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.

Work in Progress: Tarascus part 2

So I finished base coating this baby, and finished assembling it. I wanted the weathering and highlighting to be uniform acrost the miniature rather than by the part and have the possibility of them not matching up once assembled. Also now that the base coating is done I think that washes will work better applied to a fully assembled miniature rather than to the parts. (The pigment will get into the cracks/joints of the attached pices this way.). As with all my work I start with the darkest shade of coloring and work my way back up with highlights, after applying a wash over the whole of the miniature. So what you see here is pre wash and highlights, except for the face. I did a little more highlights to the miniatures face. Really lightening up the underside of the creature. I plan to keep the skin lightest on the bottom, much as real animals tend to be. Still I'm all excited about this piece now that the base coats are done. Now I can really get into the fun part of painting. The best part, even with just a base coat I think the miniature is looking really great. This thing will be great to stick on the table. I've already gotten ahold of two 4" sable foam trays to hold this sucker. I'm going to sandwitch it between them, the top one turned upside down. I will be hollowing out a pretty big area around the balde on the the head to keep it from getting hit be the tray and possibly snapped off while lifting it from the foam or if the foam scissors any in the case. Fortunatly a lot of the body will extend up into the second tray and if I cut that pretty tight around the body it should prevent it from slidding latteraly any and thus keep the blade protected.

Army of the Acheron: Gorgon

Alright I ahve to admit, beyond her tenticle legs, I was totally not inspired by this piece at all. Her leather robes, hair and even face left me with about zero wish to paint her. Still the end effect will work well on the table. I only finished/painted her becouse she is the most powerfull caster for the Ram I have so far. Summon undead being a great spell I really wanted to field a couple units capable of summoning forth the hordes of undead to swamp my enemy under a mound of the dead. Still her minaiture held just so little of intrest for me to paint. The hair/skin of the heads se holds was so intermingled it was difficult to make them stand out as seperate elements. Her huge leather jacket wasn't a help either, and rackhams C3 card and its paint coloring wasn't any help at all.

So I'm sorry to say, I pretty much just phoned in this minatures paint job. Oh well. I've got a nice Orphan of Avagadu coming that I think well be a blas to paint.

Army of Acheron: Ejhin De Vanth

Ejhin is a very intresting piece. A very awsome looking necromancer to be sure. I wanted to stick with the very dark/blackish coloring Rackham had painted her for her C3 card. I also wanted to make her fit in with the colors used in the Ram army box just released. As such I decided to paint all the metal trim work in the bluish metalic. I kept the robes in dark purple and black-grey. Both layers started out black/nearly black. The helm/hat started pure black with a bit of grey highlights. As a central part of the figure I wanted that to be as pure black as I could to keep her necromatic powers obvious. The end of her staff I worked into a slow color shift from that metalic blue to black along its twisted length. I choose grey almost alien looking skin tones as I just felt they fit for her. She is a nearly immortal undeadish being. The grey tones to her skin give her a kind of... washed out look, as if her very sins have stolen the very light of color from her skin.

Army of Acheron: Melmoth

The Ram of Acheron having come out recently I wanted to get some extra hero's done for it. So far only the Almighty Skull and Azael have been released. Melmoth is out as a Resin legendary figure, but I already had two in metal so I thought I should get one painted up. Having gotten my army box already I noticed a heavy use of a fairly dark blue metalic on nearly all the skull warriors, black paladins and even the Almighty Skull himself. With that color in mind I decided I would use a similar color to help tie the undead hero's together much as I've used that metalic scorpion green on the Army of Dirz. On this miniature I only used it sparingly, unlike the army box I get the feeling Melmoth is supposed to be really old. His attire dosn't match with any existing army and has more similarities with viking's in style. Keeping that in mind I applied a very heavy black, then rust then brown wash to most the figure. giving him a very dirty, rusted out look that I think gives him that special something. I only applied that blue mix to the face on his sword, the skulls on his back and the rings ont he back of his legs. After the heavy washing they are very subdued in coloring and I think this fit with his overall style. His skin seemed a mix of bone/desicated mummey like flesh. So I went with the darker bone coloring I had of Aged Bone and Ancient Bone to keep it dark. Withthe wash and a little highlighting I think it came out well. To keep the actual bone elements such as the spine onthe sword seperate from his skin in coloring I mixed in a little tanned skin shadow as a medium layer to seperate their coloring and give the spine a more alive/fleshy look that helped to make it a distinctive element.

SO 78: Eclipse

Continuing with my previous work on the missing hero's for Confrontation I have moved on to Dirz, my griffin army having all its missing hero's now. Having seen what hero groups will be coming out this year, and Eclipse being missing from that, also it contains one of the stronger casters for Dirz, the Desert Rose, I chose to start with Eclipse. Although admittably I don't have the metals for SO 38: Theben. I didn't get all ther hero's finished as the Desert rose has two profiles, one on foot and the other equiped with her living cloak. I havn't finished painting the latter version yet. I choose to paint her as if she was wearing a body stocking rather than wearing armor that covered so little. Mostly as a nod to my wife who dosn't think very well of this particular aspect of our gaming culture. Perhaps the most difficult aspec of painting her was the face. I wanted to make the skin seem alien, without making it to diffrent. She is a clone after all, but still a human clone. I opted for a nice base coat of a purple color with some thinned out flesh tones over that to allow the transparency of the paint to show the purple under the skin. I used a similar technique on her armor. Rather than constantly make shades of a greenish metalic, I opted instead to base paint the armor ina dark emerald green metalic color. Then appliy lighter shades of slightly tinted metalics over that, finishing with a slight drybrushing of straight honed steel to giver her armor a green undertone but not have that be an overdominate color of the armor. I think the effect came out really well.

The almost neon green metalic you see used as an accent upon both miniatures is a mix of Testors Gold Gloss and Green Gloss (neon green color). Mixed 50/50 it comes out in this most scorpion metalic green. I fell in love with this color while doing my aberation so long ago, and have used this to accent the armies of the Scorpion since. It's a great unifying color for the army.

While painting Sin Assyris I had some issues. Mostly creative. He was totally uninspiring to me. To much armor and I just didnt' see myself fielding him much either. Becouse of this I kept him pretty simple and just base coated, washed, and applied a few highlights to him. All that said I think the eyes, lenses came out looking pretty good. They are perhaps the only thing on this miniature I was really happy with how it came out. Similarly the vials on the Desert Rose also came out nice.

Temple of the South

So here we have my Temple of the South hero's Sered and Kyruss. I loved working on Sered he has so much going on in his attire. I really enjoyed all the little religious icons on hima nd painting those each up. I filled in the holy icon over his head with a firey red color rather than black like the original paint job by Rackham. I wanted to draw the viewers eye to that aspect, plus Merin is a god of fire and light. I really liked the almost egyptian styling to Sered's clothing. Very fitting for a man waging warfare in the deserts. I added a little metalic paint to both the white and the yellowing I applied the the cherubs ont he holy relic in Sered's right hand. I did this to give them a bit of a "glow", something to try and show why this is a holy relic he's holding. Allow the divine power of it to shine through as it where.

Similarly to the Temple of the East I redid Kryuss's coloring to allow him to fit more with his commander Sered. His original coloring was a lot more browns in both his cloak and robes. Being a Templar I opted for white robes, fitting withthe prepainted figures, but using similar highlighting of gold as Sered along the armor and various armor pieces to keep them similar in appearance. Lastly I finished off his cloak in brown to tie him back to his original paint job, but added some gold trim to the bottom to tie him again to Sered with his gold trimed cloak. Lastly the wolf pelt on his back being a part of his story maintained its grey/black shading.