Necromancer Valignano

A master of the dark arts of necromancy, Valignano summons forth minions of death to do his bidding.


Valignano is an old Marauder Miniatures necromancer model from 1992. I picked the model up from ebay a while ago to supplement my undead skeleton army that was largely devoid of spell casters at the time.
He has remained unpainted up until now so it's very satisfying to have some paint on him at last.

I stuck to the fairly limited palette that I have chosen for this army which will help some of the different era models retain a coherent look. You can see in the first image the size difference between the older undead samurai and the newer, larger necromancer. As he is a character I'm not too worried about it as he needs to stand out a bit from the crowd, and being a bigger model on a bigger base helps with this.

As far as the sculpt goes it was a great model to paint. It has just the right level of detail for my tastes with some nice trinkets that are well placed and clearly defined, with nothing too over the top.
I chose to give the model dark grey robes with some red accent colour on the arms and sash as a contrast. Brown was limited to the fur around the collar, and the rusty sword and a few other smaller parts.
I decided to do the staff bone colour as there is a lack of bones on this model and wanted to tie it in with the rest of the army, that will predominately be made up of skeletons of various types.

The pouches were brown but I gave them more of a bone coloured highlight than I would normally for the same reason.
The base colour is my standard grey with underhive ash highlight. I added a couple more grassy tufts than I normally would to compensate for the lack of other details on the base, and think it looks reasonably balanced. For my other characters and larger bases I will try to add details to the bases where I can, but maintain the "less is more" philosophy.
I decided on a blue glow for the eyes, staff and gems. I think this will be a nice highlight colour for the palette that I have chosen which has a bit of rusty orange that the blue will contrast nicely.

I chose the name Valignano from some text I read on europe's initial trade relationship with Japan, which seemed appropriate given the army has undead samurai in it, fighting alongside undead of Tilean origin. Valignano has travelled far on his quest for knowledge, picking up all manner of allies and followers on the way.

So that's it for now, another model added to the completed old lead undead!