Fabius Bile

A very special thanks to Sebastian Archer for contributing to our site. Sebastian has won four 1st Place Golden Demons since 2005 and his work is an inspiration to painters all over the world.

This was commission miniature of an old GW classic, Fabius Bile. According to the GW background/universe, Fabius is actually meant to belong to the Emperor's Children legion - however, the client wanted him to fit with a Death Guard theme, hence the brown-green armour and copious amouns of rust! (yes you are right, it was all just an excuse allowing me to cover the mini with rust haha...I love it!)

One of the tricky parts was trying to make his cloak look interesting (or at least, not boring!), especially at the back, because it is mainly just a completely flat surface apart from the seams, and those two faces. So that's why I included those blood trails, and the darker markings like bruises or something - his cloak is meant to be made of human skin stitched together haha, very nice!

The bright green was achieved through the use of an ancient GW paint called bilious green. It hails from the time when GW paint pots were round, taller, had white lids, contained 20mls of paint, and had the red 'citadel colour label - with no mention of GW anywhere on the pot! Oh yeah and the other good thing - they never dry out...this paint must 11 or 12 years old by now, it dates from back when I was merely a young boy (some say I still am haha - I must act like it!). Anyway, bilious green is such a bright green that it's almost fluorescent. It made the base coat, mixed with GW dark angels green for shading, and with white for the highlights.

The metallics were the most fun part - it's good to return to metallics after a sojourn with NMM. The rust was painted in a similar way to the rust on the black paladin and Kaïn. After a base coat of boltgun metal, I shaded the metal areas with a black wash - there was no need to be neat, the objective was simply to make the cracks and recesses very dark before starting with the rust. I then highlighted with a watered down mix of boltgun and mithril - again not neatly, just roughly. Then I used a thin wash of black mixed with dark flesh, applied quite liberally. Then another wash, very thin and controlled - like a glaze - with bestial brown added to the mix, focussing more on the recesses and covering a smaller area than the previous step. Then the same again with VMC orange brown added, again covering a smaller area than the previous step. Then one more time with a new mix of VMC orange brown mixed with some VMC goldbrown. After this rusting was complete, I re-highlighted with a thinned mix of boltgun and mithril, then pure mithril for the final highlight.

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