The Rest of the Survivors (Painted Mid Sept, 18)

"Somewhere in the place of stone faces, nameless men and women stand together. They have nothing but a need to survive and a lantern to light their struggle."

- Excerpt from Kingdom Death: Monster, The First Story

Starting Survivors: Alister, Lucy, Ezra, Zachary

Since the White Lion, I wanted to finish the base playing set, so I set on the path to finish the beginning Survivors: Lucy, Ezra, and Zachary. Alister isn't included in this blog post other than the above picture since I focused on him earlier. All of these were painted around mid to late September.

When I began on the rest of the survivors, I had a slightly different direction versus what I had in the past: I wanted to experiment with the color scheme a bit and go out of what the expectation of the DKM artists had in mind.

First up: Lucy

Lucy is depicted as a pale, dark haired, almost timid looking woman. The pose she takes with this miniature illustrates that well. I wanted all my starting survivors to look a bit grungier than was depicted since in the story, they started with nothing. Also, I wanted to experiment a bit with highlighting black hair so I tried to give Lucy dark purple highlights. It didn't come out great, but I didn't want to make it too obvious earlier. All survivors start with ink dripping from their eyes, and I wanted to accentuate that with Lucy as well. I think it came out better than Alister.

Next up: Ezra.

Ezra is a slightly tanned, deep red haired wild woman. My depiction follows that representation with a greater focus on the "grunge." I tried to make the hair look a bit more disheveled and the wash  for the shadowing on the skin was intended to be darker. Like Alister and Lucy, she has darkened eyes (Lucy still came out better). Side note: I loved the level of detail with the butt crack; such a random aspect that I had to exploit with a bit of over-the-top shading. Example below:

I added a lot of shading to that butt crack

Last but not least: Zachary.

Wallpaper opportunity...

Zachary is depicted as olive skinned and dark haired. I've always seen Zachary as something of a stoic smithy, especially how naturally stronger looking and darker toned he is. KDM is a world without sun, so to be dark skinned, you may need to be near a fire a lot, like a smith's workplace. I wanted to focus on more natural wash for shadowing which shows pretty well in the close up pictures. I also envision Zachary as being the oldest in the group. I highlighted his dark brown hair and beard with grey along with a bit of salt and pepper on his sideburns. Unfortunately, this didn't come out well and as such, doesn't show too well in the pictures. Still, I think the shading of the skin tones is better than past miniatures. 

All the miniatures share the same coloring and shading style of the loin cloth (again, to accentuate the dirtiness of where they first awoke), each lantern is painted the same, and I'm keeping the bases the same coloring scheme to keep things uniform. In the future, I'll work a bit more on the lanterns.

One thing that I've really begun to respect with the KDM miniature models are the poses of the characters. As I described the personality of the characters insinuated in the story of the game, one can get a feel for these personalities from the poses. I think this really shows the mastery that the creators of these miniatures possess.