Minis
Return of the Old Gods
by
A while back, I was introduced to the game The Doom That Came To Atlantic City. The game itself is fun — it plays like a kind of reverse Monopoly, where you rampage around destroying houses to open gates to the nether realms — but more importantly for my purposes, it came with a set of awesome figures as playing pieces. They’re based on art by Lee Moyer and sculpted by Paul Komoda. I knew I wanted to paint them immediately, and fortunately soon after one of my friends bought a copy of the game.
Taking decent pictures of minis with my little point-and-shoot is bear, and these are just about at the edge of my ability to paint, but I was at least reasonably happy with how the set turned out. Let’s do the roll call!
Great Cthulhu comes first, naturally. His paint job was pretty straightforward — just basecoat, wash, drybrush, and a little touchup on the highlights, and a similar process for his base. I still don’t quite have the hang of painting gemstones though.
Yog-Sothoth, The Lurker at the Threshold, was a bit of a puzzle. It’d be easy for him to end up as just a purple blob, which isn’t that interesting. I thought about doing him as soap-bubble spheres, but my painting skills aren’t up to that, so I decided to stick closer to Lee’s art which shows him as purple, and work on my manual highlighting technique. Still getting there.
Shub-Niggurath, the Black Goat of the Woods With a Thousand Young, is a deliciously complicated figure. Just teasing out which bit is part of which creature took forever. Color-wise I thought of him as kind of a weird mish-mash of stuff, but I’m not sure it came out as well as I imagined. I might have backed off the flesh-tone in the middle a bit? Who knows!
Hastur, the King in Yellow, is very, well, yellow. I don’t paint in yellow much, just because it’s a fiddly color to work with, but I was pretty happy with how the new GW yellow wash worked. Mixing in some golds and oranges seems to have worked as well. Trying again for a gem-like thing on his sphere, not sure it really worked. One downside to the yellow is the bright light makes it look weird and breaks up the blending.
Tsathoggua, the Sleeper of N’Kai, was also pretty straightforward, since so much of his body is textured. The art actually shows him as light purple, but I thought he’d be too close to Yog that way, so I did him as brown-furred. A bunch of blending back and forth until it looked okay, basically.
Ithaqua the Wind-Walker was also straight-forward, because he looks very similar to some of the Cryx (undead) models I did for a Warmachine army. I used my standard zombie-skin mix (purple and green washes for a mottled look) and a blue-and-green drybrush on the swirling winds to make them look eldritch.
Azathoth, the Daemon Sultan, came out a little weird. I really like how the color combination ended up, the blue and red, but the underlying parts came out too dark, so the highlights look like they’re “floating”, especially with the relatively light chitin. If I were doing it against I’d use a light blue undercoat and less wash.
Nyarlathotep, the Crawling Chaos, was a ton of fun to paint but an absolute pain to photograph. Something about his downward-looking face makes him really hard to get in focus. This is probably my favorite figure, I love the asymmetry and the contrast between the smooth and weird-looking parts of his figure. The blue and green color scheme worked better than I expected with the gold.
The gang’s all here!
