Killing You With Ugly

To quoth the good book:

      This nightmare creature is loathsome beyond description and has no redeeming features. Its body resembles that of a huge, bloated buffalo. . . (its) neck is long and thin, and perched atop it is a big head uglier than that of a warthog. Its legs are thick and stumpy, much like a hippopotamus. . .In any case, the most horrid aspect of the catoblepas is its bloodshot eyes.
                                                                                 -Gary Gygax, Monster Manual, 1977

Ral Partha Catoblepas, vintage 1988

Ugly is right. Although this Ral Partha sculpt misses out on a few of the nicer details from D.A. Trampier's original art, like the fleshy bits 'round the eyes and the clubby tail, I think it hits a home run in the straight-up ugliness game. More importantly to me, it gave me the golden opportunity to really work on wet blending techniques. Serpent neck blending into hippopotamus armored flesh into hairy warthog bristles. I am very happy with the grey-to-flesh blending on the abdomen. I think I could probably have gone a little warmer with the greens, but I like the "natural" look I have now and I don't want to do anything that might screw that up.

It was a very productive week hobby-wise, as I also managed to prep all of the Otherworld Adventurers and Hirelings that I still have in my queue, along with the first batch of Redbox Games Kickstarter rewards. I finished off this OW ranger mid-week, and he will probably end up replacing the thief mini that my older son uses as his character in Barrowmaze. He's a big fan of the bow here.

And finally, I (admittedly) rushed the paint job on this (honestly) iffy sculpt of an undead dog from Grenadier just to get it off my desk. It's a Cthuhlu mini titled "Hound of Tindalos" and looking it up online, it appears mine is missing a big long tongue. Dunno, but I don't think a big long tongue would improve it much. Maybe a zombie in Barrowmaze will make this his Ol' Yeller. Woof woof.

Hope your own leaden pursuits are ticking along smartly. Take care, brethren.

"You Can't Tell Me This Woman Died By Falling Out of a Tree. . ."

"Well, what is it?"

Dunh dunh.      Dunh dunh.     Dunh dunh.

Landshark!

Well, Bulette by Grenadier, anyway. I believe they referred to this mini as a "Juggernaut," if memory serves me right. . .

I really wanted to paint something out of my normal earthtone comfort zone this week, hence the Smurfette blue scale tones. I need to find out if GW's Hawk Turquoise got remade during the most recent paint system re-ordering, as I discovered to my dismay while painting this guy that my pot was pretty much completely dried out. I'll try to save it, but if you know a good replacement, lemme know in the comments.

Have a great one, brethren. (And RIP, Belushi. You are missed.)

I Love Me Some Glazed Reptile

As anyone who paid attention to this blog last year probably knows, I spent a lot of 2014 hobby time and energy painting up undead legions for our Barrowmaze campaign. Those painting sessions are finally paying off game-wise, as we've had a couple of cool dungeon crawls mowing through skellies, zombies, etc. One of the things that struck me as ironic, though, was how much Barrowmaze's author, Greg Gillespie, used swamp creatures (snakes, alligators, "boglings" AKA bullywugs, etc) to flesh out his wilderness encounters when travelling to and from the dungeon proper. In an effort to complete my players' experience mini-wise, I have turned my energies now to painting up a few proper bog creatures.

Case in point:

This giant snake from Grenadier will be attacking from a swampy hiding place soon. The stats for giant constrictors are pretty nasty in the original version of AD&D/Labyrinth Lord, so it won't surprise me if things get a bit hairy around the VeronaKid dinner table when he shows up.

Over my standard shaded undercoat, I applied a brown-green basecoat that, once drybrushed and highlighted, looked a bit too brown for my taste. Uber-light green ink glaze to the rescue!

The glaze really pulled the different highlight shades together and made the snake feel a whole lot more reptilian, to my eye anyway.

I also added a few blue and purple spots of ink glaze to the base, which is an old King's Minis trick from way back. I think it does add a nice sense of interest to an otherwise boring green-and-grass type of basing.

Cheers, lead brethren. Hope you are all well. Thanks for the look.