Painting some ghouls

 

As some of you will know, I've been playing some Rangers of Shadow Deep (RoSD) lately... and that has meant building specific terrain pieces, and buying/painting certain models. And, as you've probably guessed, in this blog post I'll be talking about ghouls... lots of ghouls... :)

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So, first off, a while back I picked up this fellow for £1 (from the bargain bin of Too Fat Goblinz - a store in Stafford), and I figured that would be a good mini to practice my colour scheme on (as I wanted to do something pretty quick - basically just letting 'washes' do most of the work).

Anyway, here it is with just the basic colours added:

And here it is with a few tactical washes (i.e. I've not put one dark wash over the entire thing - rather a different wash over each of the colours):

...which doesn't look too bad. However, after being varnished and properly based (and held at arms length ;) ), it looked a whole lot better:

So, armed with this basic colour scheme (note that I'll list all the colours I used at the end of this article), I made a start on putting some Mantic ghouls together... eight of them in fact... and undercoated them with (brush on) Army Painter Grey primer:

Next I applied all the basecoats...

...then the various washes...

...and finally, based them with some Geek Gaming 'scrublands' (though I did kinda smooth out the step between the integral base and the mdf base with some AK texture paste first). And, just like the test model, once all that was done, they didn't look too bad!

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Anyway, for some of the missions/scenarios in the RoSD core book, there's a couple of different ghoul variants - the first of these being Ghoul Fiends (essentially more powerful ghouls... perhaps akin to D&D ghasts)...

...and for these, I simply did a few hand swaps (you get some weapon holding hands on the Mantic sprues - so that's what I used), and I also used the heads with hair to distinguish them further. However, you only get one 'hair head' on each sprue - so to add a tiny bit more variety I added a second head from the Frostgrave cultists that I've also purchased recently (again, for RoSD).

And, while I did have to dremmel out the neck area, it's a pretty good match I think!

Furthermore, the keen eyed among you might also have noticed that I added some spare pouches and stuff from the Frostgrave gnolls that I painted up previously - again, just to make them stand out from the regular ghouls.

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Anyway, next on the list was some ghoul 'rotters' (disease carrying ghouls that have continued to decompose) - and for these I just opted to use some Mantic zombies straight out of the box...

...and, since they've been painted in the same scheme as the rest of the ghouls - that should (hopefully) differentiate them from actual zombies on the tabletop (that's the plan at least).

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Now, for the final type of ghoul (the 'flingers' - creatures that throw bits of bone etc. at their prey) - that proved to be a bit trickier. But what I settled on was a few hand swaps (using some of the Mantic zombie arms that are clutching a severed arm)... and also drilled out some hands and put some bones into them (again, from the Frostgrave gnoll accessories I think).

I also added a whole bunch of accessories from most of the kits I've mentioned thus far (ghouls, gnolls, and cultists) - just to make it look like they are carrying around a ton of stuff that can be thrown at their enemies:

And, while I'm not 100% happy with the colour that I went for on the dismembered body parts (I think a slight greenish hint would have been a better option), they too haven't turned out too bad:

So, with that, I think I've got all the ghouls I'll need (at least for a while)... and while the main plan was to get them done for RoSD, they'll be useful for RPGs... and I also made sure that I have 20 of them in total... just so that I can use them as a unit in Oathmark (or similar) too:

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Anyway, as I mentioned earlier, if you're interested in knowing what colours I used, here's the list (note that they're all from Army Painter):

BASECOATS

Flesh: 1 part Mutant Hue / 1 part Filthy Cape / 2 parts Corpse Pale

Bones: Skeleton Bone

Rags: Monster Brown

Rocks & Hair: Field Grey

Wood & Leather: 1 part Dark Stone / 1 part Leather Brown

Metal: Gunmetal

Severed Body Parts: 1 part Barbarian flesh / 1 part Kobold Skin

WASHES (in this order)

Bones: 1 part Soft Tone / 1 part Wash Mixing Medium

*Severed Body Parts: Light Tone

*Flesh: 1 part Light Tone / 1 part Red Tone / 1 part Purple Tone / 3 parts Wash Mixing Medium

Rocks & Hair: 1 part Strong Tone / 1 part Military Shader / 1 part Wash Mixing Medium

**Rags: 1 part Strong Tone / 1 part Wash Mixing Medium

**Metal: 1 part Strong Tone / 1 part Wash Mixing Medium

**Wood & Leather: 1 part Strong Tone / 1 part Wash Medium (add an extra wash: 2 strong tone / 1 mixing medium, over the top to darken it further)

*an extra red wash was applied to any open wounds on the 'rotters' and to the severed arms.

**these are all applied at the same time.