Painting Blazing Firecats

Introduction

Back when I purchased the Arena of the Planeswalkers boardgame for DnD, a passer-by remarked that the cats in the set would be nice Fleshhound counts-as. Indeed, I used them once way back in Age of Sigmar. Now that the party of adventurers fumbles its way through Storm King's Thunder (may or may not encounter Fire Giants and their servants, he he he), and the codex for Chaos Daemons dropped (3 squads of Fleshhounds and a Daemon Prince make an excellent detachment), I felt it was time to paint these minis. (They also promised to be a quicker and easier job than most projects.)

* Note that the intro was written way back. I painted them about 3 months ago, but I only recently got around to finish their bases.

Painting

Prime black, then basecoat black to ensure a nice, even coverage.

Flames

Paint the flames as per the painting tip.

As these are large flames, I thought of applying the whole Brimstone treatment to them. However, unlike the Brimstones, I did not have too great a yellow surface to highlight. So I highlighted the flames all over with Fluorescent Yellow. The result was a bright and realistic flame effect. I am very happy with it.

Skin highlights

I departed from my usual way of highlighting black because I did not want small spot highlights where the light usually catches on a black surface. These animals are blazing - they should be bright, with well defined contours.

First layer the muscles with Heavy Charcoal.

My first idea was to edge the muscles with Stonewall Grey, then wash black. I did not like the result. The contrast was way too much, even after the wash. Furthermore, the wash took the shine off the black.

Fortunately, I only tried it out on one mini, which I then quickly painted again with black and Heavy Charcoal. For the second attempt, I mixed Bonewhite into Heavy Charcoal (something like 3:2 or 2:1 to make an actual difference) and edged the muscles with that. Much better.

Eyes and teeth

White primer on both of these, to cover up the black. The eyes are very small in deep recesses; I made mistakes on almost every one, even with my finest details brush.

Scorpion Green for the eyes, then black around them to clean up. 2 layers of Bonewhite on the teeth.

2 layers of Agrax Earthshade on the teeth, to darken them down. I might have done better with a brown basecoat.

This is the only part of the miniatures which I'm not happy about. The flames are detailed enough (even if some are rough cut), but the teeth are just solid chunks of plastic. I went in with Bonewhite and tried to create some semblance of separate fangs. It looks funny from some angles.

Basing

I initially wanted to go the wasteland route and glued on the rocks accordingly. However, I decided against brown rocks, so as not to distract the viewer from the models themselves.

The basecoat is still brown, but less reddish. I first tried Charred Brown, which was OK. Then I switched to my cheap acrylic, but that was way too reddish. I mixed in Heavy Charcoal, which became too grey. I mixed back in Charred Brown. In the end, I got a couple different shades of brown, which I brought together with an overall Agrax Earthshade.

Now, to depart from that brown. I mixed 1:1 Black and Stonewall Grey for a heavy drybrush. Then 1:2 black to grey for a lighter drybrush.

Finally, an extra light drybrush of Bonewhite to pop out all the details.

Paint the rim of the bases black.

Finished!