Malign Portents is the newest addition to Games-Workshop’s line, Age of Sigmar. With four new character minis recently hitting shelves, this is a great opportunity to add a fresh new Hero to your army’s ranks. The Lord Ordinator himself has a lot of great potential for spicing up Order’s ranks.
The Lord Ordinator is the new addition to the golden boys of Sigmar, The Stormcast Eternals. Lord Ordinator is a title rather than a name, these warriors are Stormcast of high rank, filling both roles as Engineer, and Warrior lord. Until recently the Ordinators would not have been seen on the front lines, usually assisting the war effort from the command areas, or back in the heavenly realms using arcane mathematics and astrology to predict the future or create siege weapons for the Stormcast armies. With the advent of Malign Portents, however, the Ordinators are taking the field. Supplementing Stormhosts, and assisting with their intellect, or with their dual hammers…
Since this mini was the first Stormcast that really grabbed my attention and the fact that the Ordinators are Combat Engineers like yours truly, I wanted to do something a bit different than the normal gold paint scheme. Deciding to go with a striking gold-yellow scheme, I looked to the handy-dandy color wheel for inspiration. Using gold/yellow’s compliment color, purple, I found a good basic color scheme. Not wanting to be too basic, I looked at another color theory, Triads, to find some other colors. In the RGB, this got me teal and red-brown. Great! Let’s get started with a simple black primer and pre-shade using Stynylrez primer from Badger Airbrush Co.
The work-up for the armor starts with a medium orange. For this, I used basic Orange from Vallejo Model Air (VMA). Spraying very light and transparent across the mini, letting the pre-shade show through so I could have a template of where to layer our brighter colors, and keep our shadows nice and dark.
From here, the next color is Orange Fire from Vallejo Game Air (VGA). Again layering thin over our VMA Orange, these first two colors are just there to help our yellows stick to the mini, and stay vibrant.
Now for the first of the yellows, Gold Yellow VGA. This is where we start bringing up the yellow and making it fairly opaque. Only letting the oranges show through in the shadows. Follow this with Moon Yellow VGA, this is a very vibrant yellow, it really pops on the model. But be careful, it is a very translucent paint when thinned, so don’t try to force the color to build up, that can lead to the paint pooling and create nasty splotches. Patience is the name of the game.
Last, some spot highlights with Ivory from Vallejo Model Color (VMC). This is an off-white in the warm range, great for using with yellows like this to get the highlights extra bright before a wash. For this mini, I used Army Painter’s wash system. Mixing Quickshade Medium with Soft Tone, for a nice sepia shade. This also keeps the yellow armor nice and clean, without stains on the flat areas.
For the dual hammers, I wanted to do something to make this mini special. Painting the Hammers normal metallics just seemed too boring. So let’s do Magic Hammers! This is a fairly easy airbrush effect, carried over from Warhammer 40k projects I have done. First, just black out the head of the hammer, here I used VMC Black.
Now we are going to airbrush some colors over the black, towards the face, and point, of the hammers. This will create a magical glow effect that is quite striking since we are going from pure black to an almost white. The colors are VMC Purple, Vallejo Mecha Color Purple, then Mecha Purple 50/50 with White. Then White by itself, just a little bit. Don’t want to overpower our purples. I recommend “Hobo White” from SlowfuseGaming.
To bring home the effect, take just a bit of white, and do some edging on the sharp corners of the hammers, this will help the effect pop more.
For the rest of the mini, I used more basic techniques, this creates a more cartoon-ish appearance that I like for fantasy genre minis. A simple method of base, wash, layer, edge. Easy Peasy.
The rest of the paints to finish the color scheme are:
- VMC Purple, Vallejo Mecha Purple
- VMC Flat Brown + VMC Black, VMC Mahogany Brown, Scale 75 Arabic Shadow
- Scale 75 Black Metal, Scale 75 Thrash Metal, Scale 75 Necro/Negro Gold, Scale 75 Elven Gold
- VGA Dwarf skin, Army Painter Tanned Flesh, Citadel Shades Violet & Reikland Fleshshade, Army Painter Barbarian Flesh
- VMC Blue Green, Secret Weapon Verdigris, Citadel Gauss Blaster Green, VMC Ivory
- VGA Charred Brown, VMC Buff, VMC Ivory
- VMC Carmine red, VMC Flat red
Essayons!
Hopefully, this gave you some inspiration for your next paint project. For more fun miniatures and painting tutorials, be sure to stop by my live stream over on Twitch where I do live shows four nights a week.
About the Author: Wyatt Turk
