Doctor Carnivean's Pact of Infernal Darkness

A bunch of people in Ordo-Ineptus are doing the Pledge, that is posting how many miniatures they paint vs. how many they bought in their signature page.  I'm doing it too, but I never call anything something normal sounding like "the Pledge" when I can call it "Dr. Carnivean's Pact of Infernal Darkness". I'm also going to try and post pics of everything I paint on this thread.

January 15th
These were all painted for the House on Blackbark Ridge game I had planned on doing this past Saturday but had to postpone.  These were all of the player character models, and were all painted in a marathon session from about 3:30PM to 12:30AM

Minja the Swift - this character is a weretiger.  I went with an Indian theme for her and did the tiger colors for the clothing because I figured 'why not?'  The miniature was a Reaper female monk. I took the staff out of her right hand and made the dagger

Malvina - red mage of Hazlan. Was a Reaper mage from the Pathfinder line.  I chopped up her head and gave her a bald look so I could do the tattooed head that wizards of Hazlan have.

 

Camilla Bertrand - alchemist and scholar. She was originally a Reaper huckster from the Deadlands line. I sculpted the bag and the right side of the skirt (she had been showing some leg) and added the pistol where she had been holding cards. Would like to go back and touch up the pistol at some point.

Solange - basically a voodoo queen type. Started with Reaper's zombie master and she was almost completely nude so I had to sculpt some clothes on her - the shirt and skirt are both sculpted. I like the way she came out, though I'd like to go back touch up the braceletes and necklaces sometime.   I was running out of time at that point.

Ellywick Littlelaughs - Originally a Reaper female gnome thief. The only modification I did was giving her cloth instead the chainmail the mini originally had.

Sister Jocelyn - Nun with a bullwhip. Need I say more?  Been watching American Horror Story and wanted to do a nun character. Started with a Reaper battle nun that had swords in each hand. Cut off the swords and added the whip put a holy symbol in the other hand, then gave her the full skirt. Her robes were the very last thing I painted at 12:30 am and I just wanted to be done!  I'm definitely doing a touch up before the game.

 

Aldea Darkmoor - The only one I didn't have to modify at all. She was a female anti-paladin from Reaper.

January 27th

January 28th

February 3rd

 

February 4th

 

 Little background here, since the Beast has been stalking about my campaign world for the better part of 20 years now.

I created the character for a Ravenloft scenario I wrote for the Dire Consequences gaming convention way back in 1996. The scenario was called "The Beast of Blackbark Ridge" and involved a killer who always struck on nights of the full moon in the Blackbark Ridge community. The inspiration for the look had come from a story in Batman comics where the Scarecrow was sending gift wrapped boxes to random citizens of Gotham (it was around the holidays). The boxes contained a death's head mask, which was coated with one of his chemicals that basically made the person go nuts. They would then don the mask and start committing random acts of violence.

At the end of the scenario I wrote, the Beast is revealed to be a supernatural monster acting as copycat killer by donning the clothing and mask used by the original killer, who had been dead for years. He is destroyed at the end of the story. The nice thing about masked killers in horror stories is that anyone else can pick up the mask and continue on where the last guy left off, so the Beast has continued to pop up here and there in my stories over the years since.

In 2002, when I started using miniatures in my campaigns, I made a mini for the Beast by converting a Heroclix Joker figure.


 

It was servicable at the time, but I was never really happy with it, and so had intended for his latest appearance in the House on Blackbark Ridge game I was working on to sculpt a new one from scratch, since my sculpting projects had become more ambitious in the decade since I last took a crack at him.

Here's the finished product.



 I'm pretty happy with how he came out. I gave him a maroon shirt and yellow gloves (nod to Stephen King's Storm of the Century) to give him a little color. The one downside to me sculpting from scratch is that, while I can get exactly the look I want, there isn't a whole lot I can do with the painting, because I'm just not near as talented at sculpting as the people who do it for a living, and so the details just aren't there. With stuff like the Masters of the Universe guys I've been working on, that classic He-Man musculature and the fur loincloths leave some pretty good opportunities for painting them up nice, but here there just wasn't a lot of that, so ultimately I had to kind of make a choice between having the exact look for the mini that I have in my head, or having the kind of paint job I can do with a Malifaux or GW mini.
Still, like I said, I'm happy with how he came out, and who knows, in another ten years, perhaps the Beast will rise once again in newer, better sculpted incarnation

 

March 2nd

More denizens of the House on Blackbark Ridge have been completed.  When creating the backstory for a haunted house in any kind of gaming medium, in order to have a lot of undead inhabitants with which to torment the heroes, you always have to have the obligatory procession of dumbasses who decide to live in the house after the first half dozen residents have been met horrible ends.  And so with that, let the pants on head parade begin!

First up (not in chronological order, but the order in which they got painted) are Ares the Ram and his band of thieves who had the awesome idea to have their hideout in a place everyone thought was haunted because, hey, it worked for the thieves in Robin Hood, Prince of Thieves.

 

Or at least it did until this happened..

 

But to be fair that happened because the Sheriff of Nottingham, having just had to act opposite the guy from Moonlighting in Die Hard, was not going to be intimidated by something as mundane as a haunted forest.

Your "ghosts" are no more substantial than your British accent, Locksley

 

So anyway, in this case unfortunately for the thieves, the house actually did turn out to be haunted, and they all went crazy and killed each other, and now they roam the halls as flesh eating ghouls.

 

I was going to represent them with a few of the many zombies I have in my horde, but then seeing Tim's Nurgle pics got me in the mood to make some new zombies, so I dove into my bitz box last week, using parts from the zombie kit along with some ghoul and empire stuff to make these guys.  It occured to me while I was building them that the zombie kit is the first modular plastic kit GW put out for WFB and the oldest still in print (I think it came out in 1998). The other two that came out that year were the clanrats and chaos warriors, and both of those have been retired. After that I think the next oldest are the Empire free company that were recycled from the Mordheim boxed set. Both are probably still around just because they're such great kits with so many uses.

Since these guys all slaughtered one another, I want to have the cause of death incorporated into the models, to show how violently they died. I went for the gruesome and borderline absurd, with huge warhammers sticking out of people's heads and a guy with long spears sticking out of his chest. I was thinking about the movie Stardust where the princes were all killing each other off and then their ghosts were walking around with axes in their heads and stuff.

 

April 13th

 

Finished my insert bases for the black ork unit in my Ghost's N Goblins army

 

And here's the full unit with the two characters that are going to be in there.

 

May 21st

Wow, it's been over a month since I've actually finished anything, and really over two months since I've finished something that was an actual miniature rather than a scenic element on a base.  I know I have been doing a lot of painting though, it's just been that I'm kind of painting a bunch of stuff at once and these are the first that actually got to a completed stage.

Anyway, here they are, the Skaven poison wind globadiers.

I've been working on rat ogres and a huge plague monk unit at the same time, and I'm hoping at least one of those two units is completed by next week.