From NickJ: Skull God's Valentine Gifts (244 Skullz) (34 points)

Once upon a Skulls for the Skull God!

Sat on a shelf for a number of years was a very sad piece of terrain. The Skull Altar for the Blades of Khorne Chaos faction. I'd tried a couple of times to paint it but always something more shiny stole the spotlight and so it sat. Undercoated. Waiting.

And to be honest I had no intention of painting it for this Challenge either. Until, that is, someone mentioned a Skull Duel... well as an advocate for the Skull God I could hardly pass up that now could I??

I also took the opportunity to paint up one of the Judgments of Khorne. These are Endless Spells (similar to my flaming bull from a couple of years ago) but as Khorne does not do magic they are called Judgments instead. Best not to ask to be honest!

So I'd like to present the Skull Altar and the Hexgorger Skulls. The two other figures you see here are Slaughterpriests. These lovely chaps are the ones that make use of the Altar for re-rolls when praying to cast the Judgments. They were painted previously so do not count for this Challenge but wanted to use them to show scale.

So let's get a little closer to the Hexgorger Skulls!

I opted fairly early on not to paint these in the traditional skull colour of bone for two reasons:

1) they are pulled from the warp/imagination of the Slaughterpriest so they can be any colour he can dream of. Yellow suited the warmer colours of Khorne.

2) I can't paint bone on large flat surfaces very well and fully expect it would have been an unsightly mess; if ever there was a model for an airbrush this is it. Sadly no airbrush here...

The blood has been finished with one of GW's technical paints - Blood for the Blood God. This gives the nice shiny, slick look and then I liberally added it to the bases as well.

The next picture really shows the blood pools.

And so to the Altar itself. For the red and bronze I decided to keep those colours dark and foreboding thus giving the skulls, spikes and blades a chance to shine.

As you'll note I painted the blades using the same colour scheme as all weapon blades for my Khorne army. The main colour is actually a wash - Casandora Yellow - with an Averland Sunset base and a Tyrant Skull dry brush part way through. I think there are 4-5 coats of Casandora Yellow in all.

And now some side and rear views so you can begin to see how many bloody skulls there are on this thing - evidently someone at GW had some spare and decided to design them all into the one model.

And finally a top down shot so we can all marvel at just how much of a collector Khorne is when it comes to skulls.

In total - and to be honest I've counted them thrice and got a different answer each time - on average there are 242 skulls on this single terrain piece.

Add the two Judgments and we have a grand total of 244 skulls for the Duel.

Scoring wise:

for comparisons the Slaughterpriests are 50mm high.

Altar - 20 points. It's 6" high and fits snuggly in a 6" cube.

Hexgorger Skulls - 14 points. They stand 90mm high but aren't exactly substantial models so I've scored them as 40mm at 7 points each.

A grand total of 34 points.

Take care everyone and now on to the next project!