It's a fairly eclectic mix of minis I'm working on: a couple of Heritage slimes (green slime and black pudding), a Grenadier wight, and some Reaper undead - two older Ed Pugh skeletons (2014 and 2015) and three newer Barrow Wardens by Kev Williams (3220 and 3221). Those, and the RP Frost Giant that is my Giant of the Month Club project for May.
The Grenadier wight started as an afterthought, really. For some reason (OK, it was the "Don King" hairdo) I had it in my mind that this was one of those early Grenadier sculpts that I didn't really care for too much - you know the ones - wrong proportions, goofy expression, strange pose, etc. But I had recently primed it in a batch of minis to be worked on, and after examining it closer, I realized just how wrong I was!
Sure, it still has one feature that stands out for the wrong reasons: the Julia Roberts lips/mouth. Other than that, I really like this mini. Nothing odd about the pose, cool & creepy elongated fingers, skull and bone fragment on the base - good, solid undead look and feel. And if memory serves me correctly, whenever our DM placed this wight mini on the table 20+ years ago, everyone always groaned and puckered a bit. No one wanted to lose a level!
That wight is long since gone (well, it went AWOL with a bunch of my older minis when our first DM quit playing), but I'm happy to have acquired his evil twin, Skippy. I'll post a pic of the finished product in the next couple of days, along with any others I finish before I head out on Saturday.
UPDATE (5/26/10): Now with pics! We had a fun and successful session on Saturday, and the boys were happy to see new lead added to the collection.
The wight was a fun paint, and I put the most work into him out of the group. I tried to give him sickly white skin, not stark white. Since he's wearing a cape, I went for purple - he must have been a noble, merchant, etc. And finally, for a touch of high fantasy, I painted his eyes green - dark green, light green, and finished with black pupils.
The skellies were pretty straightforward, bleached bone undercoat, inked, and then drybrushed with three shades of white. I decided against mounting them to an extra base, so they retain their broccoli base-drybrushed-minimalist look.
The slime and pudding - how do you make them look, well, not sucky? On the green slime, I went for several different layers of very thin, bright green washes. A dark green ink filled in the various pockmarks and craters for some depth. But I wasn't happy with the larger bubbles - they just didn't pop (heh). So I painted them bright white (a couple of coats to cover the green) and then glazed them with bright green again. I like how it turned out! I contemplated using some clear gloss for that extra-slimy slime look, but was fine with how it ended up after a couple coats of Purity Seal.
The black pudding, hmm, I don't think it turned out as well as I could have done. A couple coats of black (over white primer), some gray wash to give it some depth and contrast, and then purplish rims on the boils/craters. I think the purple needed some lighter highlights applied to that for better definition. Ah, hindsight.
1 comment:
I always liked the Grenadier wight, and more recently acquired a Heritage wight with the same crazy hair and cape; obviously both sculptors felt like those were the essential features of the monster, based on the Monster Manual.
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