Temple of Elemental Evil Miniatures

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. 😀

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).

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!) 😀

Back to the D&D Board Game series today – The four eponymous villains from the Temple of Elemental Evil box. Each of the foursome took a rather different style of painting.

These first two of the models come in a dark but slightly transparent plastic – The Water Elemental took some Contrast Paint, as I actually painted it alongside the three from Drizzt. Because of the dark plastic, though, it turned out much, much darker. The extra-swirly details on this model also rendered the look of it rather indistinct. As with the Drizzt models, I drybrushed a bunch of Vallejo Foam Effects white to give it a slightly better look. I’d still call the Pathfinder models far superior to all of these Boardgame models.

The Air Elemental on the other hand was another Contrast Paint Experiment fail – it just looked awful with both grey and white attempts (each of which I quickly washed off). In the end, the best option to make it look like a decent Air Elemental was to go properly white, and then give it some subtle shading. Sure, it looks a little like a snowman, or a soft-serve-ice-cream-swirl-man, but trust me – it looks a lot better than stock. Once again, though – I think the more recent Pathfinder models are better.

The next two models again both take different tacks. The Earth Elemental was another Contrast Paint experiment that had an …average outcome. I don’t recall which of the paints I used here, but it did give the Earth sculpt a real “prepaint-dip” type look, which can pretty plainly be seen in these pics. I gave it a drybrush to finish off, because, let’s face it – it’s a mediocre sculpt that doesn’t deserve more time than I gave it here. Good enough for gaming.

Finally, the Fire Elemental started with a yellow spray – the same bright yellow spray used to base coat the Yochlol. Following this was a paint wash of thin white to brighten the deepest parts of the sculpt, then after it dried, a redo of yellow, then orange, red and then a very dark grey for the highest (coolest) points, including the fingertips, “ears”, and end of the tail. A few layers of drybrushing to give a kind of OSL-effect, as well as a black wash to finish the base in order to increase the OSL-shadow-contrast on the floor.

This final pic gives us a sense of scale for the two larger elementals next to an ogre, as this pair are my final submissions for Ann’s Miniatures of Magnitude Challenge for May & June! Wrap-up post for Ann’s challenge (with a group scale shot) tomorrow!

Azazel's Bitz Box.

Painting, Modelling, Miniatures, 1:6, Games… Whatever else I find interesting.

Tag Archives: Temple of Elemental Evil Miniatures

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

D&D Monster Manual 36: Temple of Elemental Evil – Earth, Air, Fire and Water Elementals