RT Bestiary: Astral Hounds

Trying to get back to normal life up here. You know, RealLifeTM insists in challenging you in so many different ways.

Anycase, I have managed to paint a little. If you remember the Psychneuein I made using Akula's Space Wasps, you may recall I said I had purchased some other beasts. Here they are, the 'Croc Hound'

 

Skinny dog

 

 My intention was to make some Astral Hounds, those WH40K RT nightmarish beings. They are Warp entities, lurking from their alternate energy dimension over unprotected psykers. Following their victim's psychic aura, they materialise in the real universe, hunt their prey and drag the unfortunate psyker into the Warp, where they feed on his psychic energy, leaving nothing behind them but a misterious absence of the poor victim, never to be seen again...

My first approach to the minis was a total bluff. I thought of them as in an outlandish look, in purple and red, just in the moment of appearing into the material universe, so the back part would be painted in black with swirls of shining energy.

 

Total failure

That scheme simply didn't work. They were not showing at all what I intended. Sooo, back to tile one again. I didn't want to show them in their bare muscles, skinned. There are some other Dark Eldar beasts that already look like that. I then thought of a black&white approach. The RT manual describes them as dark animals, so I figured out a black beast with white belly:

 

The crossing between a dog and a shark

 

That begun to look more like what I was looking for. I used a mix of black and blue, and the lights were made by adding 'german feldgrey' by Vallejo (a grey/green colour) to that mix. I also thought of making burning eyes and mouth, like the Balrog, maybe in red, maybe in green. But I didn't want them to look too daemon-ish. I finally made only the bright eyes, using yellow:

 

Grandma, what big eyes you have!

 

 So the Hounds finally look like this:

 

Grrrrr... Woof, woof

 

A pack of three

 And a final scale comparison shot:

Oh, come on, me again?

That's it, new perils to make my RT games (or whatever) more interesting. I really need to design some scenarios...