For the followers of The Red Hand of Tiamat, I converted two GW Easterling Warriors, by swapping their heads with two I had in my bits and pieces tray. The archer would be a blonde woman and the fighter a fierce berserker with a horned helm.

Zak S. suggests that The Red Hand is the most obvious and less secretive of the factions of Tiamat. This mirrows their draconic archetypes: Red dragons are execptionally vain and proud. They are impulsive and destructive, ferocious and vengeful. In contrast to black or green dragons, they are not very subtle about their business and are more or   less straight forward. I also image The Red Hand to act this way, incorporating red dragon ideals. They proudly wear bright red cloaks and fancy armor, because they believe themselves to be superior to others. The Red Hand is comprised of fanatics who don’t fear anything.

The miniatures can of course not show all of that. But the fighter wears a flashy spiked helmet to intimidate his enemies. The archer has a female head, because … I had one laying around. I decided she should be blonde for better contrast with the red cloak.

Painting

First, I used Reaper Brown Lining paint to line the different areas of the figures. Then, I did the basecoat. For the fighter’s armor I used Vallejo Game Color Gunmetal. The armor of the archer should be made of hardened leather scales, So I used Vallejo Model Color Chocolate Brown. The cloaks were both painted with a darkend red tone as base color. The minis were then washed with black ink (metal parts) and umber ink wash (leather parts), just like the white dragon cultists.

After that, I drybrushed (yeah, it’s dirty, I know – but it’s quick and easy) the edges of the armor and cloth and put back some of the base color as well as highlights (pure red tone for the cloaks and silver for the metal). The helmet of the fighter and his sword handle were then painted with a light bronze color, the shield was painted with VGC Polished Gold and a little VMC Copper. The horns were done with VGC Bonewhite.

I know there could have been many more techniques to be used and details to be painted (gradients for the horns, hair, bow, sword, shield, etc.) but I did not want to put too much time into the miniatures. The bases were done the usual way. I used a green wash to “weather” the stones.

After finishing the paint job, I put on some static grass and sealed the miniatures with matte varnish spray from Armypainter. These are the final results: