Painting a barbarian

Introduction

With the reboot of our MAGUS adventures, we now have new characters - some needing painted miniatures! This miniature was part of Dungeons & Dragons: The Legend of Drizzt Board Game.

Painting

Prime 

In black, not shown, as I got overzealous, and by the time I took the first picture, the barbarian was already rocking this awesome ochre-yellow hair.

Hair

A couple of layers of ochre are needed to cover the black primer. Follow up with brown wash (Agrax Earthshade) for that dark blond effect.

Furs

I wanted to experiment with a technique I caught in a tutorial for the fur. Start with a brown basecoat (and paint the skin areas while we're at it), then add patches of another brown (I only had leather brown at my disposal) throughout the fur areas.

Follow up with a generous dose of Agrax Earthshade. This is supposed to mesh the browns together while still creating a varied and contrasting effect.

Skin

Apply fleshtone wash (Reikland fleshshade) to the skin areas.

Finish the fur and other details

The finishing touch on the fur is a bonewhite drybrush. Apply with variance, to increase contrast.

I also painted the hammer before moving on. Brown for the wooden handle, gunmetal for the head; then black wash; then edge highlight with the original colors and just a hint of silver on the edges of the hammer.

Face

The tried and tested method to paint eyes: paint the eyeballs white, then black wash to make it stand out from the face; then paint the eyeballs white again, taking care to leave a contour of black; then drop some color with the tip of the brush for the iris. I decided to give the guys a Nordic look, having blond hair and blue eyes.

I used the same technique to pick our the eyebrows in ochre-yellow (except the eyebrows don't have irises, hehe). Then I dropped a bit of black wash with a detail brush to pick out the mouth.

Back to the fur

I wasn't super pleased with the fur, so I went over it with a drybrush again. 

It doesn't look bad, but it is a bit bland. If I would do this again, I would apply this technique only to parts of the fur, or switch browns on some parts, or do some edge highlighting after on some parts. By the time I realized all this, I had already varnished the model, and wasn't going to go back to painting it. So I tried to do something different to at least make the base stand out.

Basing

Start with the cracked earth base, as for the Chaos Chosen and the fighter.

Stick on larger pieces of cork.

Then fill the gaps with rocks. Although in this case, do leave some spaces uncovered.

Basecoat in reddish brown.

Heavy brown drybrush.

Black wash in the recesses, then overall brown wash (Agrax Earthshade).

Brown edge highlight.

Very thin bonewhite edge highlight.

Correct the side of the base by painting it black.

Now, for the fun part!

Mix 1:1:1 baking soda, PVA glue and white paint as per this tutorial.

Apply it to the base. Boom! Snow effect.

Finished