Swine Cursed 1: The Gremlin-Pig Lycanthrope

Werewolves scared me as a kid.  I didn't need to see An American Werewolf in London in theaters as a kid because the commercials alone kept me up at night.  I was only ten when it came out, so I'm sure an analyst would point out it was all my fear of the inevitability of adulthood.  Or perhaps more accurately, the dread of puberty.

But when I think on it, the real scare was always the loss of control over your body.  Disease doesn't tap that fear so much as the loss of your mental capacities to control your body, your actions, your words -- even your thoughts. In a minute, your mind has kicked out your personality like a bad renter. Or worse yet some small subconscious flaw has back-doored an outside influence to wrest command of the entire ship.

It sort of compliments the imitator fear in that you fit right into the new world that the Body Snatchers built without your conscious acknowledgment.

You secretly wanted this.  That's why the lycanthrope imprint took hold.

That said, the Swine-Cursed isn't a scary figure but an homage to the trope with a wink. Instead of man-into-beast, we have gremlin-into-beast. At first glance, there's a fun juxtaposition that's a send-up of the werewolf. The gremlin of folklore engages in subtle mischief, causing things that work to malfunction. Whereas the swine is represents consumption gone wrong, or as Bricktop would say -- is as "greedy as a pig".

Of course, in Malifaux there's more in kind between gremlins and pigs. Malifaux gremlins are more reckless to the point of no self-preservation. And Malifaux pigs charge into gobble up anything that gets to close to them.  So I see it more as the "imprint took hold" idea.

As to the minis, I like this one particular pose of the standing figure. It's the classic werewolf howl stance.   I see the color scheme in mid-transformation between gremlin and pig which I figured would be a fun challenge to get both tones right, especially since green and pink don't blend well.

Above all I wanted to avoid making them look like a boar lycanthrope.  For the uninitiated, that's an old D&D monster called wereboar.  World of Warcraft has a similar looking creature called a quillboar.  Both are all brown and red earth-tones.

Swine-Cursed Color Scheme

• Gremlin Skin - Base: Reaper Fair Skin and Worn Olive, Wash: Reaper Worn Olive, Highlight: Reaper Moldy Skin 
• Pig Skin - Base for Main Skintone: Reaper Maiden Flesh mixed with Entrail Pink then a thin wash of Maiden Flesh overtop
• Transition from Gremlin to Pig - Heavy glazes of Reaper Maiden Flesh between the two
• Overalls -  Heavy Glaze of Sky Blue (I changed this later on though to Reaper HD Golden Brown and Delta Ceramcoat Autumn Brown)

Unfortunately, I forgot to take initial coat pictures.  But it was white primer, black paint wash for separation and some base coats as listed above.

I decided to make the transformation to go from the upper extremities inward.  The arms and face were the most distorted and pig-like with a pink tone, while the torso and legs were gremlin with a green tone.  But while the face was fine - the arms came off mismatched, not transitional.  It looked as an action figure had the wrong arms popped in, complete with demarcation gap. 

So I pulled the gremlin green skin tone further down the shoulder and onto the bicep.  That fixed the action figure problem.  I put this figure down for a few days and would walk past it every now and again...

... and I still didn't like what I saw.  The blue color overalls clashed with the other colors on the figure.  So it was time to change it to brown. 

The overall result was... okay.  I don't think I used enough colors here.  But I learned a lot about undercoating and heavy glazes as a result of this (the main lesson: actually use an undercoat on a figure with a transition scheme *facepalm*).  

So... less a successful paint job than a successful painting experience.