Griffin Inquisitor

Well it seems I've caught up with my backlog of postings. It was nice to have about 3 weeks of blog posts already made-up and ready to go online on a nice neat schedule. Well if you don't paint then you get behind on that as well it seems. I've hit a bit of a lackluster painting spell. I have about a dozen miniatures in various stages of being painted on my table, and I have about zero drive to get to them. My Orphan of Avagadu came in, and the flashing on the face of the monstrous form was so bad that the entire left side of the mouth is just gone under it. No teeth or detail at all. Totally blew the wind right out from those sails on me. The Tarascus is a whole lot of miniature to paint, and I've gotten sick of constantly working on that... so I took a break from painting for a couple weeks.

Coming back to it I picked up a new miniature, or at least an unprimed one. The first miniature I ever painted was the Griffin Inquisitor some three years back. Well I knew that my first attempt wasn't going to be my greatest and I went out and picked up another of the same miniature some months later. I put it aside, waiting till I thought I could do it some justice. At the bottom of this post with the grassy background is a picture of the first painting I did of this same miniature.

I got all inspired to redo this model after joining a new game of Pathfinder being run at my local game store, Crossroads. In Pathfinder right now there are a few classes being beta tested for their advanced players guide coming out this fall. One of those classes is the Inquisitor. The core pathfinder book only having the core D&D PHB classes to begin with (modified to be sure) but still evoking the same play style. I wanted to try the new Inquisitor class for fun. So I designed the character to be akin to the miniature and after a good first game session I pulled this guy out and went to work on him. Initially I had not painted his face white because well I only owned pure white and I'd never had good results painting things white before. This time I applied some shading I'd been working on with some of the other models and had a great old time. I took a knife to the mask and scored it akin to a blade striking it within the world. I think that came out especially well.

I played around with shading the hilt of the weapon from a dark red to a blackish red. I think that came out very well. As did the ink fill in of the runes along the blade. Very evocative of heat and more subtle than the blade I did for Mira. I did a bit of detail work on the jewelry this time around, coloring in the gems on the front ring at least. Another bit of fun, about a year ago I picked up a set of resin bases and basing materials from Back 2 Base-ix and have yet to prime or even use them. So I pulled one out primed it up and went to town painting it and used the new summer static grass I'd picked up. I think this new base really makes the miniature shine. I'll have to prime up and paint the rest so they are ready to be used in the future. I think they were really a star piece to make this new paint job come together.

Anyway I hope to get my painting on a little more in the coming weeks. A few side projects (the confrontation campaign for example) as well as the new Star Trek online have been sucking up my time. Something about making Admiral 5 in two weeks of getting the game says I've done about nothing else I think. In the interim I think I will be putting up some more posts about my weekly games to help fill in content until my painting log gets more filled out. Till next time game on.