Otherworld D&D Stone Giant

Here is one of my favorite figures in my D&D collection, an Otherworld stone giant sculpted by Paul Muller.  I'm also introducing a new style of photos for the D&D figures, with more like these to come.

In Strides the Stone Giant

Otherworld D&D Stone Giant

Otherworld D&D Stone Giant

After basing, I primed the figure with black, gray and white Dupli-Color, then painted the figure with many washes before finishing with highlights and black lining. A stone giant should be camouflaged in his native surrounding, and so I used a strictly minimal palette. I let the white of the primer show through. I think you can see the texture of the primer and washes in the high-res pics and it strengthens the stone effect. The result is a good example of a figure that please me more than most in my collection, but that is unlikely to win a prize.

Otherworld D&D Stone Giant

Otherworld D&D Stone Giant

Otherworld D&D Stone Giant

This iconic sculpt is among my favorite of all time done in the D&D vein. Any who have thumbed the original Monster Manual will recognize this as being done after Dave Trampier's stone giant piece in that book.

Dungeon Dwellers Fire Giant

Today I get to show you one of my favorite miniatures from my collection.

Manufacturer: Heritage USA
Line: Dungeon Dwellers
Figure: 1231 Fire Giant
Release date: 1979
Date painted: 2014

The Dungeon Dwellers line has a special place in the history of D&D, and lately I've been adding a few figures here and there to my Dungeon Dwellers collection (which is respectable at this point but far from comprehensive). While we Dungeon Dwellers fans can admit the figures that make up the line tend toward the crude or primitive end of the miniatures spectrum, this figure is an unqualified success and a real gem in the line as far as I'm concerned and rivaled only by the Asmodeus and Orcus figures. Here the art brut sculpting style works to advantage, giving the figure a savage, menacing presence. Like those two the fire giant captures the essence of the creature described in the monster manual as well as the factual details. However, the expression and dynamic pose of the fire giant lend it more power than the other two. The expression on this figure is fantastic. The angry, googly eyes, the gritted teeth, the fiery beard, all of it. Honestly it's one of my all-time favorite D&D figures in my collection and amongst fire giant miniatures I think it perhaps second only to that by Paul Muller for Otherworld (got it and will get to it eventually). It's been a few years now over which I have gotten him out every now and then and looked forward to doing him justice with paint.

I should say somewhere, this being as good a place as any, that this a considerable chunk of lead. Hailing from an era where sculptors would skimp on giants this is fully up to Monster Manual spec in terms of dimensions, and is one of few fire giants from the original years of D&D figures whose sculptor took to heart the part about them being "very broad (about 6' at the shoulders), looking almost like dwarves."

Does anyone know who sculpted it, BTW?

I got it for literally two bucks at a flea market a few years back, though it was missing the sword and the I'd say I invested about what a complete one is worth in energy fabricating a new one from brass sheet and brown/green stuff. Later I saw a complete, pristine-looking one for $22 buy it now on Ebay and had to fight the impulse to pick up a spare. I regret a bit now that I didn't get it but hopefully it found a good home. The sword is carefully based on actual measurements I took from a photograph of a complete figure, though mine turned out a millimeter longer and a bit wider. It's also of uniform width where the original is narrower at the base and it flanges at he point, and the decoration is a bit different.

If you compare the unpainted above with the painted below you'll also see I added gauntlets between the times the pictures were taken. The figure is so cool I wanted to keep it as original as possible, but on the other hand this guy doesn't look like a fool, and it'd be foolish to be armored up like that and leave your hands exposed right at the level where humans tend to stab and slash. The style of the figure is obviously fairly stylized, abstract, cartoon-like, what have you, and I wanted to find a way to abstract the gauntlet concept, but I just couldn't figure out how to do it and wound up sculpting each overlapping plate distinctly. Something of a chore (for a one-off) as I believe there are six plates per finger plus several more to cover the hand.

There was also what looked like an empty socket in the knife hilt so I dropped in another gem.

In the pics above you can spot how I polished it with a brass brush in the dremel to make the armor smooth. The original surface was a little rough and would have dulled the effect of any metallic paint applied over it.

And here it is painted.

Obviously, when it comes to painting, the focal point is the face set off by the beard, and these need to be just right. The beard has to be a burst of flame around the ebony face, with smoldering red eyes. After a red basecoat on the beard I undercoated most it with dozens of coats of white to get it has white as humanly possible, then many coats bringing it up to yellow, and then alternating glazes and highlights until it was as bright as I thought I could get it. Same with the eyes.

