Anyone Want to Lend Me a Few Hundred Dollars?

It would go toward something awesome.

I've ogled these forever and they are finally available to purchase as reproductions. I love the understated, almost trapped energy of the early shade-and-wash pieces and I desperately want at least one so I can study the technique in detail...can't currently justify the cost though.

Such strange skies, such burning detail...

Such monolithic intent...

Such dense depiction...

Such bizarre menace...

*foams at mouth*
*falls out of chair*
*passes out from desire*

Desperate Men

Desperation is one of the more discernible flavors in the sour mélange of material I’ve come up with for the Wyrdwold over the last year or two. I think that’s because, from a narrative standpoint, desperation is often the only motivation that makes sense out of the actions we choreograph for our little men.

Because what we fetishize with wargaming is pretty dark. Violence, murder. Desperation. We don’t always notice it because it is buried beneath layers of strategy, or fantasy, or artistic expression, or abstraction, all of which make this such a rewarding hobby…but we serve no one if we ignore the kernel from which it springs.

Paltry Grist

Which is why, I guess, when I found myself at Games Plus in front of the Wall o’ Reaper with some money burning a hole in my pocket, I was drawn to these sculpts. 

Even in the bare metal, they communicated to me such a sense of raw fear.

Titus Slake

I don’t know if I managed to bring it all through in the painting. Don’t really care to be honest. I found them uncomfortable to paint— though not because there was anything wrong with the sculpts.

Rather, I found myself contemplating what could be in front of them to inspire such fear, such desperate violence.

Let me know your thoughts.

Liche Knight

Sorry for the stillness around here over the last week. Been quite ill to the stomach in a way that I had naively assumed I might never have to deal with again ('oooh, look at that 26 y/o male, thinking he's invincible, yeah, yeah).

Here's one of the figures I bought from Megaminis ages ago but took forever to get around to painting—mostly because it didn't take my dry-brushing very well. While there's a decent amount of detail for the dry-brush to catch, all of it is more or less the same granularity. This made the dry-brushed highlights glaringly obvious, and the thought of having to go over all of it with layering bored me too much to do a proper job. As a result, some of the highlighting is a bit sloppy:

I did, however, like the pitted, corroded metal effect the dry-brushing gave to the helmet and the sword . Quite suitable to the creaking, somehow stolid menace that, for me, this sculpt exudes, and which drew me to buy it in the first place.

I also originally purchased it on the strength of the massive, face-sculpted shield the figure was supposed to come with, but unfortunately, for whatever reason, it wasn't included. Since none of my spare cavalry shields looked quite imposing enough, and all looked decidedly too (GW) Elfish, I had to make do with a scratch-built and free-handed job. I went for a kind of bright contrast to the rest of the figure, shifting the palette to warmer reds and yellows to suggest the spirit animating this dead cavalier and his zombified horse—the angry, seismic spirit belied by the implacable stillness of the horse, the statuesque pose of the rider. (I suppose the arms of the skeletal dead don't get tired the way living arms do; they could stand with sword upraised, unmoving, for days. What an intimidating sight that would be for a living spear-carrier.)

I'd be interested to know your thoughts. Animate them, encase them in rusting, clanking armor, and bid them stand fast on the unknowable horizon of the comments box below.

Group Shots

Just a series of group shots today. First, wrapping up the ogre warband from last week:

Next, my February painting pledge. I'll be doing individual posts on these guys so you can see all the greeblies. (And the faffs.)

And some statue toppers for the pillars I built ages ago, made out of busted-ass plastic high elves that were originally the first miniatures I ever bought. Now memorialized as stone.

Group your responses together in pleasing arrangements below.

The Yawper

I thought I'd finish this little Ogre series with my favorite figure from the batch. He's full of motion and personality, with plenty of texture to provide interest, coarse enough to be easily painted but still with tons of dynamism.

I call him the Yawper in my head, because he looks like he's yawping. I managed his eyes particularly well, for me.

The Craw

I'm really curious as to who sculpted this one. It is a figure crammed with lovely texture and detail that I love, even though it was too fine to paint easily.

For instance, the belly and back are covered in a texture suggestive of fine hair. But I had no idea how to paint that, so I did it as skin and hoped my washes would articulate it well enough.

Painting difficulties aside, I love the personality of this figure. And its weight. It's a serious piece of metal. That base is a 2" washer.

The Wyrm-sage

Now here was an strange sculpt. Oddly lifeless, but in a compelling way.

The lethargy of the pose is echoed by the lazy wyrm, which I love, that's just draped over his shoulders. Like a fat cat. And what's that spiky stone do? No idea. A mysterious arcane parenthetical, bracketed in his paralyzed hands. If it were text, it would read like: (?)

The best sages are full of mystery...