Painting Runebound: The Mountains Rise

My son and I play quite a bit of Runebound. He received the The Guilded Blade expansion for his birthday a while ago, and we both really enjoyed the variety that the new cards brought to the game. He's still working on painting the miniature from that set, and it's looking pretty good. I picked up The Mountains Rise expansion so that we could get even more variety into our tabletop adventures. This expansion comes with Lothar of the Hill People Nanok of the Blade, a ridiculously wide miniature with herculean pecs.

I primarily used layering for the other Runebound heroes, but I took a different approach with Nanok, something more like I am currently doing with my Descent heroes. For the cape, I drybrushed highlights over a base color, applied a reddish-brown wash, and then brushed on slightly orange highlights. It's nothing fancy, but I like how the hint of orange adds visual interest, though it's not really evident in the pictures. The rest of him was done rather quickly with base coat, wash, highlight sequences. I mixed some blues into the metallic paints for the axe heads, inspired by the card art, and I think this gives them a nice contrast to the warm colors of the rest of the figure. The horns on his helmet needed a little attention, so I did some manual shading on them with sepia ink; similarly, the bracers/gloves are similar in hue to the flesh, so I deepened the shadows with some brownlining there as well. For the face, I brought in a technique I've seen Sorastro use on figures like Han Solo, but something that I've never tried myself: a blue glaze over the face to give the appearance of a 5 o'clock shadow. It's subtle and hard to see in the picture, in part because I was afraid to take it too far, but I'm pleased with it. Sorastro frequently uses complementary glazes to add visual interest to his models, and it's something that I would like to bring in to more of my pieces in the future.