Painting Massive Darkness: Bloodmoon Assassins vs. the Hellephant

Why did I buy this Massive Darkness expansion? For the Hellephant.

Ah, paints, it's been a long time. I picked up Bloodmoon Assassins vs. the Hellephant shortly after getting Warrior Priests vs. The Spearmaiden Cyclops, which I finished painting back in ... egads, it was June! I painted the three heroes from the not long afterward, and then the Hellephant itself sat on my desk for months. It was a stressful semester, and kids' bedtimes are shifting as they get older, and the older kids are getting involved in more activities. Also, I judged for IGF, which had me exploring a bunch of games. I had the intention to do the Hellephant over the winter break, but I never touched by brushes. I did spend am embarrassing amount of time on Pathfinder: Kingmaker, and that never even turned into the angry blog post I sketched out in my head.

Over the last few days, however, I finally got my painting groove back on, and I finished this attractive sculpt.  But first, the heroes! 

Now something seems to have gone wonky with my camera settings, resulting in the bottom parts of the images going magenta. This morning, before leaving for my 9:00 a.m. class, I decided to try to re-shoot with more natural ambient light, but I was still getting strange tones. I've never seen that before and had to search my blog for when I last wrote about my camera settings, which was when I wrote about painting Stuffed Fables. That was also the last time I tried photographing on a black background, so I decided to try that again here. I was able to much better match the colors, so that's what we get in today's post. It seems appropriate for "Massive Darkness" too.

Sylvan (front)

Sylvan (back)

The first hero is Sylvan, which is really just a cry for help. An elf warrior in green named "Sylvan"? C'mon CMON. This guy is a sort of male counterpart to Sybil from the Massive Darkness base set. His artwork did not have the interesting purple gradients that I saw in Sybil's. Instead, I did a pale green to forest green on his clothing, and for the armor, I tried to get a distinct but complementary tone for the armor. As I recall, the armor was done by mixing some metallic medium as well. It is hard to tell if this is worth it or not, though. The armored parts do look good, but not exactly metallic; yet, I am not sure if it's doing something good that I would miss if I didn't do it.

Valerie (front)

Valerie (back)

This is Valerie. Class, say hello to Valerie. Really, these Massive Darkness heroes have some of the strangest names. There's no real "world" for Massive Darkness, and I wonder what the designers had in mind as a backdrop setting.

Where Sylvan is a male counterpart to Sybil, Valerie is a feminine version of Sicarius, whom I painted with the KS extra heroes. It was fun enough to paint, but painting is all about the details, and the details are just goofy. She's wearing dark clothes and seems tied to the Bloodmoon Assassins, based on the recommended class. Yet, her thighs would give her away, and like Moira, she's standing in such an unheroic pose. Really, the more you look at her, the more she looks like she's about to fall over.

Victoria (front)

Victoria (back)

Victoria. Victoria. OK, I'll grant that naming things is hard. I had a D&D player who used their own name spelled backward for the one session they attended. My campaign map borrowed names from Hickman and Weiss among others.

This figure should be iconic Massive Darkness, with a flowing tattered cloak, but she has a sensible number of belt pouches for a warrior (zero). Flowing robes or capes like this can be fun to paint, although hers is monochrome. The thing that struck me as odd about this sculpt is that the sword is both large and awkwardly held. Someone with arms that big could not hold a sword out like that for very long. The more you look at it, the more you see things like the flow of the cape going as if the arm is being swung, though its not, and that walking for long in this kind of outfit would result in tripping over like Valerie. That's all right: it's a dice-chucker. Get Victoria on the table and start wiping the floor with some Goblin Archers.

What I like about the paint job is that I was able to get the two subtly different kinds of metallic that are showing in the illustration. I cannot remember at all how I did it, but I think it's a nice touch.

OK, time for the star of the show.

Hellephant (front)

Hellephant (back)

This sculpt is amazing, but painting big miniatures can be a slog. I started with a zenithal prime as usual, then I laid down grey over all the skin. I did a light ink wash over the whole thing to try to get into the cracks before going back over it with two-brush blending to add two layers of shadows. I drybrushed in highlights, and then I used more two-brush blending to add about three layers of highlights. After hours of work, it was still monochrome and looked quite a bit like it did when it was just primed! Sure, it did look better, but starting with all this grey, when the model is primed in grey, leaves it a grey blob for a long time. 

Massive Darkness' card illustration has a graphic novel feel. I think I have written before about the implications for gold. In some of my earlier models, I think I used gold paint to paint the gold areas, but the illustrations are really much more yellow. I went back to my post about painting Ostara from the Warrior Priests expansion, since that figure is almost entirely gold. I was able to produce the same effect here for the Hellephant's gold details, mixing white, lemon yellow, and metal medium, adding some grey and brown for shadowed areas. I also used a bit of brown ink wash to bring out the separation between the bracelets. Really, those three-ring bracelets are the worst part of the model, having no details at all on them. Fortunately, the eye is drawn to other, more interesting parts.

Let's have a battle

That's all for today. It felt good to get the Hellephant off my desk and to finally finish another painting project. There are a host of other monsters from Massive Darkness that I would like to paint sometime, a wonderful mix of classic D&D-style creatures and real oddball things. None of the others are primed right now. I have some mini-heavy kickstarted projects scheduled to arrive in the coming months, so I'm not sure if I should prime up a couple of my guys from my stock or see what inspires me when it arrives.

Thanks for reading!