sad little men.

#fediPaint is a semi-irregular painting challenge on the fediverse. I’ve taken part in it at every opportunity since getting back into the hobby – it’s always chilled and friendly, and tends to have interesting prompts for the style or theme. In this case, it’s sticking to the Zorn Palette, beloved of #blanchitsu painters everywhere (OG included).

Picking a miniature was easy – I’d been looking for an excuse to paint up Knucklebones Miniatures’ Reaching Goddess since it popped up on Patreon a couple of months ago. I’ve never used this palette restriction before though, and honestly found it a bit of a struggle at first – while you can mix up a lot of options with these four colours, I’ve become very used to reaching into a big drawer of random paints and pulling out something that seems vaguely right, at least as a starting point. And while I’d originally taken it as ‘yellow/red/black/white’, I ended up being glad I picked up proper yellow ochre and cadmium red acrylics – if only because they were unfamiliar and required me to think about what I wanted in the colour scheme. That said I cheated a bit with the black – I occasionally darkened colours with Vallejo’s Greasy Black Xpress paint, which is one of my favourite tools for murky washes. I felt like this would be alright given that it’s a brown-tinted black that could absolutely be mixed from the original oils.

Painting it

I’ll be honest, this was one where I just started putting paint on and hoping a plan would come together later. I wanted to use yellow for the cloak – the mini had instantly felt like it needed to be vaguely Autumnal, with the desiccated body / newborn face implying a cyclical theme. So I block-painted everything and hoped it would stop looking like I didn’t know what I was doing once I got to the details.

I went through a few rounds of glazes / washes / dry brushing before I felt like it started to come together and the sketch basically worked. I would have loved to reach for some metallics for the lanterns / chains but wanted to keep to the theme, so I just kept those dark with highlights so I could decide what to do with them later. I used a sponge to add texture to the flat surfaces, mostly on the pauldrons – for these I originally started masking them to add painted surfaces, but fucked one of them up royally when trying to even up some gaps, so I ended up going more freehand. I also painted in the lantern ‘panels’ with almost unadulterated red.

I eventually decided to oil wash the whole thing (a Zorn-appropriate mix, naturally) with a redder wash on the fabric / pauldrons, and a lot of extra black for skin and bone details. I pretty much coated the whole thing with the washes (aside from the lanterns) then pulled it back from the highlights with sponges, which added a nice depth to the body – I didn’t feel like it had enough contrast before.

Basing and finishing

I considered calling it there, but I ended up spending a good chunk of extra time glazing in highlights on the face and cloak to smooth it out and improve the contrast further – the features on this mini are so good it looked great with just dry-brushing and washes, but I’m glad I put the effort in. I had originally been expecting to put together a vaguely detailed ‘traditional’ base, maybe a woodland floor with leaves on an appropriately-sized Citadel base. However I’d recently wandered down to the beach with my kid to scavenge interesting rocks that could act as bases for sculpts, and this nearly-rectangular one was calling out to me.

I liked the way the model looked off to one side, and it had big ‘ritual site’ energy, so I glued everything in place and mixed up some blood. I’m not convinced Vallejo Water Effect (which I mixed with a darkened red) is technically in the Zorn palette, but I’m pretty sure John Blanche used a ton of gloss varnish so I’m assuming it’s fine. I used the blood to add a sigil to the rock and the lower hands, as well as a few drips.

If in doubt, add more skulls

I mean basically what the subtitle says – I liked that the composition was off-centre but it felt like it left an awkward space, and the interesting occlusion at the back right was calling out for something. So I built a pile of skulls, obviously.

I primed them by hand and highlighted them quickly, then glued them into a pool of the same blood mixture and drenched them in the stuff, trying to make it flow round the shape of the rock. At that point there was so much blood on the rock it felt like there should be more on the mini, so I added it to all the hands (carrying those bloody skulls up there wouldn’t have been the tidiest task). And then I stopped messing with it.

What I learned (and what I didn’t)

• I actually really enjoyed the limited palette in the end – it forced me to think about shades I might use ahead of time to avoid it becoming bunched up visually.
• I was reasonably happy with the OSL on the cloak and metal (the lantern chains etc) but I think I struggled with it on the floor and the lanterns themselves – I didn’t want them to look like they were lit by a flame, so I wanted to keep the red light red, but I think it ended up looking a bit flat. I got some really good pointers from the extremely talented Blue but my attempts just kept making it worse and I eventually cut my losses and bailed on the idea. I think the limited palette didn’t help me in this case – might need to try this with less restrictions on something in the near future.

• This would definitely have been improved by some non-metallic metals, but you sometimes have to pick your battles. NMM is a problem for Future Me. As I said above, was happy with how the light hit the chains at least.
• I really like the base – I love little features like the blood dribbling off the back of the rock, and I always like using found objects in my builds. However I had considered using this mini for games in the future (probably a lich in a Mordheim warband) and this makes it pretty impractical…