Mysterious Effigy: It's Own Creepy Thing

My buddies and I were talking about what influenced early D&D.  Aside from the well-documented progression out of wargaming (i.e., Chainmail), I'd always assumed it drew from Tolkien.  It's easy to trace the creative leap from playing out big battles into a deeper but smaller skirmish with the key leaders a la Lord of the Rings's Fellowship.  Thus much of the Tolkien-esque fantasy tropes littered through 1e D&D: humans, elves, dwarves, rangers, wizards and quests.

And of course, don't forget the hobbits halflings.

But I'm wrong in thinking it's all JRR.  An old article was dug up where co-creator Gary Gygax firmly put his foot down that Tolkien was far from the sole inspiration.  He waxes poetic about the different fantasy writers with a causal nod to mythology -- promoting that D&D is more akin to multiple other heroic fantasies than just one source.

Ruminating in the article, my JRR position was blindly reductive.  Flaming swords and thrown hammers that return to you.  The Minotaur and The Golem. Carpet of Flying. Baba Yaga's Hut. The pop-culturized Monk. Wishes. Dungeonland (!). The breadth of references is obvious.

But what D&D became is more than just a collection of multiple mythos, fairy tales, and pulpy medieval tropes.  In the creative process of including everything, you also end up making something new:

1. a place where it all exists
2. original creatures that live among known references

And as much as I am fascinated with the world of the collective, I have a special place in my heart for the original things - the new creations that become the short hand for the big picture.

This leads me to the Mysterious Effigy... 

The 1e sculpt was clearly just an effigy.

The 2e sculpt is less so.  You could set the 1e version on fire at a protest.  Not so much with the updated version.

At first blush, it appears to be leaning in on the Neverborn mimic aesthetic -- with the mask coming off like the changeling...

... Except it has spider legs. So I thought this might be reference to Arachne. Or maybe a re-interpreted drider.

... Except it doesn't have spider eyes nor human eyes. It has a nightmarish sideways human eyes.

So the Mysterious Effigy - much like the mimics and the wolf-in-sheep's-clothing - is it's own thing.

As to painting it, I originally wanted to imitate a dress pattern I saw Adam Huenecke had done on Molly.  But the Mysterious Effigy sculpt is a lot busier and a lot smaller, and I decided the floral pattern wouldn't work.

Eventually I decided on a yellow dress with a simple square pattern from 1827.


Mysterious Effigy Scheme

• Skin - Wood Lines: FolkArt Walnut Brown, Undertone Base: Reaper HD Ashen Brown, Shadow (Wash): Dusky Skin, Main Base: Heavy Glaze of FolkArt Mushroom and Barn Wood, Highlights:
• Dress - Undertone Base: Tanned Skin, Main Base: Heavy Glaze of FolkArt Ochre Yellow, Shadow (Wash): Tanned Skin, Highlights: FolkArt Sunflower and ButterCup
• Arm Cuffs - Base: Apple Barrel Antique White, Shadow (Wash): Vallejo Khaki, Highlights: Reaper Misty Grey
• Eyes - Base: Apple Barrel Antique White, Shadow (Wash): Cinnamon, Highlights: Reaper HD Entrail Pink, Outlining (wash): Black and Reaper Dusky Skin, Gleam Highlight: White
• Knife - Base: Vallejo Cold Grey, Shadow (Wash): Vallejo Black, Highlights: Reaper Misty Grey
• Hair- Base: Reaper HD Military Grey, Shadow (Wash): Black, Highlights: Reaper Grey Triad
• Masks - Undertone Base: Ceramcoat Blue Heaven, Base: Reaper Fair Skin, Shadow (Wash): Reaper Tanned Skin, Highlights: Reaper Fair Highlight
• Teeth - Base: Vallejo Khaki, Apple Barrel Antique White, FolkArt Parchment

Getting the base right to look like the Terraclips Building Floors.

First a white prime and some glue work after I snapped off the arm holding the mask (&?@!*!)

First Coats

Eyes - Base: Apple Barrel Antique White, Shadow (Wash): Cinnamon, Highlights: Reaper HD Entrail Pink

Outlining (wash): Black and Reaper Dusky Skin, Skin clean up where Dusky Skin was too dark: FolkArt Barn Wood,  Gleam Highlight: White

There's a process I go through when doing patterns.
I got the upper part of the dress down fast enough that I got a little cocky.

What follows next are moments when you realize you did it right...

...when you realize you did it totally wrong...

...and ones where you start and then lose confidence mid-way through that it's going in the right direction.

