A Djinn - Self isolation day 1

If I had three wishes.....? Well I guess one of them could have been to get some unexpected time to work on my hobby projects, but I certainly didn’t wish for it in this way. My daughter developed a new, persistent cough yesterday so we’ve self-isolated as a family - all 5 of us. We’re all fine though. I’m home schooling the kids and in between that I managed to line up some models and get quite a few things, hobby wise, done. I hope to do the same each day..

Yesterday I painted up this Zealot miniatures Djinn which had been sitting around primed, for a while. I saw it as a chance to practise some different, non-Caucasian skin after all my white barbarians and to try a different style of miniature. Also it’s another tick on my Frostgrave Bestiary challenge:

I painted the top half first (having to stubbornly refuse the desire to go all blue) starting with a rhinox hide base and highlighting up through mixes of doombull brown and gorthor brown. I’m still unsure of how successful I’ve been. My original intention for the bottom, swirling part was to blend out the skin tone into white, but changed my mind prior to starting and thought I’d practise some fire painting. So that’s what I did! Please let me know your thoughts.

I also managed to put together a gypsy caravan which I’d picked up from Sarissa Precision and which I will use as scenery for my town scene:

Next up a new little warband, some Gaslands and the Blood Bowl elf team that’s I’ve threatened to tackle many times before without doing so. Stay safe out there everyone.

Frostgrave Bestiary Challenge: Boar and Snow Leopard

The Snow Leopard, incongruous away from the melted snow, approaches the static and serene boar

Circling around the boar, the snow leopard ruminates whether it can take the bristly beast down. 

It decides to approach from the rear, avoiding those pointy tusks, but realises quickly that it's rear end is worse.

The snow leopard gets too close and as swift as you like, the boar turns, grunts and chases the snow leopard away. Perhaps an easier meal awaits back in the Frozen City

A Night Horror Demon for Halloween

As always I like to paint a miniature that has character and that also addresses several different hobby needs. The Night Horrors Facebook Group are running their annual Halloween contest and I had this partly broken Citadel Night Horror demon converted and ready to paint. The original trident head had snapped off and was missing so I replaced it with one from my bitzbox (I think this is a Snarsnik one). 

So not only does he represent my entry for the above competition, but he also works as a Minor Demon for Frostgrave purposes and is another notch in my Frostgrave bestiary challenge.

I went for a really limited palette here, working up from a dark red/brown up to bright red and finally added yellow to make an orange highlight. So three colours for the skin tone. The base coat had a white highlight added for the fur, making a fourth colour, a dark and a light green for the tongue to create a nice complementary colour and the trident used just silver and a dry pigment for the rust. White and yellow for the hoofs and teeth. The base used two shades of grey and a couple of green/brown washes. So in all nine paints were used, one dry pigment and two inks. 

Anyway, I'm quite happy with the results, especially the skin tone which I think works quite well.

Frostgrave Bestiary Challenge: Wolves

Just 3 Marauder wolves lined up for you. White undercoats, wet blended with greys, browns and yellows; highlighted up and details in the facial features added.

Important note: check Google images in advance, I wasn't expecting lighter underbelly's which goes against my normal painting logic (ie all darker colours are underneath because the sun is above).

Forstgrave bestiary challenge - rats and a blood crow

Sometimes the smallest creatures can provide a whole lot of nice detail to a game. You have to have rats lurking in a corner of a dungeon or creeping around some barrels of a street corner. And of course the lowly adventurer likes an early, easy kill. The crow certainly adds a bit of flavour, not just with it's dark, brooding and menacing pose but with the addition of a perch - in this case a damaged signpost for the city of Felstad. 

The Rats are Reaper bones (very cheap with just enough detail), the dark three primed black, highlighted up with greys/browns on the fur and a touch of Elf Flesh - Bleached Bone on the skin. Albino rat was primed white, washed with Baal Red and then highlighted up with very pale pinks (from a Titallating Pink base with added white).

The crow is from the metal Nurgle Lord kit and has been in my bitz box for years (quite surprisingly as he adds a fair bit of character and could have been used for a whole host of conversions or basing/scenery). Well he gets his time as his own model now, rather than supporting another and was painted onto a black primer, highlighted up with some greys and then glazed with some blues and purples. The wooden sign was kept deliberately pale with Graveyard Earth as a base and highlighted with very pale greys. After the freehand writing was applied it was washed with some greens and browns to create a weathered look.

Some quick paint jobs but pleasing to cross off another two requirements for my Frostgrave Bestiary Challenge.

A mutated troll for Frostgrave

This conversion was originally made for a warband rolled up on the Realm of Chaos charts (I think for the old PapaNurgle forum competition). It's a LotR troll with a sculpted Fimir face and sculpted tentacles (using small beads as the suckers). The axe head is from a Shaggoth and I also sculpted the haft and the breastplate (loosely based upon Fimir / Celtic designs). I wish I had a wip photo to show..

So he's been re-purposed to be used as a (chaotic/mutated) troll for my games of Frostgrave and therefore another one ticked off from my bestiary challenge. 

It's quite a good feeling to go through some old, incomplete and unassigned models and find a purpose for them; he feels loved again (and after all that sculpting I couldn't just let him go to waste).

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.

Frostgrave Bestiary Challenge: Vampire (and all the Undead)

Well the model is actually an 80's Citadel Champion of Chaos, but was surplus to requirements for other projects and with his bone armour donned he looked suitably necromantic to be used as a summoning vampire (hence the Mantic skeleton rising from the slabs).

I tried to capture a strong contrast between the light, smooth bones and the dark, grubby cloak and the limited palette of colours made me introduce a spot colour in the blue of his swords hilt and the eye's of the raised skeleton.


