When sculpting large creatures, there is always a balance to find between adding details and textures and making the model look over complicated and sometimes a little messy. It is good to leave blank areas sometimes, as a ‘painting solution’, to do your own thing; shields and banners are a good example of this.

Painting texture on an otherwise blank surfacecan really bring your creatures to live and give them added character. Two good examples of this, are the terrifying Beholder crime boss, Xanathar from the Scoundrels of Waterdeep box set and the Purple Worm.

Xanathar

I decided to take an unconventional approach to this beast, and use the painted texture as a highlight. After the initial assembly, the eye stalks were pinned and glued into place, mostly facing forwards in an aggressive pose. This does make it slightly more difficult to get to certain areas, but I can see how the shadows and highlights are working together ’live’ on the miniature.

Notice how the flying stand is attached already. This is masked off with tape before the primer, as you don’t want anything to touch the surface, even varnish, as it will dull and leave a cloudy finish. If this does happen, it can be rectified with a coat of gloss varnish.

As the finished miniature will be blue, I have used black primer. This is the closest colour to the dark blue basecoat.

Painting the main colour

The basecoat of Periscope Blue-309 and a drop of black paint to the mix were applied all over with a large brush, followed by two mid-tones of Dark Prussian Blue-899 and Prussian Blue-965. Even at this stage, I have started to leave the dark basecoat showing at the base of the eye stalks.

The first layer of small lines is applied, where the light is falling on the stalks. I have used three layers of paint for this: Magic Blue-021, Electric Blue-023 and Sky Blue-961.

This reminds me of 17^th century etch landscape paintings, where the colours and lines are gradually built up.

The horns are treated in the same way, adding more white to the cream mix in small stages, working nearer to the end point of pure white.

Details

Now that the majority of the miniature’s colour is finished, I can really bring out the rest of the details with a strong eye colour. For a stark contrast, I have chosen red eyes. For an added striking effect, the main iris colour is a metallic red, Vallejo Model Air colour: Turn Signal Red- 71070. When finished, the eyes were painted over with three layers of gloss varnish; this makes the colours a deeper and a richer tone.

Following the existing skin texture, I have built up the colour with progressively lighter tones, with the lightest colours around the maw. I have used Blue Violet-811 and added white for lighter tones.

With the main purple colour finished, I moved on to the mouth colours, using Shadows Flesh-343, Flesh Base-341, Beige Red-804 and Flat Flesh-955, as my final highlight colour. The whole area was given two washes with red ink to emphasise the flesh colours and finally given a coat of gloss varnish. The next stage was to pick out any teeth and horns with black paint. This provides a black border to each part, making it more pronounced and identifiable, very important when painting miniatures that will be photographed for a box cover.

As everything on this creature is textured, I left the teeth quite plain, as a contrast.

The belly of the beast

As I mentioned above, the belly is one of those areas which could do with more texture, as it is quite plain. Whilst it’s fine to leave it alone and just paint the belly plates as normal, I’m never the one for taking the easy route!

The belly was base coated with Dark Mud-316, an excellent paint with a really matt finish.