Hellboy (an old Spring Clean Challenge)

Mike Mignola’s  work stands alone. As a fan of Hellboy there’s the story and then there’s the way Mike told the story.  I did spend some time wondering if these miniatures could be painted in a style similar to Mikes original minimalist, stark, sharp, dark, high contrast style and while I love the idea of it, the original art isn’t constrained by the 3^rd dimension and seems to jump straight to the 5th and 6th.

Whilst the original art played havoc with anatomy, and focused almost entirely on the positive vs negative (ie shadow) to evoke the story rather than tell it, no doubt a stroke of genius,  the Miniatures with the game are 3 dimensional with quite good anatomical proportions.

So I’ve discounted the possibility of imitating Mike’s original style but want to see how close I can go.

Painting a full set with all the Kickstarter goals will be a time challenge even with all of spring (for me Autumn). As of this post I’m staring down the idea of working full hours from home while watching over 3 kids schooling from home. So I have to be smart about this.

Right now my plan is to focus on underpainting a good sketch layer on all miniatures first.  A zenith layer, but taken up a level like Dana Howl does here https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LGYWYDv8Gq0&t=286s

Then I will attempt to make some glazes based on Mike Mignolas colour pallet. Hellboy comics rely on block shadows and 1 block colour per subject/object so I will attempt to do the same, though my shadow/zenith with be a graded 3d B&W base.

I’ll keep my finger crossed it will evoke the comic style, and be efficient on time.  It does mean my B&W sketch layer will have to be quite good and my colour matching and glaze alchemy will have to be spot on but I wont have to spend hours colour blending or layering . At worst I’m sure it will provide a great base and I will forgive myself further washes and high lights if required.

Technically I started this projects months ago , pulling out the Hellboy character miniatures I made start but was unsatisfied with my initial painting processes struggled with inspiration and put it to one side.

During early February the box re-emerged and me and few mates played our first few games.  We fouind it quite thematic and unanimously we decided to continue playing through the campaigns and really get into the games minutia. Then COVID-19 came and you know the rest.

One of my first visual bug bears while playing the game were the dark grey markers on the dark toned tracker board being difficult to see. Before long I had painted these trackers base white with a blue glaze. I did notice a very small issue of getting base colours to stick and realized I should have washed prior.