Some ugly beasts

 While committing to other stuff, I've decided to take on a small side project, one of those palette cleansers that help you to feel closure and that you get your damn stuff done. It consists of Frostgrave and Stargrave minis, all of them creepy monsters for scary encounters. Nothing special on mind, but just some eerie creatures that you can use in a number of different games.

Eeeek

In the pic above you have an example of each mini, but I painted two of each. Trying to decide how to approach this project, it looked clear to me that they needed to look ugly, dark, ominous. Nothing about bright colours or any kind of flamboyant patterns. So totally opposite to my work on the World of Twilight stuff. Then I thought of a fun experiment. What if I gave them all the same base coat and then tried different approaches? They should look sufficiently tied in, yet distinctive.

It looked great in my mind, seriously.

I primed them black and then I used a mix of dark brown, black and grey for the prime layer. Then I abundantly agrax-ed them:

They look all the same. Ugly and dirty. I'm pretending to say it as a good thing

From this point on, however, I walked different paths with each kind of creature. Let me start with the Leechwolves. I guess the name is quite descriptive on its own.

Uuuugghh

I wanted these to look pale and sick. Leeches are in fact quite opposite, in the black scale of things, but I really thought they should have this kind of look, and Itried to define the muscles and so, just using the three base colours I used on the original mix, but adding more and more grey to each layer.

Cute puppies

Next, the Grothek. Again the palette was kind of the very same, but this time the mix had quite more black and grey. The creature is a strange hybrid of bat and boar or something in that line, so I thought that dark greys should look fine.

I really thought that "animal crossing" was a totally different concept

I only added a different tone of brown on the back when painting the final layers, to provide some additional hues to the result:

A nice family!

The Chronohounds were a different challenge. I decided to go with the dark brown palette, always starting from the same point as the other monsters. I used little grey for the highlights, and then the result fell on the brown side. But they looked too dull and the texture of the minis was calling for something else. Then I came up with a weird idea. As these beasts move in time, coming in and out the continuum, I considered they should have their skin burnt, if not full of nasty tumours. So while staying with the same colours, I tried this:

They are also blind, just because they look scarier

So let's have a look at the final results. The good thing of having two minis of each model is that I can show both sides at the same time:

I'm still struggling to decide how does the Batpig sound

Oink, oink, screech

I prefer not to think of their sound

I really think some vet should take a look at those skins

Imagine a forest in the dark and then you find these. Nice, huh?

It's been a nice challenge, trying to get different results (as different as I could) with just the same three colours. They look like predators, but each one in their own way, and I believe they'll make some interesting encounters in any game they take part of.

I'm currently working on more stuff, and it will be quite different from this; coming (hopefully) soon!