Minotaur Lord

Greetings one and all. To those who have been dropping in on "Today I have mostly been..." (PVP's daily work in progress Tumblr feed) will know that I have been painting an Avatars of War Minotaur Lord for a client and hoo boy, this fellow is huge.

I gotta say, I'm not a huge fan of most of the Avatars of War range but this guy is something else. There's such a sense of weight and momentum to him (you can better see it in the later photos). That axe is the one we featured in the first youtube video so I'll skip over that and straight on to the biggest part of the model. The skin.

Now khaki tones are amongst the hardest to capture on camera so you'll have to look at all the pictures in this post and sort of take an average of all of them! Over the black undercoat I applied a nice clean basecoat of Dryad Bark. I sequentially highlighted the skin by adding increasing amounts of Ungor Flesh which is almost nice return of the old school Bronzed Flesh. I rarely use it for skin but it makes a lovely flesh basecoat for white furs. I kept going through the sequential highlights until the tone and contrasts felt right. Can't give you an exact recipie but I reckon there were twelve layers in some places of this model. I glazed the dried skin colours back down with Agrax Earthshade and then rehighlighted only the face with the top highlight mix to draw attention to it. The inside of the mouth was painted a mix of Bugmans Glow and Dryad Bark with a highlight Bugman's Glow and a glaze of Carroburg Crimson.

The hair also started from Dryad Bark but was shaded with Nuln Oil and then highlighted with Baneblade Brown. All the leather is my new favourite mix of: basecoat Rhinox Hide, highlight 50:50 Rhinox Hide and Mournfang Brown, second highlight pure Mournfang Brown. The various chains and lumps of armour are Jeffrust.

The belly armour also has a brass surround drabbed down with Agrax Eathshade. The brilliant Runelord Brass was used for all the decorative rings on the Minotaur. On that subject it is interesting that Avatars of War put a nose ring in, it is tres bull but a bit weird. See on bulls a nose ring is a control mechanism, it prevents the animal pulling away on its halter (nose rings on pigs are to stop them grubbing up the earth). Now on a minotaur a nose ring seems to indicate that this huge fellow was a slave of some sort. Or it could have just been a sculpting affectation. Am I reading too much into this? Anyway, with that I must fly, until next time folks.

TTFN