"This Book Looks Familiar" - Blot

A book is proof that humans 

are capable of working magic

~Carl Sagan

Hi friends, welcome back to The Art of Caesura,

Okay, I've been playing this really atmospheric, but really depressing video game called "This War of Mine". It's an inspired take on war games, where instead of being a soldier and shootin' 'em all up, you control a group of wartime survivors (well, they're survivors if you don't suck). It's well made in the sense that you can't just save the game whenever you want. If your dudes (or dudettes) die, they're dead. That just happened to me. And it sucks. 

Anyway on to this week's topic: Blot, the Gaunt Summoner's (the big baddie of Warhammer Quest: Silver Tower) little familiar. He's a book with legs. 

I tried to paint one of these guys in a relatively traditional fashion, i.e. blue and gold. It was my first time attempt trying to paint text. Which, to pause for a second, is kind of an amazing thing. I've been painting miniatures for almost a decade and a half - several of those years involved a Black Templars army who would often have loads of text on their armor, but I've always somehow managed to sidestep it...

To paint the text, I used a technique that I had read about years ago. What you do is open a word document, change the font to something like "French Script" and make the font super duper small so that you can just make out squiggly lines and the spaces between them and use this as a reference to paint the text on your mini. Oh, and then paint the text using ink (shades) as opposed to paint. 

I had a bit of fun with the other familiar. I started by painting his cover yellow and red, in the hopes that this would show through in the next stage (spoiler alert - it didn't). I then painted the cover Agrellin Earth (which is a special brown paint with a "crackle medium" that makes the paint crack when it dries). So I was hoping it would have a cracked magma effect on the cover, I was aiming to make it look like a flesh bound necronomicon-type tomb. 

I had fun doing the old "make it look like someone was frantically scribbling down their last thoughts when they were killed" technique, but having the last "word" on the page streak off the page with a small (very restrained, if I do say so myself) splatter of blood covering it all.

Well I hope you enjoyed a look at these cool little books. I'll see you right back here next week on The Art of Caesura!


Reading: boring textbooks for work
Watching: Morgan
Gaming: This War of Mine


Next Week:
Heyyyy Pepto bismol...