The Count with the Clout! The Imperator of Incisors! The Baron of Bleh!

I saved Strahd for last, both presentation and actual painting. The thing is, when you're playing Ravenloft, you'll never use this mini! I've never put him on the board, we always play with new people and go through one of the other scenarios instead of hunting Strahd. But he needs to look good, and this is a good high fantasy, Wayne Reynoldsy vampire that doesn't go too Lugosi or Gene Colan Dracula.

I put some deep red on him (following the Spike principle) and made sure he had a Mr. T level of gold because dude's a count. For the sword, I laid down silver and followed with a clear blue. I see this as a Frostblade, which used to absolutely wreck me in Warhammer Fantasy Battle. If I was stating this guy up for D&D, I would try to convey that he could use his sword to achieve a TPK, but wants to feed instead.

I don't think the head came together very well. First there's the mouth, which just isn't working for me... it really looks different from the right or the left sides. Second I should have gone blue-grey and really sold the Vampire in the skin tone. Strahd is a little too pink and I couldn't remove that with highlights.

Descent Complete!

This week I completed the last of my monsters from the Descent v2 box set, so I can now bring a totally painted set to Game Night! I've also done the contents of the Lair of the Wyrm expansion and two monster groups from the v1 set, with more on the way.

This was fun and taught me to work fast! I'd recommend the Descent game as a beginning painting project: it's the right mix of challenge and reward.

Tremble before Gravestorm!

It's an undead blue dragon named Gravestorm... a little on the nose, but we don't play D&D for the subtlety!

So I knew how to do the bone, but undead dragons have a lot of dried skin too, otherwise their wings don't look good. So I looked around on how to do this Huge Dracolich, and what parts of him were dead flesh and not knobby dragon bone. I decided to match the paint master from the WOTC Unhallowed set, which decided that a blue dragon should leave... blue!

So all the bones went from a black basecoat to brown, light brown, light yellow, and white drybrushing. The flesh started as very dark blue and got some medium blue highlights for the edges of the sculpt. I love how this turned out.

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.

Three Wolves and a Furry

These are the wolves of Ravenloft: three normal wolves and the werewolf boss. I tried to make European Grey wolves, although I didn't really look up the coloration of real wolves. These wolves kind of have pig noses, this isn't the best wolf sculpt. But it's cool, dogs are hard. I've read many comics where the dogs look like giant rats.

Remember Horrorclix? It's gone but not really mourned... not to hate, but WizKids could have done better; in fact, they've learned the lessons of Horrorclix and have done better. Anyway, when Horrorclix was coming out, you could look at HeroClix and HorrorClix product produced in the same quarter, and the HorrorClix stuff looked much better. I think it's because of the sculpts and the different natures of sculpts that tended to show in the two sets. Horrorclix designs like wolves or werewolves had lots of texture and picked up washes and whatever drybrushing a factory can do really well. Meanwhile, the smoother spandex designs of Heroclix suffered under the same number of paint applications.

 This translates roughly to painting at home, in that my ability is roughly equivalent to a Taiwanese Wizkids wage slave, and these wolves looked decent without much in the way of paint apps. I did spend some time to give them gold eyes and white bellies, neither of which is really on display in this picture.

Nom Nom Nom...

I like this ghoul mold, even though it's from Dungeons of Dread and I've got a few of them already. A ghoul is pretty much just a cannibal, so they gave him parts of a person to eat. In the bevy of various undead and even more various monsters, it places the theme front and center.

My vision with these guys was, "What if your whole body was one giant scab?" I started with a purple, washed black, and highlighted a mix of purple and flesh-tone to steer safely clear of Grimace territory.

Lil' Lizards

In recent years Kobolds have moved from goblin-like to kind of dog-like to the current state of being reptilian. I support this trend... I mean, look at these kobolds, with their birght green. They're basically micro-Lizardfolk. When I was a kid Kobolds hadn't gone reptile yet, but I couldn't figure out what a Kobold was, and they weren't reptiles yet, but they were definitely in contention. I remember we had the game Fantasy Forrest, and that had kobolds, but looking them up shows a very Goblin-like creature. And I remember a dog-kobold too, maybe from "Dungeon!"? I can't verify that one..

