"We All Wear Masks..." - Professor Sawbones

We penetrated deeper and deeper into the 

heart of darkness.

~ Joseph Conrad

Welcome back! It's the Art of Caesura!


This week marks our 6th consecutive week of The World of Smog: Rise of Moloch coverage, and this time 'round it's:

I must confess, today's mini filled me with confusion when I first saw it. I really didn't get the English Victorian garb with the African mask, it just really didn't do it for me. I also didn't understand the name - a Sawbones is the old term for  a surgeon...I don't know, maybe I'm missing something there.

I'm happy to say that my feelings about the aesthetics of the model totally changed when I started painting him. I find this often happens - that I only really come to fully appreciate a miniature when I'm really relishing in it through the painting process. Another model that comes to mind like this was The Merchant, which ended up being one of my favorite models of last year. 

Once I started painting this guy (by undercoating him in Skrag Brown and his mask in Doombull Brown) I had the fun idea of treating him as "a study in browns".

Almost every colour I used, I mixed with brown; even with my metallics, where I would normally have tipped his spear with a silver tone, I resisted the urge, and used Screaming Bell. 

I used the little fetish hanging off his left side to introduce a little colour but mixed the primary colours (plus green) with Steel Legion Drab to...drab them down a little. I then edged them by adding Vallejo Metallic Medium to give the feathers a little iridescence. 

As I said, I actually really came to like this miniature as I was painting him. Again I love the little details like the way he is holding his pipe, and how he has his other hand half in his pocket. It's almost like he's posing for a portrait with some of his treasured artifacts from his expeditions. In the game, he has a cool rule where he can whip out artifacts to help him in missions. 

Also, like Eroom Nala last week, Prof Sawbones too has a badge of The Unicorn Club (on his left lapel), which I again painted gold.

To segue our discussion towards the elephant (or tiger, actually) in the room, I want to first defend my decision not to paint Prof Sawbones in plaid. As you can see in the artists rendition above, (and in many great mini painters on the internet), the good professor is often painted in plaid. Now I have nothing against plaid (hell, I'm Canadian!) and had fun painting tartan for John Brown's kilt, but I wanted to push myself to keep this model quite monochromatic and didn't want another busy pattern (like the tiger pelt) to pull attention away from the focal point: his face mask.

That being said, it would have made more sense, artistically, to paint the pelt he's standing on as lion skin. The tones would have almost perfectly matched his suit, and would have stuck to my "brown thing". But...well...I just really wanted to have a go at painting a tiger!

It took me a while to get the base tone for the tiger fur right. Aside from Ryza Rust, I don't actually own any oranges - I don't really use orange all that often and prefer to mix it from Yriel Yellow and Evil Sunz Scarlet. Anyway, when I started, the mix was way too saturated, so I played around adding Skrag Brown and Ushabti Bone with a thin wash of Reikland Fleshshade. This seemed to do the trick. I then worked on the white markings before adding the black stripes. 

The last stage was to add a few fun details like the yellow tiger's eyes, and mouth and tongue.

That's another gent from The World of Smog done on The Art of Caesura!

Reading: A Gentleman in Moscow - Amor Towles

Watching: Luthor

Next Week:

Hoppin' horrifying...