The face, meanwhile has no highlights at all. It's pure black. Many painters feel they need to highlight black the way they do other colors, and especially on creatures that are to have black flesh, like fire giants and drow, the painted result is usually gray, purple or blue. But that's not how black flesh works. Flesh has small, specular highlights that are only readily apparent under certain conditions. Meanwhile, I'm in control of the actual reflectiveness of the surface of the miniature through the use of varnishes, and I trusted that when I was done the flesh would produce it's own natural highlights.

I couldn't be happier with the results and am glad I fought down the urge to highlight. This was a nice trial run in the lead up to an encounter group of drow, which whose flesh I'll also leave pure black. Generally speaking I think painters should consider how glossy or matt the surface represented on the particular thing being painted and vary their highlighting scheme accordingly. As for the varnishes on this one, after the standard coats of "matte" Rust-oleum Ultra Cover clear (actually satin) and Testors Dullcoat I went back to brush the gems with Testors gloss-coat. I was being conservative and thinned the gloss a little, and the result was a bit more conservative than I was aiming for, even after ~ten coats, but eventually I built up a pretty good lustre. Next time I might try it full strength.

A brief word on the gemstones. They are done in the style Mike McVey popularized in the nineties and which has become the standard, but I try never to lose sight of the fact I'm representing an actual object, and I always use reference. The tendency with gem stones is to push the contrast, so you have black at the top fading through red to white at the bottom. But this gives you an effect that looks like glass, rather than a gem, and honestly if you successfully sell it as glass it looks cheap, rather than like treasure. The ones I did have less contrast and have speckled gold at the bottom of the gem and result is something that glitters and shines but is not transparent. It's not a cut, clear stone like a ruby.

Next up here are three true giant types I've covered so far, frost, fire and hill. I've also done a verbeeg, which is a slightly lesser giant, but I'm aiming first to cover the major types in the Monster Manual before I start including the lesser types in the family photos. BTW I have the Paul Muller Otherworld stone giant about 90% done, which is also one of my favorite D&D figures of all (and hands down the best D&D stone giant full stop). The other two have been shown before, but I reworked the hill giant since I put him up.

As always, the collection can be viewed in its entirety at flickr.

Painted: Otherworld Hill Giant

Here's a figure that I just finished recently, and was languishing WIP for a number of months.

Right out of the Monster Manual, eh wot?

Manufacturer: Otherworld
Line: Giants
Figure: Hill Giant
Base markings: none
Release date: 2007?
Sculptor: Paul Muller
Date painted: 2013

Painting

This one was done using the zenithal under-painting technique, primed dark gray and then white from the top. The skin was done much the same as I did for the verbeeg shared earlier. I starting with a number of coats of a light flesh tone (GW Elf Flesh) and then washes of progressively darker shades (a mix of GW and P3 flesh tones like Bronzed Flesh, Khardic Flesh, Idrian Flesh) and then many glaze layers of mixed brown (Snakebite Leather, Bestial Brown, etc), red and yellow inks. The knees, knuckles, lips, etc were glazed with red paint. Then highlights, rinse and repeat.

The hairs were drawn individually, and turned out a lot better than the graphite technique I tried on the minotaur. I also stuck to much more vibrant flesh tones with the Hill Giant, focusing on depth and punch. This feel-as-you-go method is typical of me. It took some effort here, and there were a number of points where I put the figure down thinking it was glowing to satisfaction and came back later thinking it was not yellow or red enough, not rich enough, not bright enough, and I'd go back in. I wanted it to look very ruddy, per the sense I get reading the Monster Manual description.

A couple more notes. The eyes are red-rimmed per the Monster Manual description, and you might spot a bit of shine as I haven't varnished it yet. Having some warm weather already here so may do a round of priming and varnishing soon.

In the end I'm pretty satisfied with this one. The flesh is done to competition standard, but like my Warpwolf I don't think of it as a real competition or coolminiornot contender because of lack of bells and whistles, lack of opportunities for technical wizardry beyond the depth and realism of the flesh, no foot on rock, etc. With miniatures painting especially, though, some of us are bound to come to a point where we have to decide whether to try to please others or ourselves.

