Ash in Belfry's Armour of the Dead

Ash in Belfry's Armour of the Dead

My last post was of my character in my current D&D campaign, Ash the Fire Genasi Warmage.  As I was making that, I was also working on another version of him.  In the campaign, the DM made a homebrew Spell called Belfry's Armour of the Dead.  It used a corpses worth of bones and creates magical armour out of the bones for the spellcaster, like a beefed-up Mage Armour.  The idea was so cool that I wanted to make a mini of my character wearing that armour.

The spell causes the bones to open up and encase the various body parts, not necessarily where they would normally go, such as femurs to legs, but any bone to anywhere it covers.  It took a very long time to sculpt as I could only work on a few parts at a time so I didn't accidentally smudge a part.

The body is a Ghost Archipelago Crewman and the arms are Frostgrave Barbarians.  The ribs on the front and back look sculpted because of the colour but they were actually made form molds of the Games Workshop Skeleton Warriors body's, which I cut into two and hollowed out to fit on.  The spike on the shoulder pad and the horns on top of the shoulder are from GW's Tzaangors.  The skull on the shoulder is from a shield I think, that way it would have the flattened out look I was going for.

I had sculpted a head with a skull helmet but once I started painting it, I really hated the way it turned out so I went with the same head I had used for the other mini from the Frostgrave Wizards sprue.  I don't think the head goes well with the body so I may replace it in the future.

An issue I have with this miniature is that he doesn't look like an adventurer, he's missing his bag of holding, cloak, wand, etc...

Paintwise, I followed the basic tutorial for GW's Skeletons for the bone, Base Zandri Dust, heavy wash with Agrax Earthshade, highlighted with Ushabti Bone mixed with Corax White.  The right hand and left pointing finger are coloured to represent two spells that get used a lot, Bigby's Hand and Disintegrate.  The glowing isn't as good as I hoped, I think I rushed them slightly.

For the head, the hair was done based on a tutorial for fire and the eyes were Trollslayer Orange.  I had used a dark red for the eyes on the previous mini but I feel the orange makes them look more gllike they glowed.

 

 

 

 

 

All in all, it's really cool to have some miniatures that represent fun stuff from a campaign.  I definitely want to do this for more characters and have different miniatures as they progress.  For this character, the armour can be made form any bones, so I would like to repeat this sculpt but with dragon bones as the inspiration, showing an evolution of the character.