Happy Miniature Monday! Today marks the start of another speed paint challenge. This time, it's Dain Deepaxe (Reaper Bones #77074) suggested by @EpicBlueMouse. I'll catalog my process here on my blog and post on Twitter with the rest of the participants one week from now. It's always fun to see the different results we've all come up with! All able & willing participants are welcome to enter-- all you need is this mini, 7 paints, and 4 hours-or-less.
I gave him a fun background in this picture because I have some interesting ideas for his paint color scheme, inspired by our most recent Pumpkin-Ale & Halloween-Themed Game Night. This past weekend, we played D&D 5th edition for the first time. I bought the Player's Handbook while traveling last week and came home only to scour through the pages to build a character for Saturday's game. Our group brought it. We had 5 players total-- one on Skype, which was surprisingly reliable throughout the game. We met at 4pm to build characters and get settled, since we had to recalibrate our brains after playing 4th edition for so long. By 6pm, we had all more-or-less figured our characters out. We jumped into the two-part Halloween-themed story our DM had created and recorded audio throughout the whole thing. Absolutely hilarious! I may post the audio file to my blog when we get closer to Halloween and hopefully find time to meet & play through the 2nd part of the story.
One of our friends created a dwarf character named "Throzen Stoneheart" who went by "Stockwood" and vehemently believed he was a fairy. To give you a bit of a visual image, Stockwood was described as wearing a turtle shell bikini, a tutu, and had giant dragonfly wings glued to a turtle shell strapped to his back. While most people assumed he was in costume, the bearded Stockwood firmly believed he was destined to be King of the Fairies, which made for some absolutely hilarious dialogue. After this next Speed Paint Challenge mini had been decided, I knew I had to incorporate Stockwood's spirit into the paint choices. I'm not exactly sure how I'll incorporate my inspiration, but I have a week to figure it out!
Other than Saturday's Game Night, I slept in after spending a solid week on the road. While Sunday was supposed to be my first true day off from work in two weeks, I ended up needing to work a half day anyway in order to meet some crunch timelines. After dinner, I sat down to paint and chose a mini that had been sitting on the shelf for about two years. I've taken the liberty to rename him "Alucard" (Hint: for those who haven't seen/played Hellsing or Castlevania, try reading it backwards).
Gabriel Darkblood - Reaper #02985
http://demarcs.deviantart.com
Since I'm on the "Hey, it's October!" Halloween kick, I want to paint him in a unique way, inspired by Castlevania's Alucard. I did some searching and found a few interesting images, and finally settled on one from demarcs' Deviant Art site. As I find inspiration in this image, I'll start painting in the middle of the miniature rather than starting with face, eyes, and hair like I usually do. It's a challenge, and I haven't made it very far, but I'm lining & mapping out different shapes and getting an idea for which sections will have the silver & gold trim. The inside of his cloak will be fun to paint. Maybe I'll even try my hand at painting some freehand patterns... maybe.