Anyway the Ravenloft sculpt is very reptilian, with a prominent tail, so I went with that. The green contrasts nicely with rich red in the robes of the Sorcerer and with the cheap copper I decided to make the soldier's armor out of. Strahd ain't giving you stainless steel, kobolds, he's got cravats to buy and fluff! And your weapon will have to be a sharpened stick... the dark lord was somewhat unprepared for henchmen that are not already equipped with fang or claw.

 I don't think that kobolds are a great fit for Ravenloft's ascetic, actually. Their niche, one-hit-die flunkies, is pretty much kobolds, goblins, and bullywugs, and none of them are really "creatures of the night." What would really work would be Skaven, or some kind of similar ratmen. Does D&D have ratmen outside of wererats?

Ravenloft's Toughest Non-Villians

...unless you play with the Dungeon Command expansions! Then you've got to fight Skeletal Chargers, Tomb Guardians, Dracoliches... as I told Matt when we played the other last week, I can't help but want to kill characters, it's in my blood.

Anyway, gargoyles. These were low-hanging fruit as I began to paint the Ravenloft box. D&D says that gargoyles look like statues until they start moving and kill you, so any fleshy detail would not be canonical. Ergo, I painted these as stone.

Years ago I had a revelation; if I remember correctly it was when I was painting the shoulder cross-skull device on a Terminator. If you paint in matte black, then drybrush in light grey, you get a really good slate. It's easy and I've always liked how it looked.

So the gargoyles were base-coated in black, drybrushed in grey, got some gold eyes and white teeth, and I moved on. We appreciate their contribution to keeping this project on time and under budget.

Rats are the New Cats

I had planned on doing these rats in five minutes: metallic black basecoat, spots of Tamiya transparent blue, highlight in light blue, done. And the results would have been okay, it would have looked like the prepaint. But I've got a few of the Rat Swarm from Savage Encounters, and I can never from a visual scan whether those are rats, or bugs, or what.

When I basecoated these minis in white, it was a revelation to actually see the sculpt. These weren't a bunch of little blobs, they were rats, with heads and tails and other stuff I had never seen. A second revelation was a paintjob I saw on BoardGameGeek, that used different colors to make the individual rat shapes stand out. Part of me says that a dungeon should have black shiny sewer rats, and this looks more like the terrarium at PetsSmart. But also that looks like a bunch of rats. So idea stolen!

I got out a bunch of greys and browns and went to town, never letting two of the same color touch, and never going into Albino Lab Rat territory. I drybrushed appropriately, and then went back and did dots of red for eyes. Not every eye, just the prominent ones. They aren't perfect, there's still quite a few bodies with too much black on their bottom sides, but I like these rats.

Zombies that are Actually Dead

Ravenloft zombies! I wasn't over the moon when i saw this mold in the Ravenloft preview but it's pretty good. It's a vanilla human zombie, and it's a withered husk fantastical zombie, both good things.

I got into D&D miniatures to run my 4th Ed. campaign, so I started with the WOTC Dungeons of Dread set and moved forward from there. 4th Ed did some neat things with zombies: they had the Chillborn, the zombie that died of frostbite and did cold stuff to you, and the Corruption Corpse, the artillery zombie that throws pieces of itself at you. I support both of those ideas, that's excellent thinking outside the box by WOTC. I also had some orc zombies from some previous set, and those are great too! Adventurers are essentially machines that generate orc corpses, after all. But the end result is that I had very few normal human zombies.

Also, these guys are the Anti-TV-Walking-Dead. I've seen a lot of TV-quality zombie makeup recently, where zombie-ism is depicted through white skin, circles around the eyes, and blood on the mouth. This sculpt depicts what that makeup can't do, the corpse that's a few months old, with a caved-in face and elongated limbs.

My paint job was an attempt to show this semi-mummified level of decomposition. I basecoated in mid-tone gray, washed in black, and highlighted in a mix of light gray and fleshtone. The clothes were done as brown rags. Sidenote, if you look on BoardGameGeek you'll see some of these zombies in Fred Flintstone clothes. The rags have these spots sculpted into them, and it's hard to resist the temptation not to do them in yellow with black spots. But I think that the sculptor was giving us surfaces for the brush to catch, and I kept things a Serious Brown.

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.