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Andrew Bird
Australia
Victoria
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Ahem. Yeah, g'day. Long time between posts and all that. A fairly serious health issue in the family caused me to put all my grand painting schemes well and truly on the backburner for an extended period of time. Things have settled down a bit now, though, so I've been able to cautiously resume my efforts.
Anyway, in my last post I promised to tackle those irksome trites next up, and true to my word (if a little later than originally intended), here they are:
Man, they may be irksome to deal with on the board, but they are ten times that on the painting bench! No bases, which made it quite a challenge to secure them properly for the purposes of base-coat spray painting, not to mention just simply holding them while trying to do the detail. Probably 20% of the paint intended for these guys ended up going on my fingers instead.
Furthermore, all of these miniatures had suffered some degree of warping of the legs. Not a single one of them had more than three feet on the ground, and the worst of them looked like he'd met the wrong end of a fly-swat! Anyway, there's a tried and true method for dealing with this - the ol' hot-and-cold water treatment. Dip the mini in a cup of hot (as in, just boiled) water for a short period, and once the plastic is all nice and bendy, contort those warped limbs into the desired pose and hold for a while. Then, dip into a cup of cold (ice) water, and Bob's your uncle. Of course, this procedure would have been a whole lot easier if I'd been working with minis that had fewer than six recalcitrant limbs...
As for colour schemes, these guys (unlike the imps) had no nostalgia-based colouring to inspire me with, being a new monster that was introduced in DooM III. And, as much as I enjoyed playing the DooM III video game, if I was to take my colouring inspiration from it, then pretty much every monster would be a pale, mottled flesh colour with (of course) the odd splatter of blood.
So, I decided a lighter tone than the imps was in order, and settled for GW Iyanden Darksun as the foundation. Then, my standard procedure: wash (Devlan Mud is your friend), re-highlight with original colour, and a final edge highlight with a 60:40 mix of Iyanden Darksun and Bleached Bone. The teeth had a similar treatment, but with Bleached Bone as the base and the very tips of the teeth highlighted with skull white. Rinse and repeat for the tongues, but with Blood Red as the base.
The eyes were a bit of a challenge, and given that they were of a decent size (at least, in miniature terms), I decided to try my hand at the "reflective gem" effect. So, a dark shade as the base, a lighter shade applied along the bottom, but offset with a tiny dot of white near the top. Not sure if you can see it in the photo, but it came out reasonably well for a first attempt. Fingers crossed, I'll get better at this and other techniques as I practice more, and will be able to enjoy at least a few years of being a moderately-skilled miniature painter, before old age kicks in and robs me of my fine motor skills.
Anyway, after having done the eyes in the obligatory three colours, I decided that (a) the difference in colours wasn't really that prevalent, as these guys have their eyes on the bottom; and (b) I'd already used the "different coloured eyes" motif before on the imps. So, I decided that these guys, being the pesky little duct-scuttlers that they are, are probably subject to wading through all sorts of dubious substances. As such, I tried to make it look as though their legs were stained with dried gore/green goo/blue slushy. It could probably have been done better (not enough "splatting"), and certainly with a little more subtlety and blending of the colours, but overall I'm reasonably happy with the result. There's certainly no need to squint in order to determine which flavour of trite you're up against!
Well, that's it for this post. Hopefully the next won't be so long in coming out. The good news is that I'm now done with "dozens" - the remaining DooM monsters only come in sets of six or less - yay! Stay tuned for: the archviles!
Thanks for reading,
Birdman.
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. Trites are probably the most tedious Doom minis to paint (but a painted swarm looks great on the board, though).
