A Halloween Werewolf and my Frostgrave Bestiary Challenge

With multiple projects on the go, sometimes it so happens that painting one miniature can tick a load of boxes. I'm attempting to paint miniatures from a range of different manufacturers and to tie in with Halloween and my Frostgrave Bestiary challenge, I decided to plump for a West Wind Miniatures werewolf. I had to do a fair bit of Google Image research to find the right style of werewolf, having looked at a wide range of manufacturers, as I wanted to avoid the gangly or the overly wolfen versions and instead choosing one that was going through the metamorphosis stage. The head raised into a howl was a winner for me; it's often about choosing a nice dynamic pose for a model - it helps make me want to paint it (believe me there's always enough excuses to not want to!).


So here he is:

I've tried a few different lighting options for photographing this, I wanted it to be quite dark, but still clear. I think the first photo just about gets it right.

In terms of painting, I decided to go for a very monochromatic palette, using almost exclusively blacks and greys with a few washes of beige on the skin. some very dark blue on the trousers and some red and green on the mouth and eyes respectively. The only taxing decision was on the trousers, I initially painted a pattern on his strides, in a medieval stripy way (as you often see) to show his initial background, but it was too distracting and in the end I decided a plain set of blue (jeans!) would work.

The basing was deliberately exaggerated by raising him onto some cork steps to accentuate the vertical height of his pose, add a bit of overgrown flora and the detail of a discarded, monochromatic shield in the foreground. I'll take a photo of him in the dungeon set-up next time I get that out to play with.