If you’ve been around my blog a while, you’ll know Howling Banshees are my Aspect Warrior of choice, but a couple years ago I tried my hand at Striking Scorpions. I thought I nailed a speed-paint version of them at the time, but after the fact felt a little unsatisfied and wishing that I’d done something a little more detailed and worthy for them. For the longest time I wanted to give them a re-do but didn’t quite have the motivation, and also I’d done one of them up as an Exarch-in-Training and wanted to have two “real” Exarchs for two separate squads of them for army purposes. Fortunately, @BrittneyStucklessArt came to the rescue with another Exarch for these guys at Christmas, so I made a point of giving them the re-do that I thought they deserved, bringing them in line with the rest of my current army.

Of course, this also comes at a time where I’m starting to dip my toes into Kill Team, both with my recent Phobos Strike Team and now with these. The nice thing about the Blades of Khaine Kill Team is that it allows you to field Howling Banshees (because of course it does) and also Dire Avengers, who I might have to revisit as well at some point in the near future. I wanted to try and coordinate colors for this – I have my Banshees following a violet sort of color theme, and figured that Striking Scorpions would be a great fit for green, with the Dire Avengers falling nicely in the middle with blue or teal tones if and when I get around to doing a batch of those in the future.

I’ve done plenty of forest greens before but where I diverged from some of my usual paint schemes and recipes was in painting a more emerald-green than forest-green color, in a recipe I stole from a Salamanders tutorial somewhere ages ago. Caliban Green, Warpstone Glow, and Moot Green are kind of a magical combination that, looking at the individual paint pots, feels like it shouldn’t work, even though it really, really does. While I was going to make the eyes green as well, maybe an acid-green, I decided that for contrast purposes having pinkish neon hues on the eyes would match the basing materials and would just be a really nice point of contrast.

In the end I’m very happy with how these came together – if I had one complaint for myself it’s that the yellow runes that I borrowed from an old decal set stood out against the greens more than I wanted them too and were a little garish, but they were too difficult to remove after I’d finished the applications without having to redo the helmets. Having these done, though, puts me in a really good spot as far as my army preparation and Kill Team preparations alike are concerned, and opens the door for me to slide some Dire Avengers back into my tabletop toolkit. I’m starting to think that this army will never actually be finished – oh, well.