If a man dedicates his life to good deeds and the welfare of others, he will die unthanked and unremembered. If he exercises his genius bringing misery and death to billions, his name will echo down through the millennia for a hundred lifetimes. Infamy is always more preferable to ignominy.

Fabius Bile

This week I’ve finally finished Fabius Bile, a project that I started in March this year! This is the second part of a (now very overdue) birthday gift ‘commission’ for a friend. The first part was the Surgeon Acolyte, that you can see in an earlier post. Rather than helmet eye lenses, or weapon muzzle flares, the LEDs in these miniatures are being used to represent ominous glowing vials of daemonic ichor and the potent poisons of the Xyclos Needler. My friend, who will shortly be the owner of this miniature, specifically chose the colours for the LEDs.

Modelling

As with many of my LED techniques, I was looking for a uniform glow from the point of interest – in this case the various vials and cylinders. I’ve written a short-form tutorial for how I achieved the glowing vials in my previous post on the Surgeon Acolyte, and I used the same technique for the Needler. The only specific difference worth noting is the shoulder-mounted ichor vials on Bile. The lower halves are made of 2mm resin rod that I cast myself, which conceal the LEDs. The top halves are made from 2mm transparent acrylic rod, to give the effect that the vials are only half full. All the LEDs are 3V 0603 SMD chip LEDs powered by a single coin cell battery and switch in the base of the miniature, as described in my Simple LED Muzzle Flare tutorial.

Painting

When it came to painting the miniature, I largely stuck to the official colour scheme and the specific paints recommended by the Citadel Colour app, as I didn’t have any good inspiration for an alternative. The only real difference was that I made Bile’s face look quite pale (using Flayed One Flesh and Pallid Wych Flesh), and then made his hair grey rather than white to better frame the face.

So there we go, Fabius Bile is complete and off to his new home. I hope you’ve enjoyed this slightly different project. Thanks very much for reading today’s post, and please remember if you’re on Instagram, Threads, Twitter/X, Bluesky or Mastodon you can also find me posting my work there.