If you want to get the new Kings of War Champions starter set to the table quickly, this guide will be written with minimal paint, tools and time needed in order to make it as easy as possible for you to get playing ASAP.
One extra thing you will want to pick up is a large pack of 25mm MDF bases; these can have your models temporarily glued as the large multibases included in the box set will not be easy to paint the troops on. These can be held in a painting handle such as the ones sold by Games Workshop or simply bluetacked to the top of a small item such as an empty pot.
We’ll need a few paints: A gunmetal spray primer as a base; a bright blue and red that will give us nice contrasting main colours; a yellow brown that will work for both of these and give us a good colour for our leather, fur, and so on. We’ll also need an ivory, just for the horns on the Abyssals.
I personally used Game Colour Leather Brown and Electric Blue with ProAcryl Bold Pyrrole Red and Bright Ivory, although any similar colours would work perfectly fine.
We’ll start by priming all the models in the gunmetal colour. You could alternatively prime the Abyssal force in red, but since the gunmetal colour will be shared between both forces we can just use one can.
We can just block in the following:
- Red – Abyssal Skin including things like the demons crawling out of the ground under the Abyssal character.
- Blue – All the Basilean Cloth.
- Yellow Brown – Weapon handles; Leather such as the boots, straps etc.; Fur on the abyssals and the Horses etc. as well as the skin and hair of the human characters
- Ivory – Horns, hooves and bones.
It’s not important to get these too clean as we’ll be applying a heavy all-over dark wash; simply getting nice bright blocks of colour is all you need to worry about.
Once you’ve got everything blocked in we’ll simply heavily coat everything in a dark brown wash such as Agrax Earthshade or Army painter strong tone.
If you’re a newer hobbyist and just want to get to playing, we can easily stop here; while some of our slop is still visible, at an arm’s length even these simple paint jobs will read well and there’s nothing stopping you from coming back later to do a pass of tidying and highlights.
If you want to continue, simply going back and reestablishing the Ivory, Red and Blue and adding in a flesh tone such as a Vallejo Game Color Elf Skin highlight on the human faces will help make things pop. The Blue especially will have been dulled down more by the brown of the wash, so the highlight will really improve the look. All that’s left at this point is basing them up on their multi-bases except…
If you want to make the Basilean side look better you can tackle an annoying-to-paint final step. Hop on over to the HTPE horses article to find out how to get those horses up to a better standard.
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