Karandras, The Shadow Hunter

I'll be honest, I've never been a huge fan of special characters thrown about frequently in games of Warhammer 40K.  I find it oddly suspect that you can find Marneus Calgar leading every small Ultramarines detachment, and Eldrad Ulthuan zipping across the galaxy to fight everywhere.

That being said I do love some of the models and I used to have Maugan-Ra back in my earlier days (Who doesn't love a special character with a Shuriken Cannon!?).  I even have a new Maugan-Ra en route right now to use as a Dark Reaper Exarch.  Enter Karandras.  Never been a huge fan of the guy, never liked the model (or so I thought).  Upon receiving the figure used and beat up on eBay:

I was still a bit "meh".  Now, deciding to keep with my alternate colour schemes I went with a different approach.  I waited until I had a vague idea in my head and then plowed on.  Here is the result:

Suddenly I found myself really liking the figure.  I realized I was simply put off by the green paint scheme I'd always seen him in.  I simply don't like green!  I'm quite happy with the result, even though up close you can see the paint application was poor.  At table-top level the figure looks excellent.  Being large figures, the Phoenix Lord fits much better on the 30mm base than the normal 25mm as well.

Now back to my original point.  I will mostly be using him as an Exarch for the Striking Scorpions (I dislike their Exarch model immensely) so it is probably rare he'll show up as the actual Karandras himself.  But who knows.