Black Vasken, Black Vasken, Black Vasken... 2.0

So I was browsing the internet as we do, and came upon this lovely piece by Paul Bonner.

What struck my eye was the skeleton horse to the left...need a better look?  Never fear, here you go.

 I couldn't stop thinking about it!  I needed something like this, so I went back to the internet.  I searched and searched for inspiration.  I was striking out on what I wanted in the undead category when the world wide web threw me a curve ball!  While searching for skeleton horse this photo came up.

Once I saw this, I new my project needed to change slightly as I could pull this off and would be way happier with the results.

It just so happened my dear ol' chum Blue had just sent me a Marauder Unicorn, that would work perfectly for my mount.

Now who would ride it?  Well I had been toying with doing another version of Black Vasken and this was the perfect opportunity I had been waiting for.  So I set to work.

I had remembered Nico had done some amazing chaos knights awhile back, and one of them happened to be a unicorn version.  So I started there.

I really liked the dark horse with brown mane and fetlocks.  So I new that was going to be the base theme for the horse.  I toyed with changing the scheme around on Black Vasken, but ultimately decided to stick with the original paint job.

The stressful part on Black Vasken was I had to sculpt my own helmet plume!  Gah I was a bit nervous as I am terribly impatient, and using putty is so fiddly to me that I always end up mucking everything up.  The orginal plume ahd been cutoff an exhisting figure, but I ddin't feel like waiting or forking out the cash for jsut the plume.  So  I set to work, and I am quite pleased with the results.

I also did some slight additions with putty on the unicorn.  Some mane work, and I reworked his eyes as the originals were to small for my tastes.

Then I had to paint the skeleton on.  I was a bit apprehensive, but with a couple small reworks it turned out splendidly.  But I will let you be the judge.

I think I like this version a bit more then the original.  He looks a lot more fierce and commanding.  I will probably just trade them off and on we will see.  That skeleton warpaint though is really growing on me. ;)