References always help back up when you are second-guessing.  A simple google of checkered drapes gave me a great reference of where lines are supposed to go when a hem is pinched on the ends.

But the biggest lessons learned... When painting lines on a yellow base color, first draw it out in a lighter color that the final darker color. I would get a line down in a dark brown (Reaper Dark Skin) then realize it was off and have to use multiple layers of Ochre Yellow to undo it. 

Eventually I decided to use Reaper HD Concrete Grey to ease any mistakes. 

And holy smack, did using that color make this fix simpler.  Or at least it boosted my confidence in drawing in the horizontal lines to finish the cross patterns.  There were very few fixes at this point.

Some light skin tone glazes on the masks and I was left with a super creepy mini that I felt rewarded with spending the extra time to nail the smaller details.

Bloodwretches: Neverborn Mid-Transformation

My wife is petrified of asylums.  We started watching American Horror Story: Asylum. At the end of the first episode, a reporter writing an expose is admitted involuntarily as a patient. We never saw another, it had tapped a primal fear of hers so strongly: that you would be declared insane and locked away to lose all agency over yourself.

Meanwhile the guards and the doctors get to do whatever they want...

The history of Victorian asylums stoke those fears, and the Malifaux starter set definitely plays upon them.  It takes place in an asylum run by a butcher and filled with orderlies telling you to quiet down with a syringe behind their backs.

That's why I see these bloodwretches as inadvertent rebels, fighting from the inside.  Like a molotov cocktail thrown at prison.  It helps that in M2E, they are some of the best models in the set.

When most people painted these models, they painted them as demons.  But as evidenced from the one that has one horn larger than the other, I see them as in the middle of the Human-to-Neverborn process.  These are the only models in the group I know that show this.  So an interesting challenge.

Having learned from the Swine Cursed I wanted to try the undercoat of darker colors and then do a heavy glaze of flesh color on top.

Bloodwretches Color Scheme

• Skin:  Reaper Tanned Skin blended into Dusky Skin then blended into Reaper Reaper HD Twilight Purple as a base. Then a heavy glaze of the Reaper Caucasian fleshtones
• Asylum Clothes:  Base: FolkArt Camel 
• Horns:  Base: Reaper Cloudy Grey, Shadow (Wash): Reaper Cloudy Grey, Highlights: FolkArt Mushroom 

I used the Swine-Cursed approach to the transformation: the transformation and palette changes are in the extremities while the torse and core keep the "normal" colors.

• On the left figure, you can see what the pre-glaze looks like.  Dark but strong colors. The transition between the Caucasian flesh tone to the purple looks a little muddy
• On the right figure, I already applied the first glaze of Reaper HD Caucasian Skin to the skin. Those strong colors are now a lot more muted, and the transition looks smoother.

Next was the clothes.  Keeping the clothes in neutral colors helps the focus stay on the skin.

Here's a pic of the "Bloodwretch 1" with the Caucasian Skin glaze

A few wrap up details like buttons and finger nails.

Final notes: I don't think these final pictures get the subtler shifts I got in the skin tones.  And the black hair on the first one looks rougher than I would like.  But I was pleased with the final results.  Proud to put on a table, not in a competition.

Angel Eyes: If your eyes are so angelic...

...then why is your freaking eye socket so small?

Angel Eyes has to have the smallest eyes on a model.  Or maybe it just feels that way because her name is Angel Eyes, so everyone will be looking at the eyes on your model.  That means you have to pay attention to getting her eyes juuuuuuuuust right.  (Or at least decent to look at.)

So before I dig in to the color scheme... I want to share how I learned to paint eyes.  It's the great white whale of mini painting. There was a really great article on Reaper's website about how to paint eyes that I grew to love.  The key approach: start with the eyes first.

Then Reaper took down The Craft section of the forum where the article resided. It's a shame because the article was written in a reassuring way - the author admitted each shot below was preceded by two screw-ups.  

That said, I did manage to find the pictures related to the article. As to the steps, however, I can only really remember the bullet-level basics.

Step 1: After priming, paint the white of the eye.  Use an off-white color.  Don't worry about getting all around the eye.

Step 2: Paint the Eyeball. Move the brush in a straight line up and down.  Again, don't worry if you go outside the perimeter of the eyeball.

Step 3: Black all around the outside of the eyeball area. Cover up any of the mistakes outside the eye area.

Step 4: Paint the face with your basecoat. Start far away from the eye and slowly work towards the eye - essentially shrinking the black area.  Try to leave a black circle / ring around the eyeball.

Most of this post is around the trials of trying to get the eye right.

