Those Who Trade: Hospitality

Known for their hospitality, the O. tyrannus.

Narthoks, water vendor and bartender

Philip Hynes, the sculptor behind Bears Head Miniatures regularly does Kickstarters to fund the next production round of his sculpts. A little while ago, he ran one such campaign for Narthoks the Excellent, a terrifying criminal mastermind and adversary for fantasy RPGs. In the course of the campaign, a limited edition bartender version came up, who I bought for my planned civilian project.

Here he is! Look at his smug face.

I have to admit that the cast was a bit rougher than usual for Philip's miniatures, which are generally pretty good. I'm not much of a modeller, so I didn't have much luck with the clean-up process. I think it came out okay, but you're all going to have to forgive that mould line there which I clearly didn't get as well as I thought.

The sculpt has oodles of character and was a lot of fun to paint. I decided to give him a more natural (if still weird) colour palette than the purples, blues, and reds you often see with floating eye tyrant monsters. I borrowed from the art of Tony DiTerlizzi, who painted some iconic versions in the second edition of a famous fantasy RPG:

Beholders, Tony DiTerlizzi
(c) Wizards of the Coast, c.1990s. Used without permission.

The eyes themselves were something I'd never done before. I don't paint eyes, but you can't make the three-feet excuse for a monster that is pretty much all about the eyes. Luckily there is plenty of good advice on the internet, including at Arcane Paintworks and Doctor Faust's Painting Clinic (YouTube).

I think I did okay for a first-timer.

can't nick drinks from this guy

A really fun sculpt and cute idea. I definitely need to start working on some actual terrain for this project, as a bunch of civilians without buildings to inhabit is a bit silly. The future has some big changes coming, so we'll see what happens.

In the meantime, there are only two sapient civilians left in my collection...