A Year in Miniatures 14: The Death Elemental

Hello miniature fans. It’s been a while! How have you all been doing? Oh, me? So kind of you to ask! I’ve been really busy with a lot of things that are not miniatures, including both myself and my partner starting new jobs and our first actual holiday in something like 3 years. It’s been a blast, but it’s not produced a lot of updates for this site. Time to fix that!

In all seriousness, I’ve actually not been doing too badly in terms of finishing miniatures, although one major setback was a set of 8 minis that I sunk a bunch of time into and eventually had to accept that I wasn’t going to be able to make them work and would have to start again. My main bottleneck is actually photography - taking, selecting, and editing pictures of my minitures is the part of this that I’m least familiar with, and always seems to take a huge chunk of time. As a result, I’ve got a bit of a backlog of finished models to clear, so strap in for a vastly increased posting rate for the next week or so!

Since it’s nearly Halloween, I’m kicking off with a suitably spooky entry: the Death Elemental from Creature Caster!

This stunning model is an absolute beast. At 15.5cm tall, it’s bigger than anything else I’ve painted this year except the Knight Desecrator. And unlike everything of a similar size, this one is dense with detail - no big armour panels here, every surface is intricately textured. Me being me, I of course had to highlight every single feature, so you can probably understand why this one has been some form of in progress for about 5 months!

Each section of this model seems to have presented a separete challenge, with the possible exception of the base! The bulk of it is a huge swirling mass of faces, skulls, and humanoid forms. I wanted to imply a maelstrom of souls gradually breaking down over time, which meant having the faces and bodies be the brightest points. This meant a lot of careful aiirbrushing to get the gradients nice and smooth, followed by a lot more very careful highlighting to make all of the flow lines visible. I could honestly have spent forever tinkering with this and still not be happy, but at some point you’ve got to call it done, and I’m pretty satisfied with how it’s come out.

Next up was the skin. I’ve only recently started enjoying painting flesh and musculature; it turns out learning a bit of theory and getting much better at smoother blending actually helps a lot! The flesh and muscle on this guy is an absolute trial by fire! He seems to either be made of jerky, or to have recently been flayed because his body is a mass of ropey, striated muscle. The vast majority of the time I spent on this model was taken up by gradually building up highlights along strands until I had the forms and lighting properly worked out. On top of this, I was having to balance colour very carefully, using the same palette as the soul swirl in order to imply that the elemental’s body is made of the same stuff, while keeping it different enough in tone and texture so that it didn’t get lost against the larger form. This was particularly important for the left hand where he’s holding some of the soul stuff - if the skin and soul ended up too similar, it would just look like he had a weirdly shaped claw!

Painting a nice simple dusty-black hood and partial robe was a much needed break from all the detail!

With all of that out of the way, there was just the right arm to do. A nice simple multifaceted structure of biomechanical looking armour which I of course decided should be NMM. Because I don’t know when to stop apparently. This arm alone is about the size of a Primaris Space Marine, and, like everything else on this beast, is awash with detail. Masses of overlapping plates, complex curved surfaces, and a bunch of skulls just for fun. And that’s before you consider the scythe itself, which I decided to in the same way in order to help tie things together. I feel like I’ve been really finding my feet with NMM, and this was an amazing way to practice!

I have had an absolute blast painting this guy, and I’m really proud og how he’s come out. I can honestly say that the NMM on the arm and the flesh of the chest are the best examples of both of those techniques that I’ve produced to date. I recently went back and looked at how I was painting at the beginning of this year, and It’s pretty clear that I’ve developed more in the past 10 months than in many years beforehand. I guess pushing onesself really helps sometimes!

I’m counting this one as 2 just for the sheer size and complexity involved. Looking back, I actually counted the Knight Desecrator as a single finished model, I think today I’d have added the pilot and each figure on the base to that count, but that’s just something I’m going to have to learn from.

Up next - something much smaller! Or maybe, a small part of something bigger…

28/10/22
Weeks Elapsed: 43
Miniatures Finished: 35