Undead Battle Standard Bearer

The Infernal Standard of the Pale King borne by a dread champion of Death.

After a ridiculous amount of indecision and too-ing and fro-ing I eventually settled on this model to be my battle standard bearer for my undead army. It is one of my two standard bearers from the nightmare legion, with an old metal vampire counts banner attached. There were a few other candidates, and I might use the standard bearer from my undead cavalry on occasion, but I was really after a model on foot for this army. Not because it's any better, but because it suits the aesthetic of what I am trying to achieve with these guys more. An implacable horde of skeletons slowly advancing.

The banner design was originally going to be a Blanche-esque inspired skull with checkers and stylised flames design, but the stitching on the banner itself made my attempts to paint it frustatingly unsuccessful. So in disgust I painted the bloody red splatter on, which was much more satisfying.

I might paint a silhouette of something in front of the blood patch some day, but I'm trying it on for size as is for now. I quite like how brutal and fresh it looks, which contrasts nicely with the rest of the army, which is ancient and rusty.

The paint job was fairly straightforward, with a couple of exceptions.
I applied quite a few washes of purple and brown inks on the standard itself. This built the colour up and gave the gory red a fair bit of depth (a lot of which was washed out in my photo).

In Age of Sigmar games this will be a wight king with infernal standard. Nearby models who suffer their last wound get a fixed 6+ save thanks to the power of the standard. If I combine this with the special abilities for Death from the generals handbook, I can basically get a 4+ ward save for most of my army, which will lend a fair bit of resilience to the otherwise un-resilient skeleton horde. This applies when they lose their last wound, so is of most benefit to units composed of single wound models who get to use it for every wound that they suffer.
So given that I will have a heap of single wound skeletons I'm looking forward to trying that out!