Creatures of the Night
I painted these in 2018 and uploaded the photos almost exactly a year ago – but seemingly forgot to write the post until now. What follows may not be suitable for work. Firstly because the creatures are horrifying, monstrous creatures from Citadel’s Night Horrors range (continuing from my earlier post here). And also because one of them is naked.
Here are three of the horrors together – from left to right a werefox, lich, and witch. And there’s a bonus horror at the end of this post. The paint absolutely flies onto these miniatures – they look great with even one or two basic colours and simple shading.
Witch
First up, the witch. She seems to be relatively rare on eBay and doesn’t feature in Citadel’s 1991 Red Catalogue, which is the main resource I’m using to to collect this series. She does though appear in their 1986, 1987, and 1989 flyers.
She’s a little more complex than the other miniatures in this post. The design is slightly unusal, leaning forward perpendicular to the slotta-tab rather than running parallel, and her skirt only clears the base by a couple of millimetres. She seems to have more in common with pre-slotta design, with advantages (lacking the distinctly two-dimensional quality of some other figures in the range) and disadvantages (a few fiddly corners to paint).
I tried a somewhat more complex approach to painting her, including a range of complimentary colours instead of a simple base colour, some freehand flowers inspired by Romanian folk-costume, and a bit of quasi-object sourced lighting from an off-screen cauldron. Or maybe she’s just got a greenish tint to her skin.
Werefox
I’m not sure what to make of the werefox – but overall I think there are better fox-folk out there – Dark Sword’s female kitsune druid for example. This one is tiny – dwarfed by even a 20mm base, which taken in context of Citadel’s later reliance on cartoonish huge weapons and ostentation could be a bit of a breath of fresh air. On the other hand it’s quite an underwhelming sculpt; a naked girl with just the head of a fox. I’ve tried to mitigate this a bit by keeping the flesh tones close to orange-and-white fox-fur.
Spectre
I knew almost exactly how I wanted to paint the spectre from before I owned the miniature: bright-but-luxurious purple robes and green eyes. The red belt was a bit of an afterthought; I wanted a contrasting colour and thought a thin yellow line would be overwhelmed. So this was one of the fastest paint-jobs I’ve done, and I’m super happy with the result.
Ghoul
As a bonus, here’s a ghoul that I painted up after photographing the rest of the group together but before leaving the UK in 2018. I’ve used my standard ghoulish colour palette building up from blacks and purples to pale blues (which I think was inspired by an edition of White Dwarf in the mid-90s), and red-and-yellow boils. I added bright pink entrails, red claws, and a few patches of gore for contrast.
The undead hordes will continue to swell. I’ve got a couple more Night Horrors on my painting table at home that I plan to get started on as soon as I get back, and picked up Tom Meier’s Zombie Dragon from Ral Partha Europe – at £10.95 you’d be crazy not to get one of these (even without the amazing John Blanche box art).
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