look great in the collection.