I’m a big Warcry fan. It scratches that skirmish itch and does not over stay it’s welcome at the table during individual games (looking at you Mordheim and also you Necromunda!). I’ve played a lot of one-offs over the years and in early 2025 I was intro-ing the game with the intent of playing a campaign with a group of semi new players. during this time I decided to get my brother the Blackthorns for his birthday and give them a solid go with painting. This started off well, with two of the miniatures done right around his birthday last March…. then I got the Epic 40K bug and totally shifted gears for a bit there, not getting back to them until DECEMBER of last year. I finally cranked the last one out two weeks ago and it was a journey worth remembering as these are some beasts to paint, and stretched my skill-set to say the least. I am a notoriously slow painter so I feel if I had them done by late Summer, it would have been OK….January 2026? This was not ok.
Stock paint jobs, these guys are mostly painted with gold armor on the box, but I did not want to go that route as it was just TOO FRIGGIN GOLD. Looking at the othher Sigmarines for inspiration, I happened upon an article in White Dwarf issue 502 (a really good issue for paint advice/tips as it goes through their typology of notation going forward for Paint Splatter articles) and in the back it has a beautiful mix of steel and gold armor for Sigmarines. This would be my start. I did a test model of a random sigmarine I had lying around (no idea where it came from) and it turned out super solid. I was quite nervous about messing the Blacktalons up, so this was a critical step.
The Black Talon kit was pretty easy to put together, but I had to decide on helmets or not for all but the elf-lady and I went with no helmets except for Neave who I wanted to look like an emotionless Sigmarine out of the bunch. There isn’t a lot of skin on these guys, so the heads have to look great as they are big focus of the miniatures above all that metal. Rostus and Henrick (the two big dudes) were fairly easy to paint skin- wise, but Rostus is one of TWO bald members of this troop and that’s never easy. Shakana, the crossbow lady, has brown skin and that is the easiest ever to paint and make look good. I’m going to talk about Lorai (the elf) separate.
Metal wise it was Iron hands steel with a wash of nuln oil, hightlighted with ironbreaker, but with a glaze highlight (super thin layer) and when that dries you do a recess wash of drakenhof nightshade and then a final edge highlight of stormhost silver. I did a few scratches in the armor, but since these guys were super badass, I left it mostly alone. The Gold was Retributor Armor with a Reikland fleshshade wash highlighed liberator gold and then a Gore-grunta fur wash, then edged with stormhost silver. I overdid the edging a few times and had to clean it up. Overall both of these recipes worked great for the superheroic models these are, that would never let their armor get dirty.
The rest of the model was just picking out details for the armored guys, but there were two parts to these that I struggled with– the ENTIRE elf lady (Lorai) and the Shakana’s bird. Paint recipe wise I pondered these for way too long (weeks of procrastination) before diving in. The biggest issue with the elf lady is that her skin has to be perfectly smooth AND she has a bald head– no hair at all, totally bald. This along with very delicate armor and weapons and it was no wonder she took the longest by far. Shakana’s bird ended up being super easy, just selecting three different colors of blue and breaking those out into three colors (base layer, highlight, very highlight).
These models have molded bases that have a bunch of stuff on them. I’m not a huge fan of this but it suits these models. Again the base on Lorai was like painting another model though with the tree, mushrooms, water and these weird floating fish things flying around her feet. All of those things needed recipes of highlights, washes and shades and that took awhile. I pondered for several days on what to make the floating fish look like, and how to achieve the shiny water effect on the pond with what browns to use to make it look like muck. I pulled it off but it took way too long navel gazing.
There was one major modelling issue with Neave as she had a horrific gap in her fur cape that had to be filled with greenstuff. Mostly putting these together was a snap (except for Lorai… of course) but it was frustrating to have to fill that large of a gap.
Overall, highly recommended the Black Talons as a kit– these look incredible when painted and I think they redeem the silly looking original Sigmarines. They are absolute terrors on the Warcry table as well.
