A painted D&D party

 

Hitting the deadline with only a little stress, here's the D&D adventuring party I've been painting up this month...

First up we have the party cleric, Tatum Brightbranch. I did have a bit of an oops on this one - Tatum is a human and not a halfling, and I somehow got this muddled in my head when looking for miniatures to represent him. This is extra annoying as it was incredibly difficult to find halfling models suitable for clerics. Human cleric miniatures are dime a dozen and easy to find. Still, he turned out OK, and the player good naturedly just said that Tatum is very short for a human. My players are very tolerant and kind of my foolish mistakes, and I love them for it.

Prucey Shatterstone is the party's dwarf rogue. For all the models I gave them a zenithal undercoat and then added contrast paints to get the base colours down as quickly as possible. This looked passable, and was done with a day to spare. I then spent the spare day adding detail - drybrushing some clothes and leather to add more texture variation and depth of colour, and adding highlights on metal and faces to have them stand out more.

Hatch Bladestorm is the party's half-elf warlock who thinks he's a Paladin. He's a Hexblade and has mostly been fighting with swords and stuff like that, but recently looted a Spider Staff that does a whole bunch of damage and cool magical effects so he's switched to that. That change did make it a little harder to get the model done, but I cut off a spearhead and replaced with the head of a magic staff, and also swapped out the fighter's head for a more Heroic elf head.

The drama over losing part of the right arm assembly meant he was the last painted, and his magical armour meant I decided to drop in a lot more metallic paint, in the form of Retributor Armour, from the start, as it does a lot of work with a quick wash and highlight. The model's face details were also pretty soft, but as a Heroic elf, I added an additional highlight of Flayed One Flesh over the top of the Kislev Flesh to get him paler.

Puff Marbler is the Gnome Wizard of the party. For all of the party, I tried to match colours on their chosen character artwork to the miniature as best I could. It was a very interesting experiment for me, as I'd had to pick out miniatures to try and best represent the characters, and then choose from the limited Contrast colour range I have to match the colour schemes as best I could. It was a fun exercise, particularly within the constraints of a strict deadline.

The final "party member" is Ferrous Mule'er, Puff's Mule and loyal Carrier Of Stuff. He caused me a number of panics as I was painting five models for player party, and kept having a moment where I knew I'd booked five seats at the gaming café, but five models plus the GM is six . . .

I'll be posting later about the game itself, but these models are now with their new owners - the players in my game. Starting the year off with a small, simple project that hit deadline has put me in an excellent positive mood. This feels like something I should repeat in future to either restart momentum or to set a new year off in a positive way.