Abyst
by Thomas Pope
I should probably admit that I started on the second VIC entry with little more enthusiasm than the first. For the record, I paint almost exclusively by necessity. I enjoy nothing more than painting all of the characters to order for the latest role playing campaign, and I'll even go beyond that to paint silly little accessories and (less silly) monsters and bad guys for the game. However, those all fall into the "useful" category of painting, where everything I paint is specific to whatever we're playing at the moment.
While I do occasionally like to paint miniatures just for the fun of painting them, they are usually inspired by something I've done or seen recently. A typical case in point is the latest (now a couple of months old) addition to my gallery where I painted a few starships from popular movies and TV shows.
So this VIC entry falls in to the "things I really should paint but I'm not sure I want to" category, which is always a bad place to be. However, the point of this whole exercise is to paint something I normally wouldn't, presumably learning something in the process.
So... on to the actual paint job.
Since I'd never really painted a demon before, I decided to stick with the tried and true standard "demon look" rather than try anything new and exciting.
I started with a base of (appropriately enough) Poly Scale Demon Deep Red. This was washed with Windsor and Newton Chestnut Brown and dry brushed with Ral Partha plain old Red. The fur was painted first Polly Scale Ogre Brown (the bottle of which has almost completely dried out unfortunately) and highlighted with a lighter shade of Ral Partha Red Brown.
I kept the details relatively simple. The eyes were painted yellow with a black pupil, sword Polly Scale Graphite Metallic washed with (the irreplaceable and out of production) Chessex Dark Brown Stain. The bone was a base of RP Ivory, followed by that nice Dark Brown Stain again, followed by a drybrush of RP Bone White. Armored plates were RP Steel, edged with Chessex Copper.
The wings were painted separately from the rest of the body. I attached them when the front was finished and then went on to work on the back. Again, they were kept relatively simply, the spars were painted the same color as the flesh, while the wings themselves were painted RP Dark Blue. Since the whole piece was very muted I used a dark gray for the claws and horns to keep them from standing out too much.
All in all, I think this is a passable if somewhat boring paint job. I'm actually most pleased with the base, since it looks reasonably like he's standing on a field of flame.
Oddly enough, both this miniature and the VIC 1 miniature did find use (if briefly) in one of our games. During the climactic battle at the end of an interminably long campaign we were in need of a suitably large and overbearing demononic foe. His "on screen" time was short but at least he served a useful purpose before going back to his lonely spot on my shelf-of-things-I-don't-know-what-to-do-with.
Well, time to start working on VIC3...
Thomas Pope
Previous Miniature
Visions in Color #2 Index
Next Miniature