Monster Madness: K'daai Manburner

In my last article, I hinted you all that I had stuff under my sleeve, right? Here's what I promised: A K'daai Fireborn.

K'daais are lesser fire daemons, which are bound by daemonsmiths to serve a Chaos Dwarf army in battle. In The Legion of Azgorh list, there are some troop choices that do not have models released to represent them and K'daais are one of them. Although the Chaos Dwarf community sees the lack of the models as a chance to build or convert their own miniatures (most probably because of being used to be neglected, heh), I went on to look for suitable models to be used as K'daais.

The model I'm talking about is a fire elemental from Rackham's Confrontation line. It is long out of production so I had to pay a small fortune to get a hold on to this model; but it is worth every single penny. Being completely metal, this beast is 6.5cms (2.5") long and was an absolute bitch to put together. However, I must say that I am very happy the end product. Since it's a very cool looking (and very expensive) model, I'm thinking of using this as a K'daai Manburner, the unit champion.

Ok, as I said, it is a heavy, metal model, which came in 10 separate pieces. Hence, I needed to pin the shit out of (or into) it. I started with the head as it was the easiest part. Then, I moved on to the arms and attached each of the three claws to the joints. Once they were cured, assembled it all for good and pinned it on the base again. The effort was easily over three hours, phew...

When painting the K'daai, things were simpler. Basically there were two areas: Armor and fire. I did the armor parts the same way I did the normal troopers, no problems there. For fire, I started with white and then washed with gold yellow, blazing orange and baal red, in this order. For some glows, I applied a little ogryn flesh once the washes dried. After this point, it was all highlights. First with %50 white-gold yellow, then with the same mixture; but with more white.

After I finished painting the miniature, I added the basing elements. Yeah, I did the basing after I finished the model; because I thought it could be extremely hard to reach certain parts of the model. Added a few rocks here and there, which were built from balsa, and some grits to make up for rubble and molten rocks. Pretty much that was it.

Photos anyone...?