Tuesday, April 22, 2014

Aberrations and Apparitions

Howdy! I wasn't able to paint as much as I would've liked this week, so my horde of giants is just a hair's breadth from completion. In the meantime though, I finished basing the grell and painted a green Bones figure.

I've always enjoyed DMing aberrations. Part of it is definitely due to Robert E. Howard's use of aberrations throughout his Conan stories as gods and horrors inhabiting any number of lost cities. Part is definitely due to Lovecraft. The thought of an alien being or culture beyond human comprehension inhabiting the world next to humans has always fascinated me, and is one I've always played up in my games. Other than beholders and illithids, few aberrations have appeared in fantasy literature to any extent, and therefore not even a well-read player will have many preconceived notions about them. This leaves plenty of room for a devious DM to surprise his players with strange, startling, and shocking behaviors and cultural aspects. Grell happen to be one of my favorites. These figures are Ral Partha's AD&D 11-525 Grell. The color scheme was inspired by an illustration in the 3.5 Ed. Lords of Madness supplement.


I decided to base one as if it was floating through a cavern, the other as if floating over underbrush in a forested area. I like to use grell as inhabitants of old ruins and have them regularly patrolling forestland and cave systems around their abodes.

The other figure I finished was Reaper Bones 77099 Nightspectre. I liked the idea of the clear plastic and wanted to play with painting the figure while leaving large areas of the plastic unpainted.


I simply did a wash of black ink and then dry-brushed gray and then white on the edges. Finally I outlined the outer-most edges with some Ral Partha Glow in the Dark paint, which has proven to give the figure an eerie cast when the light is out. My next step is to drill a hole in the base up into the figure and to install a LED tea light, for a bit of internal lighting. The idea for that came from Chris Palmer's blog All Bones About It and his large Bones fire elemental. This figure is a bit smaller than the elemental and I'm hoping the light carries through most of the figure when done.

So next time, I'll definitely have some giants/ogres and maybe a character or two. My players are all over me to paint up their PCs.

'Til next time.

2 comments:

  1. These are superb and I can't wait to see the spectre lit up - what a great idea.

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