I’ve written something like this section for just about every army I’ve built recently. Before I put paint on my Beastclaw Raiders army (you can read more about them here) I want to be very clear about the aesthetic and what I’m trying to achieve. As I type this I have no more than a very cursory idea of what that is, so here’s hoping putting words down helps!
I’m going to start with the beasts themselves and then when I’ve got that sorted I’ll move on to the ogres (ogors?) and finally the freehand elements. It all has to work together though so that will be considered at the end too.
Starting from the bottom up
I have an award winning painter doing my bases for me (a wise man, I don’t remember who or where once wrote that great miniature painting is about faces and bases) so these need to be factored in. They’re snow bases with grey rock on. So it makes sense that my Beastclaw Raiders come from somewhere cold. So what does that mean for the colours of my beasts?
How cold is cold?
Ok so let’s start from the top. Or the bottom. But let’s start somewhere polar. To be clear, this is a miniature gaming blog, not a copy of National Geographic so what I’m looking for here is reference material. A quick search of the internet for ‘Polar animals,’ brings up the usual suspects:
(credit clockwise from left: https://animalhow.com/arctic-animals-north-pole/ , https://www.steppestravel.com/en-us/arctic-big-5/ , https://www.coolantarctica.com/Antarctica%20fact%20file/arctic_animal.php)
I do like this look and I think it would be good to paint and stand out. It’s not white (I don’t think there’s a single white strand of hair on any of these animals) so the colour differences would be great to paint. Being light coloured would also make any free hand pop even more.
What does GW think?
One thing I am wondering is if deviating from the ip in terms of colours etc would damage our chances of an army nomination. Well, actually, light coloured big beasts are a thing:
I don’t like the blue / grey ice shades they use as a base but I’m liking this light colour scheme even more now.
But Thundertusks and Stonehorns aren’t polar bears – they’re Mammoths?
Yeah, agreed and this is something else I’ve had buzzing around my head. Ogors are, effectively, cavemen. Their art and aesthetic is very caveman so it stands to reason that the things they’re riding are tame mammoths (reason?) So what colour were they?
Credit from left to right: https://www.sciencenews.org/article/resurrecting-woolly-mammoth-cells-dna , http://www.fossilmall.com/EDCOPE_Enterprises/vertebrates/vfossil25/vertfossils25.htm
Sorry for the pretty gross pic. Basically they were ginger. For some reason this was the original colour I had in my head for how to paint the big beasts (I think this was just because that’s how my mate who played Ogres in 8th had them). The problem with this colour is that it’s going to make it very hard for freehand and other colours to pop against it. A lighter colour (like the creamy off white with grey patches on the wolf above) is visually interesting but also works as a canvas.
Ok, I’m glad I wrote this – polar Beastclaws it is! As always, any comments or queries let me know!
2 thoughts on “Choosing my Beastclaw Raiders aesthetic part 1 – the beasts”