Back in 2018, one of the first tabletop games I crowdfunded was Tainted Grail, a narratively dense take on the Arthurian legends from a team of Polish designers called Awaken Realms. Think a cross between the Knights of the Round Table and The Witcher and you will have an idea of the grim, corrupted world they conjured, successfully enough that it is being spun out into multiple videogames. The game’s expansions came with a particularly nice set of miniatures for the new playable characters. Looking for a smaller miniature-painting project, I decided to paint these using their card art as a reference but pushing a specific colour on each character to make them easy to identify on the table. These were painted around April to May of this year (some time before the individual Warhammer Quest models I have recently posted to Instagram/Mastodon). Shot individually below there is little sense of scale, but most of the bases are roughly the size of a 10p coin.
Dagan was the original reason I wanted to paint this set, a butcher wielding his cleaver and meat hook which made it easy to tell a story through the severed pig head beneath his foot to the bloody knife and blood spatter across his face and torso. I had consider adding similar gore to his hook but felt that would detract from the arc of red across the other elements.Sloan’s illustration is desaturated to the point of being almost monochrome. I translated this as sickly, pallid skin and virtually no colour from the rear. Beneath his cloak are warmer browns and golds to add a little more life to the model. Pack-in miniatures for board games tend to be made from softer plastics or resin that lack the level of detail in higher-end tabletop miniatures — you can see this particularly in the chainmail which forms an amorphous mass of rings.Maintaining interest in a largely single-colour model can be difficult but Vallejo’s paint range contains a wide range of browns which allowed for plenty of variety in Duana’s leather skirts. I concentrated the magical blue energy into the flame in her hand, darker and colder at the bottom, rising to a hot white tip. Taking inspiration from the splashes of red in the card art, I tied together her accessories with the blood seeming to originate on the skull, dripping on the cross and staining her hand, which in turn transferred it to the flap of her satchel where she would have opened it to pull out spell components.Visually, Thebalt is the closest to a classic knight. In the card art, his yellow clothes seem to have faded or worn away to white. However, whites seemed a little too bright and pure for this game, so I leaned into the yellow (and I have only recently found techniques to create white robes with which I am satisfied). Meanwhile, as my suits and socks attest, I love a good turquoise so likewise boosted this as a strong accent colour.The most striking thing about Caolin isn’t Caolin at all, but her pet wolf. Its green eyes stand out against the monochrome fur but overall I wanted it to read as a shadowy presence almost wrapping around her (even on all fours it is 2/3 of her height). In hindsight, the handgrip wrappings on the bow ought to have been brighter to contrast the dark fur.I wanted to lean into the exotic trappings of Naazer, a foreign explorer laden with map scrolls. A palette of rich green and gold made him stand out against the darker or desaturated tones of the other characters.
Finally, here is a bonus pack mule because it’s cute. Feel free to suggest names on a postcard.
I still have a battered copy of the second edition of Space Hulk, a £40 big box boardgame from the 1990s that now sells on ebay for around £200. Set in the grimdark sci-fi universe of Warhammer 40,000, the game is unfolds aboard huge spacecraft adrift in the depths of space as hulking power-armoured Space Marine Terminators fight off packs of ravenous aliens in tight corridors. The game draws heavily from the Alien franchise — this included the Genestealer design inspired by H.R. Giger’s iconic xenomorph as well as the tension-elevating mechanic of using of “blip” tokens to represent swarming dots on a radar screen. Although the box contains 20 Genestealer models, they are only placed on the board when within line of sight of the Terminators. Until then the tactical decisions must be made based on unknown numbers at each blip. I do love asymmetric knowledge at the game table.
When I collected the box from my parents’ house, I found some of my early attempts at miniature painting inside, probably circa 1998. In this post, I put them side by side with new examples of identical models from the box. Let’s (hopefully) see some progress.
My original attempt was actually pretty faithful to the box art, with the bright red armour of the Blood Angels chapter. With the new Blood Angel and Ultramarine I felt free to experiment, particularly as they did not need to fit in with a larger army. These older models are also a good example of my previous comments that less detail can allow greater creative interpretation. I wanted to produce much richer armour, which I built up through multiple layers of different contrast paints — successive layers were darker but increasingly watered down, and the topmost layer was mixed with a wash to change the flow properties to gather more in the recesses. The result of that layering is a pearlescent finish to their ceramite armour plates, most visible on the Ultramarine’s blue shoulder in contrast to the matte black of the Blood Angel. The lighter helmets draw attention to the faces (initially a happy accident as the red armour became a darker hue than initially intended, so I avoided the face with the final coat) as do the glowing eyes. The glazed red on the Ultramarine is more obvious but I prefer subtler object source lighting on the Blood Angel, the green just catching the raised edges of the cheeks. As a photographer, OSL is definitely something I am interested in exploring more.
Interestingly, there is no gold paint used on any of these models. The aquila on the 90s paint job is a yellow not even trying to mimic gold. The gold details on the new models have been underpainted in silver then layered with a translucent yellow and then darker washes. This approach allowed for very different tones to the warm gold of the Blood Angel (with a red brown wash) and the colder tone of the Ultramarine (using a wash of brown and blue). The plain black bases are because they are going to be replaced entirely with new ship corridor bases in the future.There was failed experimentation along the way. Initially I had intended to use non-metallic skulls and a black aquila on the chest in the style of newer Blood Angels imagery. However, with the darker armour the black aquila just did not work, looking unfinished, so I abandoned it in favour of the more classic gold. That in turn made the aged bone colour of the shoulder honour badge and other skull motifs feel too weak, so I reworked them in a more stylised gold and bleached bone. Since that proved successful, the same approach was incorporated into the Ultramarine paint scheme from the start.Again I think the original attempt was relatively faithful to the box art if a little too dark in the purple skin and too light in the blue carapace. The colours are extremely flat with very little layering beyond the bone of its claws. And shout out to those old school green bases. My first new paint job from the Space Hulk box was the middle Genestealer, which is probably closer to how I have always pictured them. Saturated skintones in unusual hues are great for aliens. Continuing my previous comments about seeking varied skintones, I found a lore-consistent approach with the inversion on the right side. When separated from their brood, Genestealers lose their colouring and shift to the traditional blue and purple appearance that aids with concealment in corridors, so some adopting a dark purple carapace with blue skin seems equally plausible. Sure, an in-universe justification for the appearance of fictional characters isn’t strictly necessary, but I enjoy that aspect of worldbuilding anyway.