Angel Eyes Color Scheme 

Shooting for cool color schemes as opposed to warm color schemes

• Skin:  Reapers Dusky Skin with Reaper Gem Purple as a base with an heavy glaze of the Reaper Caucasian fleshtones
• Cloak: FolkArt Thunder Blue - base; FolkArt Night Sky - wash; Reaper Gem Purple - shadow under tones
• Vest: Base - Worn Olive; Wash - Olive Drab; Overtone Shadow - Apple Barrel Wedgewood Green 
• Scarf and Pants:  Base - Reaper Concrete Grey
• Bands: Base - Worn Olive
• Boots:  Base - Vallejo Black with Reaper Cloudy Grey and FolkArt Charcoal Grey highlights

First things first.  The boots on this model are so thin, there's no way you're going to get a pin in there.  So I cheated and did it on the cloak.

So I had the eyes looking just right.  And then I went back for more detail.  I hate when I do that.

So I had to go back and fix it.  Like 3-4 times.  Eventually with my magnifiers on I saw I got the dot in the right place.  You wouldn't think it from this.  You'd think I was trying to paint a muppet.

The red box is where the black dot for the eyeball is, not the green box.

Eventually I got it.  Here she is with the eye inn the right place.

Final thoughts: I didn't post a lot about painting Angel Eye's cloak or boots or even her skin tone (which didn't pop as much as the Scion did because she is clothed so much.  But over all I am very happy with the end result.

Scion of Black Blood: Neverborn Indigeneous

The Scion of Black Blood has a very dramatic pose. A weapon in each hand, arms spread out, chest out, wide eyes.  Puffy-chest incarnate. His M2E picture invokes the moment as the crazed fighter wanders through the fog of war out into the edge of battle, taking it all in, just before he's about to go berserk.

And then in third edition, they gave him a name.

Maurice.

Today, I wonder if the Scion has this pose because he's about to flip out that someone named the chosen heir of acid blood something more appropriate for a local British solicitor.

Anyway, I'm going to use the Indigenous color palette I set up on my post about skin tones for Malifaux's Nephilim.  (I painted him about 18 months ago before M3E decided he was half-blooded.)  To get the "peanut worm" translucence -- I chose a purple base, light wash of a deep blue shadow in the crevices and then a thin overcoat of a light but dull blue tone over everything.

As to getting the colors right his other features, I found a decent reference to a 1912 Winchester off Wikipedia (technically a little ahead of the Malifaux's alternate timeline but it still works for what he's holding).

For his horns, I wanted to avoid the typical bone color but wasn't sure what to use.  I little searching and I found a costume piece on Etsy that had a nice greyish / dull violet look. 

Maurice, the tax auditor Scion of Black Blood Color Scheme

• Skin - Undertone Base: Reaper Twilight Purple Skin, Shadow (Wash): Ceramcoat Purple Smoke, Main Base: Heavy Glaze of FolkArt Linen, Highlights: Reaper Bloodless Skin and FolkArt Parchment
• Pants -  Undertone Base: Reaper Worn Olive, Shadow (Wash): Olive Drab, Overtone: Heavy Glaze of Ceramcoat Autumn Brown
• Arm Braces and Shoes: Base: Reaper "Nut Brown"** and Orange Brown, Shadow (Wash): Heavy Wash of Ceramcoat Cinnamon
• Horns: Undertone Base: Reaper Cloudy Grey, Shadow (Wash): Reaper Cloudy Grey, Highlights: FolkArt Mushroom
• Metal Bits:  Undertone Base: Reaper Cloudy Grey, Shadow (Wash): Reaper Cloudy Grey, Overtone: Reaper Concrete Grey

** At least I think it's Nut Brown.  It's labelled as "MSP Sample" and I got it for free in a Reaper package.

Here's the first cost of Twilight Purple with a heavy glaze of Linen over the main coat.

From the top down, I could see a mistake in the eye by the nose I would have to clean up.

 First Wash

More lighter skin glaze and 1st coats on clothes.

Leather gauntlets.  Making sure to distinguish them from the pants.

1st wash on clothes and highlighting details

2nd  wash on clothes. Belt clean up and definition. My first attempt at a tattoo - using a thinned out black.  Not great.

Wood grain on gun

Final thoughts: I'm really happy with the style of this Indigenous Nephilim palette.  The overcoat method worked.  The pants could have used a little more definition and shading, but overall I'm proud to bring this one to the table.

