Wednesday Night WIPs

I took a week-long hiatus from painting. We just had our first child, and I thought it was appropriate.  But now our sleep is under control, and my little squirt does a lot of nursing which does not involve me. Tonight I decided to try painting again.

Here's a Merriod, falconer, lizardman shaman, and dragon ready for highlights. (hopefully tomorrow!) Most of these guys got a simple basecoat, but my vision for the dragon is a Third/Fourth Edition black dragon, so he can start at 100 percent black, then drybrush in the blues and purples.

Why did I say we have sleep under control? I am tired as hell...

Dracolich in Training

A zombie dragon is a pretty good concept; any category that includes Nethyrmaul the Undying is great.  My only quibble with this mini is that it was the only Large-Size White Dragon avaiable for a long while. Several people used green stuff to bring it back to life and plug the hole in their dragon colorwheel (luckily the WOTC Dragon box set gave us a good Large White two years ago).

It's hard to sell both the White and the Zombie part of this guy. I tried to paint him as a normal white and give him wounds and dead eyes. It works well enough for me to move on.

Whoops, I Made a Smurfette!

Blue skin tone, yellow in the white hair to imply filth, and all of a suffen this Howling Hag was part smurf. Whoops!

But she's still cool, cooler than I would expect. I wasn't too jazzed that another Dungeons of Dread thing was being treated as a special villian in Ravenloft. A hag is a good miniboss for our favorite pen-and-paper Castlevania, but I never found the D&D hags all that compelling as monsters. But once I had painted my semi-transparent Bestial Brown onto her white-based robes, I had this looking pretty good. There's a lot of good detail in her various folds and fringes.

Ooh, she should have been green to do a Wicked Witch of the West thing. But that would make her too orcish, this blue was probably the safest choice.

Let's Be Clear That This is a Frankenstein

Ravenloft has a Dracula and a Werewolf and a Frankenstein, but where's the Gillman? How much ass would the Saughin Baron have kicked it he was in this set?

My goal for this miniature was to drive the Frankenstein theme home, and that made acceptable the use of green skin tones to recall the Karloff version. I picked a standard tone for the face that wouldn't give me any highlighting and shading trouble, then varyied my alternate tones so that no like patches shared borders. He goes between pink and grey and green, so given his size, and the fact that he comes from a D&D world, I think he's a mix of Ogre, Troll, and Hill Giant parts. That's pretty cool.

Blue pants made the most sense from a color perspective, but I kept the blue as dark as possible. It's really hard not to give a medieval guy blue pants and have it look right, because they strongly imply jeans. Look at this Elven Arcane Archer from the WOTC prepaints: they probably just wanted some variants among their various earth-tones, but he appears to be rocking some 501s.

The effect I like the most on this guy is the flayed flesh and exposed muscle on the left arm. This was a basecoat of reddish-brown (the paint is called "Brownie," racist) and highlighing in a baseline red. The result is rich and deep with nothing threatening to be too white. I'm looking for another mini to use this effect on.

Heroes of Ravenloft, Part 2

Returning to the heroes of the Ravenloft set! The second half is the Human Ranger and the Dwarf Cleric.

This female dual-wield ranger is a pretty great sculpt, and it's too bad that WOTC half-assed the paint apps in prepaint for the Heart of Cormyr set.

I wanted her in greens and browns, which made me lean towards red hair. Her chest armor is a scale sculpt, so I tried to vary between gold, copper, and the occasional flat orange to make a fishscale-like effect. I've seen this look awesome on Aquaman action figures, and if Aquaman does it, it must be cool guys. I don't think this was a total success; the area isn't large enough and there aren't enough scales. But with smaller scales I couldn't achieve the granularity of this effect. I think it still looks interesting.

This dwarf cleric is an interesting sculpt, mostly robes or jacket. I tried to do him in a rich red to make a stab at color-coding the heroes (I've got a yellow fighter, a green ranger, a purple mage, and a grey rogue). He's a young dwarf and hasn't gone greybeard yet; otherwise he'd have the wisdom to stay the hell out of Strahd's house. I like him, especially the epaulette-looking things. We called him Captain Dwarf of the S.S. Moradin when we played.

Heroes of Ravenloft, Part 1

My first look at the Heroes of Ravenloft! The first half is the Dragonborn Fighter, the Human Rogue, and the Eladrin Wizard.

I fully support the addition of Dragonborn, Tieflings, and Warforged as baseline D&D elements, but the race doesn't scream Ravenloft to me. The counterargument is that we have maybe six Dragonborn minis, so any excuse to get another is acceptable. This was the first mini I painted in this modern era (defined, personally, as preparations for the arrival of the Bones Kickstarter). This is what I painted on the first night of Painting Club, and I credit Todd with the idea of doing his axe as stone and not metal. He's a little chalky but I like him.

The Human Thief is apparently female, according to her game card. Well, she's got long hair and a "this is definitely a lady that I'm sculpting" chest, but the face and body made me assume this was a dude with Aragorn hair. Well, she was holding a sword and a knife, so I painted her like the Gray Mouser... she's the Mouserette.

I gave the Eladrin Wizard that came with the Ravenloft set to Todd to paint, and good riddance! I was so sick of that mini... he came in Dungeons of Dread, strike one. But he was also the pick to represent Marc's Half-Elf Warlock, Varin, in our D&D game, so I saw him on the table every week for three years (Varin upgraded to a Heroclix mini in the Epic tier). So letting someone else paint him was fine with me. But then I needed a fifth guy for our Ravenloft game, so I took the old prepaint and drybrushed a little here and there. It pretty much looks the same as it did before.

Painting Bone is the Gift you Give Yourself

Oh man, that's what I should have called this blog. That's why I'm doing this, cause recently I've got a real painting bone, heh heh heh.

Back in, I guess high school, my friend Bien used to paint Space Wolves, and he loved doing all the bone on those sculpts. Bone was the best effect you could do, according to him, especially in a time vs reward analysis. And he's right. I haven't done bone in years, but doing these skeletons brought it all back. You go from black to brown to other brown to white and then you're done, and it looks great, and it took you ten minutes for the three of them.

I've got some other skeletons: Descent has some skeleton archers, and of course there's Reaper Bones stuff to think of. I'm going to stockpile them and do them all at once, just totally bone out.