The Shrine Anchorite is what got me interested in Trench Crusade.
Well, that’s not strictly true. What got me interested in Trench Crusade was the basic conceit – the Knights Templar open a portal to hell, its legions march forth, fast forward a few centuries to the modern era and you have the colossal tragedy of industrial trench warfare coupled with a world war against the arrayed forces of hell. That drew me in, and the art of Mike Franchina cemented the concept in my brain.
Especially the Anchorite Shrine. It is a walking gothic cathedral piloted by a mad saint. It is the most Warhammer non-warhammer thing. I love it. It is my clanking, industrial-religious behemoth of a son.
Anchorite Shrines are metal behemoths some twelve to fifteen feet tall, a living altar of war almost completely immune to any damage, with a diesel engine belching smoke and trumpets echoing with prayers. The interior of the Anchorite is covered in spikes and barbed hooks so that the monk pilot is in a constant state of torment, rejoicing in their pain so they can suffer as their Lord once did. The exterior is festooned with icons, holy relics and devotional prayer scrolls, each according to the traditions of the Pilgrim sect that the Anchorite serves.
The pilot monk or nun, once installed, never leaves the Anchorite Shrine until the day they die. Once they fall in battle (or rarely of old age), their remains are reverently removed and body parts are preserved in reliquaries mounted upon the Anchorite. Thus each of these war machines is a testament to its long history of war against the forces of Hell.
Yeah boi. That is my jam. That is my shit.
Naturally, when it came time to pick a warband for the game, I opted for the Trench Pilgrims, the indomitable crowd of amateurs who bring the Anchorites to the party.
I had backed the game on Kickstarter fairly early and so I had a nice range of Pilgrims to choose from. In assembling my first warband I selected a War Prophet, a Communicant, a Castigator – I thought that one sounded like a Sisters of Battle tank, and it turns out that is because it is – a Stigmatic Nun, three Trench Pilgrims, and of course an Anchorite Shrine!
My initial idea for the warband was to go for a sort of Blanchitsu style, using a limited colour palette with a lot of sepia, yellows and browns. Then, largely because I was replaying the original Fallout at the time, I decided to go for something a bit orthogonal to Blanchitsu and use a mix of oranges, browns, ruddy reds and weathered metal. I then decided to try some greens to contrast with the orange tones, with the look of weathered Fallout combat armor as my mental reference point.
I also decided to use a lot of sponging and stippling for texture, especially on the Anchorite. For metallics, I’d try to use a lot of copper and brass, and anything that was iron I’d try to get some terracotta red and brown colours underneath. I also thought I would try experimenting with a pigment wash to add stronger rust corrosion effects. Overall, I was not looking for a corrupted look, but I wanted the Anchorite to look heavily weathered and worn – as if it had seen, and been retrieved from, many battlefields!
Cleaning the models took some time. They were commercial 3D prints, but there were a surprising amount of bits of supports still attached. I spent a few hours warming the models in water, scrubbing them (this was probably unnecessary) and using tweezers to gently pull away the remaining supports. It was time well spent, and I regret the few I did not notice until I was painting.
I primed everything in black. It’s the hardest colour to paint over, but I wanted a ‘grimdark’ look to the warband, and I wanted to be able to leave a lot of black in the crevices and details to support that. As you can see, I kept the Anchorite in several pieces to make painting easier. I tried to strike a balance between keeping areas easy to reach without having too many annoying, fiddly pieces to think about. I also used some Vallejo texture paste to apply a ‘mud’ effect to the base.
The execution was pretty much as outlined in my plan. I discovered that stippling the model with a variety of sponges, with some occasional overbrushing for harder to reach areas, was a fun and effective way to apply a lot of colour to a large model quite quickly. Using a mixture of colours and sponges produced quick and interesting textures, and layering browns, oranges, greens and metallics in different ways produced interesting and distinct looks. In the WIP photo below, you can see how different some parts of the model looked as I was experimenting.
The most complete part, and my favourite, was the left arm. I subsequently spent a fair bit of time trying to get the other parts to match. I’d say I was reasonably successful in this!
I switched to a normal paint brush for painting the wooden parts. The Catherine Wheel does have wood grain sculpted into it, which provided guidance on placing my brush strokes, and I found that after spending a lot of time working with sponges I was having fun using carefully diluted paint in careful but firm brush strokes. I returned to the wood areas a few times with different shades of brown, trying to build up a realistic look and more texture.
Painting the detail around the model took quite a lot of time compared to the bulk of it, but it was a lot of fun to do. I used Games Workshop’s excellent Blood for the Blood God paint for the sacrificial lamb, the cross on the icon, and to give the mace that used look. I built up from black to grey to off-white for the saints on the leg panelling. The penitent on the wheel was painted similarly to the wooden areas and saints, but with a variety of Ultracryl fleshtones. (I used Ultracryl paints for almost this entire model, actually. I am finding them a little challenging at times, but I do like them. Most of them.)
I added some highlights by mixing my off-white colour with my main green colour and applying very rough, sketchy highlights around certain edges and curves. I am not great with light placement yet, so I used a light touch – haha – for this application, and I think it is subtle but does what it needs to. The spire or helmet of the model I painted similarly to other metallic areas, keeping a lot of black and sponging various metallics over it. Normally the head of the model is a focal point, but the Anchorite is a strange one. I felt like the penitent, the mace, and all the detail around the lamb are the focal points here. The head is architecture, of the kind that looms over you. I have seen painters who have used light glow effects around the ‘windows’ in the head, which I think looks great, but I really like the results I got with this completely opposite approach.
Overall I was really happy with what I achieved here. I think it is one of my favourite models that I have painted to date. It is also the most fun I have had painting in ages – so much so that I want to try and make use of the same techniques as much as I can in future. It is much less applicable to smaller models, but I love the texture it gave, and how liberating it felt to build layers in this way.
I don’t love the rust effect I achieved – I don’t think it sits very well and the placement is erratic, so it works better as an effect if you don’t look straight at it. The model’s left arm still looks a bit different from the rest of the model if you examine it closely, but I think I managed to bring things together into harmony fairly well. The model is probably a bit brighter and more, um, cheerful than I had originally envisioned. But these are small criticisms, I think, and overall I’m proud of this one.
