After great success several years ago, I thought it was time again for some fantasy miniature painting. So I bought myself – for only $5 – this dude:
It’s a 2 inch tall plastic model (by Reaper Miniatures) called D’Khul Bathalian. But if you’ve played D&D you’ll recognize this as a Mindflayer, an iconic evil octopoid-humanoid. As you can see the figure is astonishingly detailed for its size, and when painted professionally it looks mighty good as these examples show:
Obviously I wanted to paint mine to look as good as these, and reflecting back on my efforts from last time I considered any flaw in the final work due exclusively to my choice of paints. This time, rather than using free paint that came with a children’s magazine, I would invest in high quality tools. And so I did:
I purchased this set of premium acrylics for only $9, which I thought quite reasonable considering it came with three brushes! I’d never used acrylics before, but was sure I’d have no trouble due to my overall better-than-average artistic skills.
The figures don’t need primer, so you can just slap on apply the paint with little setup. Everyone knows mindflayers are purple so the first choice of colors was easy and shortly after I begun I knew a masterpiece was being made.
That’s a shot of my palette upon completion. I chose dark colors to evoke the evil of The Underdark and the bright whites and yellows were used for overbrushing (for detail) and the magic effects of the staff. I blended red and black to create a clotted-blood colour for his robe and the blue was used extremely sparingly (a few atoms only) to detail his medallion. In short my design was eclipsed only by my effort, and both resulted in a final work I’m immensely proud of:
Thoughts?