And here are all my recently painted Undead, being led by their new Vampiric leader:

I'll be having a break from my Frostgrave Bestiary Challenge and returning to old Citadel Nurgle next (seeing as I've recently finished collecting all of the Nurgle Champions...)

Frostgrave Bestiary Challenge: 10 Ghouls

I absolutely love these Heresy ghoul models, I saw them years ago painted by Mika over on the Warhamner Forum and loved how he had created a great contrast between the ghouk's skin and the dark reds of the blood and gore. They are pretty dark miniatures (I found applying the blood and gore to the baby quite upsetting) but they are wonderful characterful sculpts that are a real pleasure to paint. There's actually not much to them, they are mostly flesh with a few other details so it was imperative that I got the skin tone spot on. I realised early on that it would have to have a green tinge so that it complemented the inevitable red of the blood, but I also wanted to create a layered, transparency it the skin too. This would be offset with the neutral grey basing. I also did a bit if research into how to create such blood and gore and foinf a great recipe to make the blood quite physical, see below. I usually steer clear of too much blood, but these ghouks, being cannibals and because of the additional details of body parts being butchered and eaten, these guys did need to have a realistic blood effect added.

So after some skin experiments (I'd already decided to veer away from my Orc skin recipe) I went for this approach:

White Primer
Earthshade wash
Small amount of earthshade plus increasong amounts of white, layered on for the highlights
Glazing with purples and blues in the shadows and especially apparent in the faces
Yellow glaze over the teeth
Then final glaze with green ink (and lots of medium) over the skin to remove any chalkiness from the highlighting.
Before the physical blood and gore was added (see below) I washed a mixture of purple and red inks to the hands, feet, knees and elbows (to create a little extra contrast and to break up the large areas of green skin).
Finally I prepped the areas that would be getting the blood effect with a combination of black, purple and red inks, increasing the amount of the latter where the blood was to be most fresh.

After weathering the bases I then approached the blood and gore. Quite simply I used a mixture of Tamiya Clear Red, black ink, UHU glue and a cocktail stick to mix the mess together and to apply it to the areas of stringy, gooey gore. The cocktail stick was used to stretch he goo between two surfaces , for example from mouth to floor. I didn't want to overdo it, so I had to keep restraining myself because it's a smashing effect and easily done. I decided that several of the models would not have any of this applied at all.

With regards to the Ghoul King who is digging out a grave, I decided to use a Tamiya weathering stuck (essentially an oil pastel the colour of mud) and applied this to the grave area, the base and dollop on his shovel too.

Lots of photographs to follow, as I have a new iPhone and have used this as an opportunity to experiment with it's focus and exposure corrections during the shot and it's editing abilities after. I'm pretty damn happy with these:

Frostgrave Bestiary Challenge: wraith

A very quick paint job on this LotR figure. Over a white undercoat I glazed several very thin layers of original Citadel yellow ink over the skin and drapery areas. I then highlighted up with the the addition of some white to the ink. Exactly the same process was done for the blue armour and the chainmail/metal had the usual treatment of boltgun metal followed by a wash of black and chestnut ink followed by dry red ochre pigment bound in a matt varnish:

Next up are he Heresy Ghouls; I've really been looking forward to getting some pain on these. 

Frostgrave Bestiary Challenge: 12 Armoured Skeletons

I haven't painted in batches for some time, since the days of my orc and goblin army many years ago. I soon rediscovered the tedium it brings during painting, especially when you think you've painted all those leather straps (with highlights) and then find one thst I missed requiring me to break open the snakebite leather and white again... However the satisfaction, in fact joy, of finally painting those paint rims black, is almost worth it. It felt like I'd never had such a gush of accomplishment. The sculpts are pretty uninspiring, but at least the very nature of skeletons means there is a pretty limited palette and there's no need for the repetitiveness of painting a multitude of eyes, hair, glazed red cheeks/noses etc. Oh and I sped up the process by undercoating grey rather than white as most of the colours on these (from bone, to rages, to shields) used grey as a basecoat.

I had a bit of trouble with my old Citdael transfers, they didn't adhere very well to the shields, probably because of their age, and had to be enticed to stay in place with some dilute pva. Which was annoying x12.

Eventually, when the oxidation of their bronze and metal armour was completed and some other general weathering was added, I was pretty happy with how they look; here they all are in a ruined city:

Frostgrave Bestiary Challenge: 6 zombies

I've added a new gadget to the right which is another to do list / completionist project that I've set myself; to paint all the models that could be needed for Frostgrvae. Why? I ask myself (or you may ask). Well I've got a pile of miniatures (not all lead) that need to be painted and with the help of lists and project ideas I can choose carefully from them to help me paint in a structured and efficient(ish) way. It gives me some way of accomplishing a secondary feat (crossing them off and tracking my progress towards a goal) to just the completion of painting a model and helps my mind plan ahead with a clear direction. I probably should have waited until I'd finished one of these previous lists (be it another set of dungeon tiles or the Nurgle retinue table) but it does mean I've got a nice eclectic mix of models to paint up over the coming year. And I'm sure there will be some currently unplanned, list additions along the way too.

Today I painted some Mantic zombies to add to my growing undead horde; for Frostgrave and Heroquest. Very simply these were undercoated white and a multitude of thinned glazes were applied directly over the white  to the skin, ranging from purples, blues, oranges, greens and yellows. I used some darker blues around the yellow areas to create bruising and also around the eye sockets to create some depth and a certain tired/dead look.. Some dried blood was added with a combination of red, purple and black inks applied liberally to the wound areas, mouths and hands. Small dabs of Tamiya clear red were then applied into the wounds to make them looks but fresher, as if they were still oozing a bit. So here are the zombies:

I must add that layer of green/yellow paper to represent the slime under the grille.