Chaos Pact / Chaos Renegades

I had been taking ages to prepare a Chaos Pact team (now officially known as Chaos Renegades, but I'm old school when it comes to this kind of thing!). This lot were from a Goblin Guild crowdfunder, and each were an individual sculpt, which makes it far more interesting to paint but has the side effect of taking much longer too.

It may seem strange to some, but the first thing I considered was not the paint scheme, but instead, the bases. I had seen the use of water effects, and having been fairly dull with other team bases I decided it was time to try something new and challenging... and it certainly was challenging for me! With a glacier ice-like look to the models in mind, I decided that a cold-blue theme would work - the team ended up being named the Blue Ice Pacters (a nod to Green Bay Packers?).

I started my base painting the miniatures being careful to select a different blue colour for the armour compared to the ice-blue look I was going for on the base. Then I painted the bases with white, then applied patches of blue with a lighter blue around their edges. The idea was to layer the 'ice' and have a mix of white & blues depths.

I'd not used Vallejo Still Water before, but it has a melted ice cream consistency to it, which means it runs everywhere! This was going to be a difficult task with slotta bases, so I tried to green-stuff the visible gaps and then put masking team around the edge of the bases (thinking this wouldn't lead to paint coming off on the tape. This worked fine for the marauder miniatures, but for the Big Guys (Troll, Ogre and Minotaur) they had elements of the miniature that overlapped the base edge. I applied a very thin layer of Still Water to the miniature bases in order to get a shiny ice effect. 

Unfortunately there was some leakage for the big guys and a couple of the slotta bases, and the masking tape failed a few times with soaking up and coming undone. For the next layer I wanted to put a good amount of Still Water on as once it dried it would crack, giving a nice ice shards look. In order to do this I used cellotape instead of masking tape this time. I prepared two lots... one with a dash of white paint added to the water, and one with blue. Using a pipette purchased from a local pharmacy, I proceeded to apply blue mixture over the blue patched areas, and white to the other areas and then let nature take it course. 

It took a couple of days to dry out properly and crack nicely. I then pealed off the cellotape (taking some of the paint off too!) and cut the edges off the ice where the water had nestled up to the tape.
I had added some mixed rocks to the bases as glacial debris and then dusted the rocks with Valhallan Blizzard (snow to you and me) which dried nice and hard in a few hours. I then set about picking out the detail on all the miniatures, going for a cold looking skin, pink boils (well, they have made a pact with the Chaos gods) and ensured all the various mutations on the marauders looked respectable enough. I had already put a chaos eye on each of their belt buckles, like the Sauron eye.

As you can see from this photo focusing on the bases, the cracked ice effect looked pretty good, and in real life the ice is nice and shiny (sorry for my photography!).

The Big Guys - Ogre, Minotaur and my attempt at a Lava-skin Troll.

 Animosity! - The Goblin, Skaven, Dark Elf and Orc players.

 Marauder mutations - Tentacles, extra arms, lizard leg&tail, Hellboy fist and a marauding female.

 More mutations - Claws, two heads (Predator theme), big teeth? and a bloater.

All in all I was pretty pleased with the way they turned out and it was good to do something new, and use some different team colours than I usually go for! I still have a team coach, apothecary and a few other bits and pieces to complete for this team, but I'll do that some other time (maybe!). What do you think? How did you find completing this team?