Last week I showcased some of the Massive Darkness heroes from a couple of the small box expansions... well that was just the tip of the iceberg! After painting those I decided I really needed to pick up the original base game and put my ticklesticks on the plastic contained there in.
Here's how that turned out...
I painted the heroes in the order I was most excited about them, so I began with Siegfried. As with the heroes from last week I'm still using exaggerated highlights from the upper right to give the impression of light hitting the mini and creating shadows. Siegfried turned out really well, I particularly like his shield and his tattoos.
Next up we have Elias who is obviously a homage to Gandalf the Grey. With Elias I accentuated the light and shadows to really bring his robes to life. Then I played around with some OSL (object source lighting) to make it appear as if his staff was glowing. This is always a daunting prospect as you need to add the OSL last and if it doesn't work you need to repant. Personally though I think that blue glow looks great!
Next we have Sybil, with her I did less experimentation as I had already painted a similiar scheme for Sylvan last week. Still I think she came out well, even if the pose is a little odd.
Bjorn reminds me of the Barbarian on the front cover of Heroquest. This one I'm really happy with. The skin breaks from my normal method, where I try and create a more harmonious blend between light and shadow and instead leans into a heavy contrast to really bring out his muscles. I also started to experiment with different metal tones, giving his axe a lighter steel colour.
Owen, the team's paladin came out so well. I was a little daunted by the prospect of painting the full gold plate but really pleased with the end result, which pairs really nicely with the sanguine robes.
Finally we have Whisper who I left til last because so far I have not been happy with the darker colour schemes I've done for Massive Darkness. However she came together really quickly and I'm super pleased with the end result. I like everything about her, the colours are really rich while still giving an overall shadowy look. However I think my favourite thing is the cartoony blood on the blades, this works so well for this style of mini, they really do look like illustrations on the page which is what I wanted to achieve.
And there we have it, the whole group ready to battle the Darkness.
Until next time, have fun painting...
The Duke
The Duke's first dungeon crawl board game was MB's Dark World... That game spawned a love of dungeon delving that has never gone away!