Did I say Dragon Horde? I meant Enter the Dragon!

Continuing along I’ve finished up a number of NPC models.  Specifically we now have a painted vampire, ghouls, wraith and spider.  Additionally I painted up a Foo Dog to act as the warbands war dog.  Finally I painted up a stone golem/elemental to act as the main character in the Frostgrave mini-campaign “Hunt for the Golem”.

The vampire was a fairly standard paint job.  I’m still a but unsure of if the metal and grey clothes are too close in tone.  Might have made more sense to either go with a purple/blue for the clothes or a bronze for the armor.  Regardless I like him well enough.

The spider is based on an image I found.  In the game they’re ice spiders but I’m not sticking too strictly to the frozen theme in order to make these more generally useful.  I like the final effect and I’m pretty sure I could get a scream out of a number of people if I left him sitting around 😉

The poor ghouls I could not seem to get much motivation to paint up.  Not really sure why but they just weren’t pulling my interest and so have been sitting here for a few weeks.  I finally got them done by 1. deciding they just need to get to a reasonable state and 2. using the power of an XLBS.  I did quite a bit of back and forth with blues and skin tones trying to get a skin shade I was happy with.  Glad to have them done and happy enough with how they came out.

On the flip side the elemental was lots of fun.  The basic scheme for him is pretty easy so I took some time to paint up the crystals, add some different colored stone, little gold deposits and some glowing runes to spice him up a bit.  He probably came out a touch cartoon-y but has some nice character.

The wraith is the last of the NPCs.  He’s actually a model I’d started years ago and had been sitting around.  The mini is one of Reapers translucent lines which make for a bit of a painting challenge (for me at least).  Translucent models are cool and all but if you’re going to paint them you have to figure out how much of that you want to maintain and how you want to use it.  I went for a dark central area that fades off into the translucent edges.

Last but not least is the Foo Dog.  He’s a bit interesting as I wanted to inject jade into the color scheme.  To that end I started with a jade green underlayer and then worked into Reapers Palomino Gold triad.  I went through quite a number of glazed to work the colors and like the result.  I do find that the light the mini is in can really change how the colors look on him (shifting from yellow to brown/green especially in the darker areas).  The eyes I left as single colored orbs but I might add pupils in the future.  Looking up reference art seems to support either option.  I think adding pupils would give him a bit more life but I’m worried it will also make him look a bit too googly-eyed.

Next up is a Frost Giant.  He’ll serve a duel purpose as he’s needed for Frostgrave but will also act as a test subject for a clan of Frost Giants I’ll be painting for a homebrew Pathfinder game I’m running.