PotM: Mortis Engine

How you doing lads, this is Eto and today is the first day of the month which means it's time for another episode of Painting of the Month (PotM), a series where we'll nominate a unit at the start of the month and by the time it's the first day of the following month we'll showcase those units. For February's episode I had chosen to paint Vampire Counts Mortis Engine and I gotta tell you, it was something different!



At the beginning I was a bit skeptical how I’d actually approach this quite massive.. beast.. machine.. thing. I decided to go with the same style with the spirit horde holding the massive bone construction, as my Spirit Hosts; light grey and blue with white highlights.



After I was done with the ghostly parts I had to tackle down the Mortis Engine itself. I really liked the idea how they described the reliquary being inside a cage of fused bone, so I made the joints as obscure as possible. The reliquary itself and the stairs leading to it, as well as the half skeletons on fire were a lot of fun to paint as they offered something of a contrast to the bone parts.



The corpsemaster and the book infront of him got me stuck for a quite a while. Eventually I decided to go with black robe to slightly blend him in. I didn’t want to add more contrasting colors to the model by making his robes stand out too much. The blasphemous tome ended up with some scribbles, latin words and blood splatters on it.



Finally I added the banshees on top of the construct and they’re pretty much hanging there by happy thoughts and wishful thinking. GW has a tendency to sometimes make models where some parts defy the laws of physics.



I really enjoyed painting this model, and I’d go as far as saying that I only spent 1/3 of the time painting it, and 2/3 of the month wondering what color combinations would work out best. Surprisingly, it was pretty easy to construct even though the total amount of bits in this model is a whopping 90 parts. Eventually it turned out pretty neat, staying true to the rest of my army’s color theme (pictures for those will be added later).

For March episode of PotM I’ll be painting a pack of Ghouls for my Vampire Counts army.

So that pretty much wraps it up for today’s episode of PotM. If you have questions or comments feel free to drop them in the comments section below, and subscribe to our blog if you want to hear more! I’ll see you guys in the next episode, this is Eto signing off.