I’ve gotten the first of the three monstrous models in this set from the Mythic Battles: Pantheon box done this week for this year’s Monster March Painting Challenge being run by Swordmaster over at Path of an Outcast.
While googling for images of Foxes, I found several featuring some striking looking foxes with black and orange marnings rather than the typical orange and white.
While I didn’t copy them completely, as I felt there would have been too much black, they did influence how I painted the fox, giving it a slightly unique (and for me, interesting) look.
I have to say, I do with we had more fox-based models in the hobby rather than everything being based on wolves. I might just have to take matters into my own hands in future and paint some wolf models in more of a fox-like scheme when appropriate, especially when the wolves are on the smaller side as at this point I’ve got heaps of both giant and normal-sized painted wolf models. Once again, Chainsaw Girl Berkeley steps up to provide us with model scale (and another trophy for her wall, no doubt!)
Azazel's Bitz Box. 
Love it!
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Cheers, Eric! 🙂
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Great colors on the mini, like the inspiration from the fox
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Thanks Mark – Hopefully I can find more foxes to paint in the future as well!
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Excellent job on this, and I love the use of Chainsaw Girl Berkeley as a constant source of size comparison!
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Cheers mate – she’s pretty versatile when it comes to the monster slaying and has ended up being my size model due to how well she works with most others! 🙂
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Hot damn! Well done, nice blending on the legs. Can’t wait to see more.
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Thank you! 😀
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That’s such a unique looking fox, never seen one like that before! And I like how you translated it to your model.
I also completely agree on the ‘to many wolves’ front. More foxes, cats and bird models, please!
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Thanks Jenn – I know, right? I just did the usual googling for natural images of animals and saw the black foxes and was immediately sold! I’ll certainly be painting a lot of the smaller “wolf” models I come across as foxes in future!
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Excellent work mate, can see the influences from the reference picture, but you’ve made it your own
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Thanks Dave! I didn’t want to add in *too* much black on this one, especially with that huge bushy tail!
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Great work on that fox, and you’re right it would be nice to see more fox models out there.
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Cheers Dave! I guess we may have to do our own (via paint) – they may not be fully anatomically correct, but let’s face it, neither are most wolves, anyway!
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Brill colour choice mate – that is one foxy lookin’ fox!!
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Thanks Alex – Foxy McFoxface perhaps! 😀
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Oooh really nice! 🙂 Love the colour scheme – one of our Chihuahuas looks similar although he’s got a white mane (and scale-wise, he’s much smaller)!
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Thanks John! We might need to see your Chihuahuas posted up on your blog now!
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Great painting- that looks really good.
Cheers,
Pete.
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Thank you, Pete! Cheers!
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Brilliant mate and good decision on going with less black I reckon
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Thanks mate – and of course, plenty of chance to go with more variation once I get some more painted in the future! 🙂
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Great adaptation! Really striking color scheme.
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Thank you! Credit to Mother Nature for the inspiration here! 🙂
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I don’t think I’ve seen that type of fox before. It almost looks like it could be mythical with that wild color scheme. I love the final results on the mini. Its really striking and will look amazing on the tabletop. Have you played Mythic Battles yet? I’m curious about it but its hard to find much info on it and it requires Kickstarter to get a copy so they don’t make it easy on you!
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No, it was something new to me as well – and when I saw it (and the other photos) I immediately knew that I’d be painting this fox in that style. Haven’t played it yet, unfortunately. It’s more of a PVP army-list-building game, but there are some really nice models in it that will translate across to games like Kings of War – especially the Mythical Greek Army homebrew list (using the Greek Historical list combined with monsters that have a Greek origin/reference). But yes, I want/need to focus a bit more on getting a couple of specific games painted so we can have that extra motivation to play them!
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I didn’t know it was PvP focused. That probably won’t be a good fit for me then and I’m glad you mentioned it. I’m excited to see more minis for it regardless. I’m probably going to paint some minis in this genre at some point this year so its inspiring to see similar stuff!
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If you wanted to pick it up as a source of pretty-good-for-boardgame models that also have the Ancient Greek theme to them it would be worthwhile. As a game, its supposed to be good but it’s not super high on my kust of things to play since Marpuda doesn’t really like pvp boardgames much.
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That’s a lovely piece and your paintjob is really fresh!
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Thank you, Mikko! 🙂
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We would not like to appear pedantic, but the coat has intrigued us. It is a specimen of “cross fox”, long considered a separate species (canis decassatus), while today it is recognized as a simple variant of the more common red fox. It lives both in Eurasia and in America, even if we have never seen it either …
Once the naturalistic documentary is concluded, we fully approve the choice of colors for your beast, both because they match well and because you are managed to create natural colour transitions.
We fully agree that manufacturers often focus exclusively on a few races, totally leaving out many others when miniatures are produced. Why an inflation of wolves and wild boars (alone or as mounts)? Why a uniform mass of beast men with goat and bovine features?
We recall a fascinating sentence by Tolkien (we do not remember from which book) where it was stated that every animal species of Middle-Earth took a stand for good or for evil: it would be nice if it were translated into lead or resin …
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Yep, that’s what I found in my googling of the fox variants at the time as well. An interesting snippet of Tolkien’s lore, though it does feel a bit black and white really. I think we get so many wolves both because of their traditional “evil/dangerous” role in European folklore and legend “big bad wolf”, “throw them to the wolves”, “howling of the wolves” etc, while foxes are their smaller, less dangerous cousin.
Goatfaced Beastmen just seem to be the ones that GW stabilised on after a wide variation in their earlier days.
I don’t think it’s directly related to the Broo of Runescape, but perhaps a combination of seeing them in a (visual) lineage up to Minotaurs, along with the occult overtones and even a touch of Pan…
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That looks excellent with the interesting alternative scheme for foxes 😉
Berkeley is a great addition here for scale as I had assumed that the mini was much smaller.
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Thanks! Berkeley has certainly been a useful model for scale shots across a lot of these less-common models! 🙂
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Very nice indeed! I don’t tend to think of foxes as being all that monstrous (unless you happen to be a hen I suppose) but I completely agree, we definitely need more unusual beasts to serve as monsters. There are loads of wolves out there – and now I think about it real wolves aren’t terribly monstrous either – a wider range of creatures is definitely called for.
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Thanks Wudu. I’m fine with foxes since they look pretty good with those ruddy coats. Dire Foxes, if you will! 😆
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Great work again mate!!
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Cheers Pat! 😀
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