"I'll Grind Your Bones" - Conan Bone Golem

Rigid, the skeleton of habit alone 

upholds the human frame.

-Virginia Woolf

Welcome back to our weekly Friday meetup on The Art of Caesura!

Today I have another miniature from the Conan board game, this time it's the Bone Golem. 

I love the idea of a bone golem; you can just imagine bones scattered on a dry tundra from a long past battle beginning to jitter with mystical energy before assembling themselves into a hulking monstrosity. 

According to Monolith, below was the initial render for this miniature. And while necessarily quite rough and static at that stage of design, I really preferred the direction they were going with it at that stage over the direction they went. By orienting the miniature "face on" (or more in the frontal plane) it really gave a greater sense of mass - which would have given them more opportunity to play with negative space between his bones etc. 

Below is the same creature from a Conan video game that was in development around the same time as the board game. It is a lot more faithful to the artwork above. 

Unfortunately by dividing the model along the side-by-side (sagittal) plane it really reduces its bulk, and makes its limbs quite two dimensional, and its third arm gets totally lost. 

I know that this was a necessary decision for the pull angle of the molding process, but it is a shame nonetheless when you look at the wicked box art above. 

This model couldn't really have been more straight forward to paint. I undercoated him with Wraithbone Spray...

...Painted the entire model with Contrast Skeleton Horde...

...painted the brown bits with Contrast Wyldwood...

...and finished him by highlighting the bone up with Ushabti Bone mixed with more and more white and giving the brown bits a gloss varnish for a bit of textural separation.

No bones about it, there was really nothing more to it than that (I didn't even highlight the brown - shhhh!) sometimes you just don't need to over complicate things, I mean look at the pile of bones he must have arisen from!

Thanks for tuning into another Friday on The Art of Caesura! I hope you all stay positive and test negative!

Reading: The New Jim Crow - Michelle Alexander

Watching: Overlord (2018) - Julius Avery 

Next Week:

Tomes of lore...