The first of many ghost-pants!

Age Of Sigmar's second edition just came out last week and as much as I enjoyed my time playing the first edition of the game the truth is I didn't actually play all that many games.  I liked the simplified system and thought the new background was cool but the truth is none of the new armies really 'grabbed' me.  The models were well sculpted and well executed but I've always been a fan of a fairly traditional classic take on fantasy and the admittedly exciting new direction Games Workshop was going in just didn't strike any particular nerves with me.

One of my local games stores, Black Knight Games in Hamilton, is running and event called A Call To Arms which is basically an event geared towards collecting and painting an army.  It coincidentally kicked off shortly before the release of the new box set and being traditionally an Undead player the new Malignants were the first collection for the game I was really excited about.  So here I go!

Ahead of the arrival of my new starter box I got my grubby hands on a Nighthaunt box with comes with; 3 Spirit Hosts, 5 Hex Wraiths & 1 Cairn Wraith.  I was eager to try out the new Hexwraith Flame technical paint so I decided to start by painting the Spirit Hosts which had the most ghosty bits to try it out on.

Let me start off with two product opinions.  First up whoever designed and tooled the Spirit Host models is one of history's greatest monsters.  I have built TONS of models over the last 30+ years and I genuinely don't remember the last time I struggled so much to build any models (let alone plastic models).  They weren't very stable to work with during construction and the instruction sheets provided were confusing and barely helpful.  Even though I'm basically happy with the end result I can't imagine ever building another unit of these again.  On the flip-side the Hexwraith Flame technical paint was AWESOME!  It was incredibly easy to use, performed exactly the way I thought it would  and (in my opinion) got a terrific result.  My immediate reaction to using it was to start looking through boxes of unpainted models for more ghost I could paint ASAP.  The stuff is great and I highly recommend it to anyone who wants or needs to paint any ghost models.

For my Spirit Hosts I started by prepping the models bases by using a green stuff roller to put cobblestones across their bases.  This is the basing I've decided to go with across my entire Malignant army.  I primed white then gave the entire models a coat of Hexwraith Flame.  After that was dry I drybrushed P3 Frostbite over all the ghosty bits.  The weapons are Boltgun Metal with an Agrax Earthshade wash.  The cobbles are Skevenblight Dinge with a Dwanstone drybrush and a Nuln Oil wash.

Overall I'm happy with how they turned out and I'm looking forward to painting more ethereal models over the rest of this month.

-Jay