Bellax, Baby Beholder?
Since we’ve been playing a bit of the D&D boardgames lately, a few more of the models from those games have sneaked into my painting queue. Despite my fairly effectiove use of “The Tray” unfortunately some of the stuff there just isn’t driving me to paint it right now, and the D&D stuff belongs to that most relevant painter/gamer clause of “I need it done now for a game”. So when I found this thing in the bottom of the game box, primed and basecoated red. Well, I could see that the model was going to be simple enough to finish pretty quickly. So over the course of not too much time over two days, I got it finished.
Dancing Dragonborn Fighter for scale.
As I understand it, a Gauth is like a small Beholder, which is a bloody silly monster in and of itself, and as such, very D&D. It’s also one of the noises that – should you find yourself making it with any frequency – means you should go get yourself tested for COVID-19. As for the model, I dunno. While I actually have an amazing looking paionted variant of this model in my mind’s eye with mottled skin and transitions between distinct shades, it was already basecoated red, and given how much of a zero-sum game my painting time is, it’s really not a model that calls for such effort. It was an easy paint, it looks alright, it’ll work well when we need it for the boardgame or if I ever play D&D/Pathfinder again, so it counts as an easy win, I guess!
Azazel's Bitz Box. 
I certainly know the feeling – you want to play the game, you want it to look good, but the miniatures… but hey, he’ll look good in the game, as all anyone will see is those teeth – wonder which joke store he got them from!
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Luckily he’s so small that they’re a little less overwhelming in person. 😉
He’s like a legless squig with eye-dreads!
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Another off the queue mate, and as a gaming piece there’s nothing wrong with it, so save the precious painting time for something you really want to paint
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Yep, yep. It’s plain, but it’s a perfectly decent tabletop quality job. And even that means it’s pretty high quality as far as painted boardgame models out there go, anyway! 😉
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Agree with all of the comments so far! 🙂 Looks fine to me (the painting, not the subject – I find it more than a bit creepy)!
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Yeah, D&D has some wacky monsters. I guess they’re relics of the time. No idea *what* might have influenced such strange ideas back int he 70’s and 80’s… 😉
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I think you gave this mini its due as well. The sculpt could have had some wrinkles or folds in the skin to make this guy look even cooler and give you more to do while painting it but since the skin is so smooth, a quick highlight or two and this guy is done. The sculpt may be simple but the Gauth still looks like a creepy foe for some adventurers to tackle 🙂
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Thanks Kuribo! To be fair, it is only a boardgame mdoel from basically a decade ago – and liklely it would be again reused from a prepaint, so expectations need to be appropriately low. So yeah – simple and effective is all it needs. 🙂
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I forget that the board game is ten years old! When you take that into consideration, it isn’t too bad at all. I’ve painted as bad or worse Mansions of Madness minis to be sure!
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Yeah, I wonder what the models inside the newer versions of these boardgames are like? I guess I could look them up…
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Simple but effective. I always thought beholders (and tiny beholders for that matter) were weird looking beasties.
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I’ve been thinking a lot more about the physiology and potential environmental niches of these wacky D&D monsters lately as I’ve been painting the things. I could see Beholders and these things kinda working as Aquatic creatures. If they were natural critters rather than psychic magic floating things, anyway…
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I can see that. Perhaps it started out as some kind of free-swimming predator, hunting in open water where it needs to be alert to its own predators as well as any potential prey, hence all the eyes on stalks. Then in time it evolves into a magical creature instead (in a universe where magic exists it would create another evolutionary niche for creatures to exploit). No idea what the official background is, I’m not too clued up on D&D creatures, but that would make sense to me.
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I think we’re both over-thinking it. The correct answer is obviously “A Wizard Did It.”
Or perhaps more accurately, a combination of Tetrahydrocannabinol and Lysergic Acid Diethylamide.
Man.
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Tidy job mate – kinda looks like Covid as well as having a name that sounds like it!
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Whoa! You’re so right on the money on that one!
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Nice paint job, and I do believe that Gygax had a vivid imagination – allegedly fueled by a few substances at TSR https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gary_Gygax
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