It's a swamp demon-- they're thick as bats
in the swamps beyond Black River.
You can hear them howling like damned souls
when the wind blows strong from the south on hot nights.
Beyond the Black River - Robert E. Howard
Hello one and all and welcome back to another Friday on The Art of Caesura!
Today I have another gribbly from the Conan boardgame: The Swamp Demon!
Like last week's Yeti-Man-Ape, I painted this guy so quickly that I forgot to take work-in-progress shots of him, so let's just launch in!
This is a fun swamp creature model with a lot of texture to it. The box art (below) paints him in a solely green palette, but - still cleaning the muck off my boots from the Preyton's swamp base - I wanted to draw some of the other colours that we see in swamps into this model.
From a base of Castellan Green, I shaded him with Athonian Camoshade. I then splodged patches of Seraphim Sepia and Agrax Earthshade on different parts of the model.
I painted on some Druchii Violet on his hands and face for a bit of colour variation, but it was lacking intensity, so I added some diluted Contrast Shyish Purple.
For the highlighting, I started by drybrushing and then as the layers got lighter and lighter in tone, I just went in and line-highlighted them. I used Deathworld Forest and then added Ushabti Bone. I highlighted up to pure Ushabti Bone on his face and some of the vines of his forearms.
I knew I wanted to make his eyes pop, to hearken back to the fire-flies in the box-art above. I painted them a fiery orange-yellow to really contrast the dark greens and browns and purples of his "skin". I like the image of wayward travellers wading through a swamp, seeing what they think are two fire-flies coming towards them...until it's too late!
Looking at the close-up photos, I see I could have pushed the eyes' yellows and even dotted with white, but I do kind of like the lambent glow. Let me know what you think in the comments below.
I'm really enjoying painting a diverse bunch of miniatures at the moment: from Preytons to pirates to Yetis to swamp creatures. I also like how the minis from the Conan board game are kind of generic and can fit multiple settings. I loved the Harryhausen-style skeletons, mummies, that I painted in the first year of this blog, and I'm still loving painting the models now.
Thanks for trudging by, I'll see you next week on The Art of Caesura!
Reading: The New Jim Crow : Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colourblindness - Michelle Alexander
Drinking: Dark and Stormies
Gaming: Necromunda: Underhive Wars
Next Week:
An arcane practitioner...
Dark and stormies!!! Wooooo
ReplyDeleteHeck yes!!
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