The Red Duke Comments welcome on the Feedback Page
Page 26 of the Vampire Counts Army Book describes a legendary vampire from Bretonnia, once the Duke of Aquitaine. I decided to use this as the basis for a Vampire Counts army.
The downside is that the Red Duke has a black and red color scheme on his heraldry, going by the illustration on page 79. It seems like black and red are the staple colors for Vampire Counts armies and I prefer to be unique. I decided to focus on making the army look like a mixture of Bretonnian and Vampire Counts to represent the cursed army of the Red Duke.
To represent the Duke himself, I chose one of the Bretonnian Lord models from Games Workshop. Since the specifics of the Red Duke aren't specified in the Vampire Counts book I had full flexibility to design the Duke any way I wanted. I chose to give him a Hellsteed for a mount.
The Hellsteed
A Hellsteed is essentially a monstrous, undead winged horse. I started with a Bretonnian Pegasus but mounted it directly to the base rather than on the clear plastic rod that would hold the model up in the air. I did t his partly so that I could have the mount rearing up on the base, and partly because the Red Duke will be a converted metal model and I didn't want to have t he center of gravity so high up.
To make my pegasus into a Hellsteed I took the metal wings from a leftover pair of metal wings from Sulephet, the dark pegasus that comes with Morathi. Using a little green stuff to fill the gaps I mounted the wings onto a Bretonnian Pegasus and thus had the basic shape of the Red Duke's mount.
(I had the leftover wings available because my wife had done a sweet conversion to change a Morathi model into a Wood Elf Spellsinger mounted on a unicorn.)
To mount the model onto a base I simply drilled a hole in one of the hooves and pinned it to the same size base a Bretonnian Pegasus is normally mounted on.
Painting the Hellsteed
The body of the Hellsteed is, of course, black with the caparison the Duke's red. The membrane between the finger bones was to be a sickly white.
The "fingers" of the wings was given a base coat of Chaos Black and the membranes were base coated in Bleached Bone. I then painted the membranes in a coat of thin Rotting Flesh.
I then painted the bony spikes with Bleached Bone as well. To darken he areas in the joints of the webbing I faded from Scorched Brown to Tanned Flesh and faded the colors out. I also darkened the membrane around the holes and notches in the membrane.
Finaly, I highlighted the raised areas with Bone White. This was much too sharp a contrast at first so I decided to go back and do the highlighting over with a mix of Rotting Flesh and Bleached Bone.
The caparison was done in a base coat of Red Gore.
The Red Duke
The Red Duke himself was a Bretonnian Lord with the dragon crest cut off. To replace it, I took a metal bat from a Bat Swarm blister and cut off the post and filed down the bottom. I pinned it to the top of the helmet to make a new crest for the Red Duke.