I have a fairly extensive Khemrian army, and am very fond of my skeletal horde. However, it has missed something rather vital – liche priests. A Khemrian army has to have at least 1, and should have several. GW doesn’t currently make any models for liches, though, and I’ve yet to see anything suitable by other companies. So, time to get out the bits box and putty…

WARNING – the following contains extensive original sculpting, and requires a certain amount of skill and patience. If this isn’t your idea of fun, stop reading now.

First off, what are my liches going to look like? Well, that’s easy enough – WD 239 cleared up whether or not the liches actually died when Nagash cast his great spell (they did), so obviously they are going to be skeletons (which means that the light wizard used by GW is now inappropriate, even if it is Egyptian in flavour). They have staves in the shape of cobras, they cast spells from scrolls, and must look priestly. Fine, something to work from.

Looking through a few pictures of Egyptian antiquities and tomb paintings, the look of Egyptian clothing is fairly clear to me – a white linen loincloth, and not much else. The nobs and priests wore an odd round, spiked hat.

Well, the loincloth goes well with wizards (flowing robes and all that), but the cap doesn’t impress – so I decided to go with something which does look impressive, no matter how out of place. So I stole the ceremonial death-mask headgear – gold and lapis lazuli inset cap and stylised hair down the side of the head, ala Tutankhamun. You know the sort of thing. To work…

First, I got myself 4 skeletons from the new plastic sprue. I assembled the legs and body of each, keeping the arms and heads separate. All four were going to be different, but some things were the same for all of them:

The loincloth – the simplest part of the liche to make. Get some putty, make an oblong of it, shove it into the groin of the skeleton, and shape it so that it has folds. Draw the putty up to the waist, and join it at the sides. On three of the liches I added a cummerbund to the top of the loincloth, with the ends very obviously twisted together. This was done by rolling out a sausage of putty, flattening it, and then wrapping it in place. The fourth just had a flattened top where it met the ribs.

The ceremonial headwear – not so simple this time. Take the skull, and form a sort of crest of putty on it, from above the forehead to the back of the neck. The crest should be as wide as the skull, and be flat at the front. It should be wider than it is tall. On either side of this add flaps down past where the ears would be to somewhere around the level of the chin, as if it was solid hair. Round this off neatly at the top, make it thick at the back where it meets the crest and skull, and flatten the ends, perhaps at a slight angle to make the outside edges longer than the inner. These flaps take quite a lot of effort to get right. The best way I found of doing them was to get a small piece of putty, roll it into a sausage of the right length, and then flatten it in certain places so that the basic shape is right, then put it into place and build up putty at the back where it joins the skull. The front of the crest should protrude in front of the flaps. When this is done, attach the head.

For all four liches the arms were different:

Liche one – the right arm was to be holding a serpent staff horizontally as the liche cast a spell. The serpent staff would be a rod with a snake twined around it. I took a standard spear arm, and cut off the head just below the studs. The cobra’s head was made from the dragon’s-head crest of a Bretonnian knight, severly trimmed. The rest, including the frill, was made with putty. Roll out a nice sausage, wrap it around the rod and arm, pinch out a frill and attach it to the back of the head, and it is done. The left arm would hold an open scroll – just flatten a bit of putty, make it roughly rectangular, and mold it around the left hand so that is hangs down from it. Stick the arm on horizontally, and there it is.

Liche two – this time the serpent staff was alive, a cobra wrapped around the liche’s arm. The entire thing was done from scratch, the head being the hardest part. I just bent the end of the putty forward, shaped it to a bluntish snake-head shape, and put a pinched-out frill on the back of that. The eyes were made by carefully poking the end of a knife into the putty. Sounds simple to read, but is a bugger of a thing to do. The left arm of this liche would also have a scroll, but rolled up. Two very small bits of putty, one one each side of the hand, would do. Incise a groove along it for the end of the sheet, flatten the ends, stab a tiny hole in each end, and there it is.

Liche three – a bit different this time. The left arm would hold the serpent staff, still petrified but entirely putty. Sausage time again, using the same method as for liche two for the head. This would be held upright in front of the liche, with the end of it planted on the ground, and the whole thing looking very rigid. The right arm was to be pointing to a victim, so I used one of the archer arms from the old skeleton horseman sprue. Cutting very carefully between the index finger and the other fingers, then scoring behind the fingers where the meet the palm, and bending them back into the palm, I managed to have a single finger extended toward the enemy.

Liche four – another snake wrapped around a rod for the staff this time, done in the same way as for liche one, but this time using an extended spear arm to have the staff raised above the liche’s head. The left arm was again holding a rolled up scroll.

Painting was simple enough – my usual method (black wash, and nothing else, carefully applied to the indentations) was used for the exposed bones. The headgear was painted in alternating stripes of gold (burnished gold over golden yellow) and lapis lazuli (polished blue, an old metallic). The loincloths were painted skull white, then the hollows were painted space wolves grey, and this was then heavily drybrushed over with skull white again so that it gives the impression of dark folds but doesn’t look like a different colour. The rods of the staves (the ones which had rods, anyway) were painted black. The cobras themselves were painted skull white, and then drowned in chestnut wash. This gives a nice brown, and can look like either petrified wood or snakeskin (a damned odd snake, I will admit, but it still looks good). The scrolls were all painted white, with tiny black scribbles on them. The metal end of the spear used for liche one’s staff was painted chainmail, and then dwarf bronze (gives the best bronze result, I have found).

Stick the arms on, and there you have it, four different liches, from scratch. They fit into my Khemri army very nicely, the gold and the brown matching the bronze of my skeltons’ arms and armour, while at the same time they stand out from the crowd, as such important models should, because of their bright, large headgear and white loincloths. I don’t much care what GW eventually comes up with for liches now – mine work perfectly for me.

Reproduced with permission from:
Jason Job © 2003