First, I wanted to just spend a minute explaining how I choose an army, and then the units within it, to collect and paint.
I'm not a hugely competitive gamer, so I don't specifically buy armies to win, or even to place high in tournaments. What interests me more is the narrative of the army - the background of the faction itself, the reason this particular army is going to war.
Alongside that is the main question that needs to be answered by the army; will I enjoy painting it? I've seen many armies over the years which I thought would be fun to paint, but once I've built a unit or two I just have no drive to paint them (most recently these were World Eaters for Horus Heresy, Space Wolves for 40k and Hedonites of Slaanesh for AOS). These armies quickly fell by the wayside and either sit languishing in a box in the Den O' Doom, or have been sold / traded on.
With this in mind, Undead have always been an attractive option to me. The idea of hordes of skeletons and ghostly apparitions unceasingly attacking their living enemies appealed to me!
Combine this with an idea that they're from a wintery region and I had an idea for both collecting and painting - cool colours with rusted metals, snow across the units and LOTS of bones...
First on the table to paint was a unit of skeletons - and the banner which ended up giving the whole army its name:
Next up was a unit of 20 Chainwrasps - using Contrast paints and traditional styles made quick work of these:
To break the inevitable monotony of painting large units, I then painted a few characters, first of which was the commander of the Army - Sir Reikor himself, a Knight of Shrouds on his undead steed:
Alongside Sir Reikor, I painted his personal Headsman, Cornac:
It was then back to the units - Black Knights, cavalry of the undead;
And a unit of Glaivewraith Stalkers:
The final unit to be painted for this stage was a nice addition I'd forgotten I had - the Undead warband from Warhammer: Underworlds - I really like these models, they're full of character:
A thing to notice here with all of these models is a use of a very restricted colour palette, the same blue, metals and bone are used across the various units, with little change from that. This helps pull the army together in a cohesive manner.