This weekend I searched the stacks of uncompleted projects on my work bench for something interesting yet easy to knock out quickly. A Citadel AD&D Umber Hulk and Troll called out to me!
One project I am working on is painting up some iconic monster manual wackiness to use in old school style dungeon crawls. I plan to have a bestiary of beholders, flail snails, rust monsters, displacer beasts, hook horrors, and owl bears to fill this subterranean ecological niche.
Umber Hulk
This guy was obviously sculpted using the original monster manual illustration as a reference. I always imagined Umber Hulks as giant beetle-like burrowers. Though the detail of this model is quite soft, I tried to emphasize this by painting areas like an iridescent beetle carapace. This fellow might double up as a species of Ambull for 40k games too!
Troll
There is something I find unsettling about the way Trolls are represented in early D&D, their vacant black eyes, carrot noses, weird tufts of hair, and gangly limbs reminds me of a really creepy boogey-man. It's a lot more interesting than "generic muscle-bound yet over-sized orc" which seems to have become the default modern depiction.
Some classic and superbly-painted hero-fodder with which to stock your dungeons. I love the colours on the 'Hulk's carapace and you managed to capture the pit-like eyes of the original DnD Troll perfectly and it's sickly, almost luminescent skin tone suggests something that has been grubbing about in dark places all it's life. I'd love to see you tackle a Ral Partha Drakken (with a paintbrush, you understand).
ReplyDeleteThanks for stopping by Gaz. I'd enjoy slapping some paint on one too, unfortunately I don't have one, definitely a cool figure though, I like how it is covered in vegetation as if it emerged from beneath a boggy swamp. It reminds me of another interesting thing about Trolls in D&D, (at least as shown in the artwork they can look a bit like Swamp Thing) they seem somewhat plant-like or having a relationship with vines and plants- connected in some way to their regeneration ability?
DeleteExcellent painting. I think that Troll is wonderfully creepy...
ReplyDeleteBoth miniatures still have that creepy unwholesomeness that, these days seems to be gone in favour of action movie/comic book style brawn and showiness for monsters. I prefer the dark places to be scary and foreboding, rather than a flashy loot and xp arcade. Your paintjob really enhances that unsettling mood already present in the miniatures.
I couldn't agree more. While the Citadel AD&D range was charmingly comical and exaggerated in comparison to other fantasy ranges of the same era, the contemporary visual style of most fantasy miniatures and rpgs is worlds apart and in general doesn't do much for me. Reading that back to myself though makes me think of the grumpy old dudes that certainly said the exact same thing when these Citadel figures came out :)
DeleteThat troll looks disgusting! Nice job.
ReplyDeleteHaha thanks, good that's what I was going for!
DeleteI like the Umber Hulk, how'd you achieve the iridescent carapace? Looks like a wash over a metallic surface, but I'm probably wrong :)
ReplyDeleteNice.
Cheers, that's right just a blend of blue, green, and yellow ink glaze over metallic green. I have experimented with this idea before (like on my Nurgle fly champion), but this is a much larger surface area. I think the effect is interesting and pretty successful, there are many insects around here with a similar exoskeleton.
DeleteSuperb paintwork on both. AD&D Trolls are really something special. Do you know what publication the black and white Troll image is from? I'd like to find it!
ReplyDeleteThanks Zhu, I neglected to mention the influence of your article about the D&D Troll - http://realmofzhu.blogspot.com.au/2011/12/dawn-of-d-troll.html.
DeleteThe picture of the Troll is from the AD&D 2nd Edition Monstrous Compendium Appendix Volume 1. It looks like James Holloway's work, though I could be mistaken.
Hey, thanks for that!
DeleteThe reason I asked is that the pose is very reminiscent of the first Citadel Miniature Troll, but the 2nd Edition AD&D Monsterous Compendium would be too late for it to have been copied.