Caffeineforge

Depending on your climate you may have had a white christmas/winter, or maybe not – fortunately, we have Yetis for every situation in the following post! (posting by (again a very sleep deprived) Antonia)

First of all: Happy New Year to all of you! I hope you had great holidays and a good start into the year 2018. Did you make any plans, especially on the painting and gaming side of life?

[I didn’t, to be honest, because I normally don’t manage to fulfill my resolutions anyway because a) I find other cool things to do or b) I don’t find the time  or c) we do have a small kid, so see a) & b) ]

 

Fortunately we both managed to paint the first group of minis this year, a horde of Yetis! We painted all four of them, I put up only three links up because at that time, they only had those three online at reaper’s, so if you want to add the last one later, feel free to send a pic we can edit in!

The minis were great to work with, btw. – they did have some flashing and gaps here and there, but although I considered them rather ugly at first, I found that they are “good-ugly”, in a well proportioned and detailed kind of way. Plus I like painting fur  😀

 

Dirk went with a traditional color scheme with some awesome effects:

I think the white fur looks quite realistic in that it is off-white, a bit yellowish, like with polar bears that live close to the coast or even on the mainland. The war paint looks really good, I have a thing for warpaint on minis and would have used it too, but I didn’t want to put too many effect layers on my mini – here on Dirk’s version it works beautifully. And of course Dirk couldn’t resist using Vogelglow ™ effects on the shaman’s axe, which looks stunning! I guess the shaman just summoned some kind of ice magic or energy to support his/her group, very cool (haha, sorry!) idea!

 

Since I wanted to be a special snowflake again (more winter puns, yeah… :p  ) my Yetis are not Yetis at all but rather large tropic apes:

When I thought about how I’d use the minis later (a big source of inspiration and motivation for me) I decided to make a tropical/jungle version to go with the D&D pirate setting for one of my RPG campaigns. And since I wanted to do something colorful, I went for orangutans or something similar. I mixed some dark orange for the fur and grey for the faces and hands, which I think work quite nice together. To make the fur look even more shaggy I used the grey skin color on exposed body areas where the fur could rub off/wear thin, like the knees and elbows, and of course the backsides: They are primates after all  :p

For the shaman I tried something I saw in one of the more recent white dwarf magazines, where someone did a warband of elves who had stayed in a swamp for too long so they grew mossy and moldy themselves. I thought about sloths too, which have algae growing in their fur to give them a greenish tinge, and experimented with static grass on the  shamans head, back and legs. Maybe the guy/gal sat and meditated so long that plants would start to grow on their fur? Who knows!

 

Arjen is very busy at the moment but fortunately had a yeti prepared already!

He wrote he already painted that one some time ago and I like the color scheme a lot! It goes into Dirk’s direction, but looks even more pale, even albinotic, while the greyish wash on the fur prevents it from looking to pink overall. I think in this mini we can see that the right choice of colors can save a lot of time, when you have a good combination all it needs is a wash and maybe drybrush to give a very convincing result. Arjen, did you intentionally use more wash on the shadowed areas like under the arms and the lower part of the legs, or is this “real” shadow? It sounds like a nice idea anyway, like OSL effects but with washes instead of drybrushing.

 

Michaels Yetis were painted accodring to his waether conditions at home: Frosty!

The use of light blue as a skin color gives the Yetis a bit of a supernatural/elemental look, nice choice of colors! And of course the blueish white screams “cold as ice”, so I can imagine theses guys having some (magical or natural) frost attacks to unleash onto their enemies. Do you have actual plans for using them, in an RPG or for skirmish games, perhaps?

 

Jim’s Yetis are, in fact, either “true Yetis” or no Yetis at all, but rather Bigfoots/Sasquatches:

Updated with one more Yeti!

Jim spent some time researching Yetis (we are a dedicated bunch sometimes, us painting enthusiast, I know that too!) and found out that “real” Yetis (if there is such a thing and not just some strange bears in the Himalaya) are described brown, not white as we normally know them from the film & fantasy genre. Therefore these guys could be Yetis (for purists) or Sasquatches, which works just as well. Thinking of it, we could have done those minis in a ton of variations, like black, greens, patterned… and now that I started I can’t stop imagining them as purple, like the lead from Monsters Inc. But that would be Sulley silly, right?

Anyway, nice to see another brown version of these minis, the fur looks great on them, you even used slighty different shades of brown for each of them!

UPDATE:
David sent us another pack of Yetis after he was inspired by a snowstorm:

As you can read in his blog, David started with a dark blue wash/liner and gradually added lighter colors via drybrushing. This take on the Yetis is still the darkest of the bunch, I’d say; the blueish fur and the purple skin work well together. How did you come up with puple? I’d never have thought of it, but it still looks quite natural in this combination! The snow on the bases is from “woodland scenics” and looks nice, is it some kind of flocking or a paste? I’m still looking for good snow flocking that has a certain structure, the ones I tried were either too coarse or way too smooth (a brush-on snow effect in that case).

Anyway, thanks for the submission, I hope the storm didn’t hit you too hard!

 

Here is this week’s gallery:

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Coming next:

01/22/2018 Bones III Aeris, Female Elf Ranger (B3 Core)

Want to participate in the next post? Email the pictures of your minis until Friday 01/19/18 to

MondayMiniature@fantasymail.de  (It’s a .de domain, in case emails are bouncing)

–> Attention: The submission date for photos is about three days before publishing date, to give us a bit of time to actually write about your pictures  😀

This way you’ll have two weeks/one weekend to paint, and we have one weekend to write (which is the only time of the week where we have some open minutes).

You can of course send in pics later, but to take out a bit of the stress (most pics arrive here rather last minute) please consider the three day deadline. Later pics will show up in an update  😉

 

 

02/05/2018 Bones II Infernal attack: Fly demon and/or Blood Demon (B2 Core)

02/19/2018 Bones III Giant Cobra (B3 Core)

03/05/2018 Bones III Lendil Blackroot, Wizard (B3 Core)

03/19/2018 Bones II Harsk, Dwarf Ranger (B2 Core)

04/02/2018 Bones III Pathfinder Troll (B3 Core)

04/16/2018 Bones III Eastern Encounter I: Tengu, Crow people (B3 Core)

04/30/18 Bones II Aaron the Conjurer (B2 Core)

05/14/18 Bones III Werebear (B3 Core)

05/28/18 Bones III Nazeera Bloodraven, female fighter (B3 Core)

06/11/18 Bones II Bugbear Warband! Hunter, Warrior, Leader (B2 Core)

 

This entry was posted by Antonia & Dirk Vogel.