Monthly Archives: September 2020

D&D Monster Manual 44: Temple of Elemental Evil – Salamander

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Dungeons and Dragons D&D Temple of Elemental Evil - Salamander

And now we’re back to regular models. Though I’m still playing catch-up posts from August into September. Yesterday and today were hell days for work – even though I”m (mostly) working remotely with some flexibility, there’s a deadline for next Tuesday so I pulled a late-nighter-early-morninger to get it all done, then headed in, then did my excercise when I got home, then crashed like the Hindenberg. (Too soon?) So this should have gone up yesterday, but you gets it now.

This thing is apparently a Salamander from D&D. Though I did that thing that I sometimes do, and didn’t bother to look up how the model “should” look (officially, at least) and just went with how it looked to me. And some of you may have already twigged, it looked to me like a Naga from World of Warcraft – one of my most despised types of enemies. So I looked up some examples of WoW’s Naga, and used one of my more commonly-encountered palettes of these over the years as my guide. You can see they’re quite colourful.

Which is kinda funny now, as I’ve literally just looked up what this model and officially looks like is properly called as I started writing this post. (The primer obscures the text underneath these newer figures, post Drizzt). So it’s just now that I’ve seen that it’s a Salamander, which is apparently a fire-based elemental (makes sense for the Temple of Elemental Evil, I guess) and that it should usually and properly be painted all firey and shit. Oops?

Oh well. I’m sure it’ll work just fine as a single model in a boardgame, and the D&D Police aren’t going to try to break down my door anytime soon, so we’ll live with it. 😀

Dungeons and Dragons D&D Temple of Elemental Evil - Salamander

As far as the model itself and painting it went, it’s an “ok” tier model at best, the facial detail is pretty dodgy. So I decided to use it as another Contrast Paint experiment, and also try out the new Tesseract Glow technical paint to see how it works – it’s the green element of the blend of blue through to yellow on the back and crest.

I mean, if I’d realised it was a red, firey elemental beforehand, I would have painted it more canonically, and just used it to try and push something like those black-red blands along the spine, but I don’t care enough to go back and change it or anything. This is the sort of figure I term a “trash model” – which isn’t quite as insulting as it sounds, but it does mean that it’s a model I don’t care about – so options are generally either to:

1) paint the fucker and get it done as quickly and painlessly as possible.

2) use it as a subject to experiment on and build my skills, without any worries that I’ll fuck up a sculpt I care about.

3) a little from 1), and a little from 2).

This model was very much a 3).

Dungeons and Dragons D&D Temple of Elemental Evil - Salamander

So while this model isn’t going to win any painting competitions (not that I enter them), something liek this definitely has valid uses – I know how several of the Contrast Paints look and behave (I like the Bone/Yellow mix on the underside, not keen on the Teal-Blue on the arms, but it looks ok on the tail, some messing around with a brand-new paint (the transparent-ish green) – and I have another painted model for a board game! (even if it’s the wrong colours!) 😀

Dave Stone’s Winter of Scenery Challenge – Personal Wrap-Up

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So there’s been quite a few posts over the last two months showing the individual models I painted as part of Dave Stone’s Winter of Scenery Challenge. I started getting everything out to take some pictures of, but then rather than in my normal “showcase” kind of setup, I started to lay everything out on the game mat, more like the way we’d lay out the terrain for an actual game. Pretty much because I needed to figure out how to have all of that fantasy tavern/blacksmith/trap/type stuff in the same pictures as so much industrial and post-apoc/sci-fi terrain.

While the challenge started off as a good bit of motivation to get some scenery painted, we also had some shit go down in July, which made it hard to concentrate on something like my own Jewel of July painting challenge, but I did still want to paint, and so Dave’s challenge really came into it’s own as a way to keep my hand in, as good looking tabletop scenery follows a slightly different set of rules to models – so the rougher look of weathered terrain was the perfect thing for me to work on.

Looking at these pics, the little campsite worked out a bit better than I thought, but by the same token I feel like I need a hell of a lot more of those pipes!

Aside from all of these pieces that got finished during the challenge period, I also got a few other medium-to-large pieces started, and so the tail of this challenge should go on to bear fruit for several more weeks at least as I finish off the extra projects.

So in the end, Dave’s Terrain challenge helped motivate me enough to basically complete enough terrain to run a small game on in just two months. Even better, most of these pieces had been sititng around for a minimum of a year, and in quite a few cases, more than a decade.

I’m certainly looking forward to the next one of these!