As usual the collection can be viewed in its entirety at flickr.

From the Frozen North

Painted: Frost Giant

Usually I'm several years behind showing figures I've painted. This one, however, I painted a month ago. I should have been working on my hobgoblins, which my plan shows come next, but one-off monsters like this giant sometimes easier to fit in and less stressful after a day's work at the office.

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Manufacturer: Ral Partha
Line: Personalities and Things that go Bump in the Night
Figure: 01-057 Frost Giant
Base Markings: RAL PARTHA 1977
Release date: 1977
Sculptor: Tom Meier
Date painted: 2013

Painting

There are a couple canonical variations of frost giant skin and hair colors described in the Monster Manual and went with blue hair and "dead white" skin. I primed this figure in Dupli-Color dark gray, gave it a touch up in a similar shade of paint to get all the crevices and then primed again in white before painting. I did the fur as a series of washes over the light gray primer layer and then when back in with drybrushing and painted highlights. For the hair and the frost effect on the base I used a shimmery blue paint from the Ral Partha AD&D range which has miraculously survived the past few decades perfectly intact, one of only two such from a set of six or eight colors. I also glazed parts of the girdle over and mixed with metallic paint for a cold sky/earth reflection. I'm really happy with how these effects turned out. I painted the eyes black with pin-prick white reflections but might go back and paint them blue to match the canon. Overall, though I did put in some shimmering effects and spent a bit of time polishing up the girdle, I was trying not to get too fancy and to get this painted up fairly quickly.
As always, the collection can be viewed in its entirety at flickr.

Painted: Grenadier Giant (Verbeeg)

Here's another of the monsters I started off the blog with given its own little showcase. I'm quite fond of this giant sculpted by Grenadier boss man Andrew Chernak in 1984. Chernak had been sculpting for a number of years at this point and though his figs had always had a lot of character, I feel in his post-AD&D-contract Fantasy Lords series, for which this giant was sculpted, shows new-found technical skill. Faces are a real sticking point with me and Chernak not only gets the emotion right but the facial anatomy is bang on in a way few others can claim. The only critical comment I have for this figure is with regard to the underdeveloped upper body, but that's a very common trait amongst figures from this age. Not sure why no barrel-chested giants as it's not like material cost was a factor back in the day.

I have a number of these Chernak giants and was going to use them as hill giants, which is what Grenadier calls them. But I've since gone with the Otherworld hill giant for full-blood Hill Giants (how can one say no to such a figure as that OW hill giant, who looks to have just strode of the page of the Monster Manual), and the Chernak ones are now Verbeegs (see Monster Manual II). This is a brilliant solution in my opinion. The name verbeeg is a crappy one, imo, and I really hope they aren't called verbeeg as in "very big," but once you see the verbeeg is simply a smarter, more human-proportioned giant somewhere between hill giant and ogre in stature, you'll probably agree it fits a great purpose, even if only to the miniatures collector divvying out which miniature to which particular species. But they also have some utility game-wise as I can use them with ogres or hill giants to modulate those encounters as well as by themselves. PCs can also face off against verbeegs earlier in the campaign than hill giants, which is a bigger advantage than it may seem given how many sessions are spent attaining each level. And this way I can have giants running around and then still scare the pants of the party by dropping the full blooded hill giant.

Oh, and I asked last post whether it would be better to use the catalog title or the monster type I plan to use figures for as the post title when the two differ. It seems to me that as I work through the Monster Manual in attempts to paint them all it's more helpful in the long run for me and you if I use the role I'm using the figs for in the game as the title.

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Manufacturer: Grenadier
Line: Fantasy Lords, first series
Catalog title: Hill Giant
Catalog #: 119
Base marking: M49 1984
Release date: 1984
Sculptor: Andrew Chernak
Date painted: 2009

Just a very brief word on painting the figure. Normally I prime black or prime black and mist gray or tan. Every now and then I try white again and generally regret it as it's almost always a lot more work. This figure was a rare case where I primed white and everything went right. I did it white to help get a richness to the fleshtones, and I'm very happy with the result. A pretty old school technique was used here starting with a light base (GW Elf Flesh), shading to brown, and glazing (not washing) with GW Flesh Wash. Then ruddy cheeks, nose and knees to really sell it.

Btw, if you want to see another painter's take on this fig check out this version shown on the Old School Miniatures Bulletin blog.