Cthulhu Wars Sleeper expansion

Since these pieces are for a Risk-style board game, the most important thing is that they be easily identified as belonging to their faction. With the other Cthulhu Wars minis I’ve painted, I’ve tried to keep to the faction’s main color, with maybe one or at most two other colors as an accent.

The Sleeper faction is orange, which is a color best used in moderation, so I’ve decided to do this faction primarily in brown with orange highlights. Their Great Old One, Tsathoggua, is depicted as being somewhat furry, so the brown should work well.

Since I have so many figures to paint for this game, I don’t want to reinvent the wheel. I’ve decided to go with the basic Army Painter approach of colored primer + details + wash +highlights. I started with leather brown primer, followed by some detailing and a Strong Tone wash.

For the other large Cthulhu Wars figures, I’ve done a mix of matte and gloss varnish, using gloss for areas that would be wet such as slavering mouths. I did the same here for his orange boils.

Cthulhu Wars has tons of cultist minis (each of the 8-and-counting factions has 6). I’m getting a little tired of painting them, but I’ve established a basic pattern to make it go a little easier: robes in either black or white, ivory for the mask (barely visible under the hood), brown book with ivory pages, and accents such as hood trim, belts, wrist bands, and bookmarks in the faction color (in this case, orange.

Since these were already primed in brown I decided to have the robes be brown with orange accents.

Sadly, I’ve now run out of Strong Tone wash (Tsathoggua had a lot of surface area to cover) so I’ve now got a crowd of base-colored monsters impatiently waiting their finishing touches.

The Formless Spawn in the back row really needed to be all-orange – in the brown primer they looked exactly like a dog’s business…

Since the rest of the project is stalled until I get some more Strong Tone wash (my local store was out so I had to resort to mail-order), I decided to paint a couple of the game’s independent Great Old Ones: Father Dagon and Mother Hydra.

For these I wanted to try something a little different, rather than the standard primer-detail-wash approach. I started with black primer, then dark versions of the basic colors: grey and red for Dagon and two shades of greyish-green for Hydra. I followed this up with a quick drybrush in a lighter shade of each color.

I’m pretty pleased with the results, and it was quite a bit faster without waiting for a wash to dry. Unfortunately I find that drybrushing is really hard on my brushes – the brush I used for these two is pretty much shot now.

I finally got the supplies I needed to finish the wash and highlights for the rest of the figures in this expansion. For the most part I’m pleased with the results, given that the goal is for them to be easily recognizable on the board and look fairly decent, without spending a huge amount of time on each figure.