The Black Banner of Doom!

 

To be honest, I think he's more a terrain piece than a character - for one thing, Mordheim guys don't really have banners. I was tempted to paint him as if he was stone, but that felt like a waste somehow. I expect he just appears where necessary, to unsettle the characters and provide a bit of cover. 

A few weeks back, I saw an old chaos sorcerer for sale on ebay. He was broken, as the top of his staff was missing, and was only a few pounds. I liked the crouching pose and the Grim Reaper feel of the model, so I bought him. I think he is called The Plague Priest in the old red catalogue.

As luck would have it, many years ago I bought a vampire on horseback from Gamezone miniatures. Gamezone did loads of really nice models: I don't know if they're still going. This guy was a standard bearer, but I replaced his banner with a sword... and I still had his banner lying around. 

The banner was a cool-looking representation of the Reaper holding up an hourglass. Being largely cloth, it would fit well with the guy holding it. With some drilling and pinning, I managed to attach them together and covered the joints with green stuff.

I felt that he was a bit low to the ground, so I put him on a rock made of dried-out DAS clay. This was pure fluke: the clay had got old, and dried into a large slab of stone.

I added a skull in a helmet (the skull is GW, the helmet from Warlord Games) and a Mantic skeleton's sword to the base for extra variety. And then the formatting went weird.

Painting the model was a problem, as I find black very hard to shade, especially with grey. I wondered if I could use blue instead, like in this picture, called Death and the Gravedigger, which looks quite Mordheimish anyhow. Death even seems to be holding some glowing weirdstone, although she looks rather less grim than I'd expect from the Grim Reaper.

So, I used blue on the standard bearer and his standard. The rocks were unsurprisingly grey, with some brown and green washes to suggest dirt and moss, and to make it look less monochrome. Hopefully the small pieces of colour stop the model from being too drab, and suggest what it actually is. The very small pink bit is the banner-waver's arm, which has come up in the photo much lighter than it actually is.