Stripey Spiders

 These are my painted spiders from Ravenloft. When we first saw photos of this set I was pissed to see so many molds that I already had, and had in large numbers. The Deathjump Spiders and the Ghouls appear in Dungeons of Dread, the first D&D minis set released for 4th Edition, which I got a lot of to support my campaign's first year. Oh, also the Howling Hag and the Elf Wizard... with all this repetition it was hard to get excited about the product. Luckily the game itself is a lot of fun, much better than the sum of its parts.

Anyway, I had about a million of these Deathjumps already prepainted in black and grey. Replicating that look would have taken five minutes with a brush, or about an equal amount of time to switch out the unpainted versions with manufactured product from my collection and moving on. Instead I tried a different paint scheme to make lemonade out of this, frankly, lemon of a sculpt.

When I roll out spiders in D&D I like to make swarms, with huge mother spiders at the center of the encounter. For this I used spiders from my old Toybiz Resident Evil toys on a 3x3 base. On these Ravenloft minis I tried to replicate this paintjob, with the idea that one day I'd pair them and have a whole encounter of red and yellow stripe legs.

I made two changes: 1, the mandibles are in red, not black. The RE spider has big sharp thornes for a mouth that can be threatening without enhancement, whereas the Deathjump has little mouth-legs like a tarantula. Those needed to be red. 2:, the original has black stripes on the yellow leg-segments. I had applied black paint to brush and was sitting down to do this, but I thought, "You're seconds away from screwing up this whole figure" and I walked away. I'm dedicated to the philosophy of Table Ready and no more... manage your own expectations, move your paint over square yards instead of creating the perfect square inch.