Neverborn Skin Tones

Painting a demon seems kind of boring to me.  Sure, when I was a kid, Chernabog was ominous in Fantasia. But fantasy lines are so rife with this BBG that I now find them commonplace, much less scary.  Red skin, big horns, goat's legs, Tim Curry's voice.  Next please...

So I avoided picking up Nephilim figures from Wyrd's Malifaux line.  It was too in the vein of what I was avoiding.  I thought the nightmares from Malifaux captured my imagination more.

But my "to be painted" collection started growing bunches of these Nephilim: Nekima. Tuco. Angel Eyes. The Scion of Black Blood. The Bloodwretches.  Stuck with them, I struggled on what to use for skin tones.  Especially since each of them have a slightly different background.

So to start, I picked the most unusual part of the their biology: Black Blood.  So what would a creature that had "black blood" look like?  The closest real "Earther" counterpart creatures with purple or violet blood.   Of these the most interesting palette I saw was this picture of the sipuncula or peanut worm.  The creature is interesting because different parts have different palettes based on how the camera captured its translucence.

Having recently picked up the 2nd Edition Core Through the Breach book, I got to read up a little on the history of Malifaux.  The planet starts off with human-like people.  Eventually they got to war with their greatest enemies - the Tyrants.  To defeat them, they turn their blood black - basically a defense mechanism similar to the Alien Xenomorphs.

The lore also talks about a ritual to turn a human into a Neverborn.  From some of the stories I've read, you can tell when someone doesn't look like an indigenous Neverborn who had existed in Malifaux before the Breach opened.  As such, a transformed human can still disguise him or herself a little among other humans.

So I'm classifying them as three types of creatures: Indigenous, Once Human, Mid-Transformation.

One thing I learned from painting the warpigs: A simple two-tone color scheme can have unexpected depth by using a a deeper or darker undercoat and then a heavy glaze of a lighter color for the base coat.  Here the shadow is a third color on the undersides of the model. Final highlighting would be a white skin tone that had little-to-no red in it - probably a linen, recalling the Jen Haley tutorials.
So terms I'm using for this process are: Undercoat, Shadow (Wash), Base (Heavy Glaze).

One specific thing regarding the term "undercoat": I'm still priming white, uniform grey, or black - and THEN applying what I'm calling "undercoat".  (I recognize a prime coat is technically an undercoat, but whatever...)

So I'm breaking out skin tones in three sections:

• Indigenous (e.g., Nekima and the Scion) would have a more blue/purple skin tone than a human one.  The males have a deeper purple undercoat - Reaper HD Twilight Purple.  The females slightly brighter purple - Reaper HD Gem Purple.  Base coats will be straight Linen color.  No fleshtones - like Caucasian.
• Once Human (e.g., Tuco and Angel Eyes) may still retain a little of the human skin tone.  Reapers Dusky Skin tone might work as a undercoat base with an base of the Reaper Caucasian fleshtones, with final highlights being Linen.
• Mid-Transformation (e.g. Bloodwretches) would still retain more of that Caucasian skin tone with blends in the Once Human in the extremities - similar to the Swine-Cursed.

Doppleganger: Fear of the Imitator

This is a sharp left turn from my previous post on dogs, but it has a happy ending.  So hang in with me on this.

Last month, I was dreaming that my puppy was acting strange - almost feral - whenever she was in my peripheral vision.

A vet came to our house and said, "This is not your dog.  It's an imitation.  Right now, the imitator has taken a hold of your dog and she's like a zombie version of her former self.  The only way to get her back is to kill the thing you see before you." 

And he handed me a rock.

I braced myself, sighed, and swung the rock at her head. The blow didn't finish the job. She looked up at me, like she does in the photos my wife takes when she's at her cutest with big pleading eyes.  Except now the side of her skull was lopsided and blood was pouring out of her nose and mouth.

I dispassionately swung the rock again - as if I were performing a task.

And then I woke up... horrified at the dream but moreso at myself.  What the hell was wrong with me?  (And no, I hadn't re-watched The Thing the night before.)

My worst nightmares are always about the imitator.  

And my worst recurring nightmare is right out of "Invasion of the Body Snatchers": someone has clearly been replaced by a copy.  More people start acting strange and I become concerned. Then, everyone I confide in tells me to stop worrying... and here, eat this strange food I've never seen before.  Or drink this cup of milk with a thick mist rolling off the brim.  Or just step in this shadowed back room and relax. Or just close your eyes - we have a surprise for you (no peeking).

I had a string of nightmares like this almost every night during my first trip to Ireland.

