Kingdom Death Monster Painting Progress...

 

Since receiving my copy of KDM, I've been slowly plugging away at the minis within, and have made a bit of progress in the last week or two!  I figured that now, with a few models completed, I'd have enough to warrant an update post.  One of things I have noticed as a whole about the minis, is that with even while rushing, and with the minimalist of effort as I have been doing, they paint up rather quickly, and (imo) with some pretty decent results!  I'll present these in the order they were completed in, starting with the first monster, the White Lion....

 As I mentioned before, KDM is definitely a mature game, with blood, guts,  and boobs everywhere!  As such, to really emphasize that dark, gory aspect, I'm going really heavy with the gore.  In the story, he ambushes the newly awaken survivors and starts ripping people to shreds, which I wanted to represent.  Likewise, I really wanted to give him some crazy, glowing red eyes, just to move him even further away from looking like your average day lion...





Next are the 4 survivors, the ones that have awoken, naked and on a ground covered in stone faces.  These are the survivors that managed to scramble away from the White Lion and, managing to find a broken shard of one of the stone faces, must now take on the ambushing beast or die like the others.  In the book, each survivor has a specific look and hair color, which I stuck with.  As with the lion, these guys also painted up fairly quickly and easily.  There was a little bit of an issue with seams on a few of the models, that I did my best to hide, but it did come out a little bit rougher than I would have liked.  Really, anytime I filled a seam, or fixed a gap, you could easily tell.  Moving forward, I think I'll just let the seams stay.  My eye is much more likely to NOT notice and ignore a seam, than it would a rough filled in patch in an otherwise smooth model.  I can't sculpt to save my life, and apparently even filling in gaps can be troublesome when a smooth, seamless finish is needed.

Next up is the Screaming Antelope, and I looked towards his artwork for inspiration on how to paint him up.  This time around, I did not do any gap/seam filling, and I think he looks fine, and any issues should be easily ignored on the tabletop.  I timed myself for this one, and start-to-finish, the whole process took me just an hour to complete him in a single sitting.  So yeah, I'm pretty pleased with results of an hour's work!  Once again, I kept to the "gore theme" as seem by his stomach.  It's also hard to tell, but there are actually tiny, baby hands reaching out from various parts of his skin around the open section!

Finally, the Butcher, and he looks menacing imo!  From what I can tell form the art, he likes to take the lanterns, which I assume is supposed to represent a survivor's soul, and carefully peels off the survivor's faces to wrap around the still-lit lanterns on his back.  (Did I mention KDM was graphic?!?)  For him, I started out with the basic, silver armor, and felt it too plain.  I then added some red ink, but felt it turned out too pink!  (hard to look menacing in pink)  Then, in the hopes of bringing it back to the original, darker red, I started doing a couple of other layers of wash.  The end result was the darker, reddish, brass color you see.  It was bit of a happy accident, but I'm pleased with how he came out.



... and there you have it!  Looking at the pics, I may go back into the Antelope and Butcher and some blood drips to the ground beneath the Antelopes stomach and the butcher's weapons, much like I did with the Lion.  Currently still on my desk, I have: The King's Man, The Hand, The Watcher, and the Phoenix to finish... and I still haven't started in on the rest of the survivors in the various armors from core set just yet!  I'm really trying to decide if I should just randomly put some of them together, or go through the trouble of magnetizing components to do a "mix and match".  One of the problems I see with the "mix and match" scenario is that I tend to mix colors when painting skin tones as I do not really care for most of the "out of the bottle" options I've used in the past, which could create some odd results when arms and torsos don't match.

What do you guys think moving forward?  Just pre-assemble several survivors in a mix of gear, or go all out with magnets?

-WuhSawBe-

**PS: Shameless plug, don't forget to follow me on twitter!  I tend to post pictures as I complete stuff, or as I progress on things, thus giving twitter followers a bit of a "first peek" at what is coming ahead...