I recognize these nightmares are rooted around change and fear of it.  I used to think it was based around the fear that those around you have flipped their moral positions.  Or everyone has started buying into some new hip philosophy that is terribly flawed, one that seeks my own death in a way that everyone else is steadfastly ignorant of.   

While these might be the root for some, I've figured out my nightmares stem from the opposite: I have changed -- or had to change -- and my psyche is straining to catch up.

The first time I pieced it together was all those years ago in Ireland.  During the trip, I became enchanted with the land, the viridity, the people, the stout. Then, the doppelganger nightmares every night. After one rather awful nightmare, I awoke with the clarity that the one who was changing was me, not my surroundings: I had adopted a slight brogue. So I forced myself to stop speaking with the lilt I was so charmed by (and cease what was probably an embarrassing cultural appropriation). I reaffirmed to myself I was a Northeastern American on travel.

The nightmares stopped.

My most recent imitator nightmare definitely revolved around the death of our previous dog, Ammi, and the transition to our new dog.   Ammi's passing left behind a void in our household, and we were lucky to locate a dog that filled it so perfectly.  But I was still struggling with moving on; it was harder on me than I wanted to admit to myself. And my kill-the-fake-puppy nightmare manifested from my lingering numbness, fresh emotional confusion and guilt. 

Numbness over the constant clean up as Ammi slowly lost control of her body and more of her personality. 

Confusion over caring so deeply for a new dog when I still cared so deeply for Ammi.

Guilt over "replacing" her, probably sooner than I was ready to admit to myself. 

Things changed but I was struggling to keep up.   But like most fears, once faced into light, the nightmares dissipate.  Once I realized the root of the issue, I came to peace with the situation.  The nightmares stopped.

So... before I move onto to facing the paint job, I want to clarify a few things

First, Spelling: Malifaux spells their creature doppleganger rather than doppelganger, which comes from the German doppelgänger.

Second, the creature definitely draws for the D&D-ish interpretation of doppelganger - a monster who has supernatural powers to imitate a person - rather than the more innocuous "twin stranger".

Third: the figure itself.  The Malifaux Doppleganger figure can be painted two ways: one as if she's holding a towel, one as if she's grabbing a newly acquired sheet of skin to be added to complete her/its masquerade.  

I've seen many done as a towel, so I chose the latter. The sheet of skin needed something to define it a bit. My inspiration to use veins was Cassandra from the first season of the rebooted Dr. Who series.

Doppleganger Color Scheme

• Skin - Main Base: Heavy Glaze of Reaper Tanned Highlight, Shadow (Wash): Reaper Tanned Skin, Highlights: Reaper Fair Skin
• Muscular Bits -  Main Base: Reaper HD Brilliant Red, Shadow (Wash): Delta Ceramcoat Cinnamon, Highlights: Reaper HD Entrail Pink
• Hair - Base: Thinned Vallejo Black, Shadow (Wash): Vallejo Black
• Red and Blue Veins - Undertone Base: Reaper HD Brilliant Red and FolkArt Solid Blue, Shadow (Wash): Heavy Glaze of Reaper Tanned Highlight
• Viscera - Base: Tamirya Tamiya Clear Red paint, Uhu glue, Vallejo Black (see post from chestofcolors.com)

So I used my standard procedure for painting eyes - which i have learned is to do the eye first.  Disappointingly, the awesome The Craft forums on reapermini.com where I got this idea from has now been taken down.  You can still see ghost references for this method on pinterest.

Anyway, the concept is paint the white of the eye.  Then paint a black dot for the pupil. If you screw up, it's easy to fix because you just start from white again without screwing up a perfectly painted face. 

Then paint everything around the eye in black, slowly making sure you don't nick the white of the eye.  Then paint you skin base coats on the face.

For this figure, I got a deceptively coy, almost anime-like big-eyed expression on the figure.  I was very happy at this point.

Dripping blood would definitely distinguish a sheet of skin from a towel. So I tried a new method I read about from chest of colors. The idea is to make a sticky red "goop" that you pull between areas to get the stringiness of fresh blood.  

Dropped a big wad of the goop and pulled it up to the sheet.  For a first time, I was really proud. Beaming, I showed this off to my wife - who said this looked more like... something else... was shooting from between her legs than it did the sheet dripping.  

Very embarrassed , I took an exacto knife and cut off most of the dried goop. Then applied a method that I've seen for drool that uses fishing line and super glue.  That got a coat of Tamirya Red.  

Big improvement.

In retrospect, this figure would have looked a lot better if I'd done a reddish skin tone as an undercoat, then done the veins and then a heavy glaze work of the base skin tone.