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Conan the Barbarian!!!

 

I am a huge Conan the Barbarian fan. Books, movies, comics, all of it. Conan reaches back to an era of sword and sorcery which we don't see much in fantasy anymore, to mysticism and mystery and a little bit of horror. Low, dark, minimal fantasy.

I've spent the last few weeks making terrain and painting Napoleonic soldiers for The Silver Bayonet, and I wanted a bit of a break. I picked up this "Conan" model from Reaper miniatures. I think it was just labelled as a generic barbarian, but we all know who this really is...

I started off by priming him with some tan/brown craft paint that I have laying around. A few coats of this, just to make sure of coverage.

I also have a bottle of Gulliman Flesh contrast paint that was given to me by a friend, and which I had never used before. I thought it would make a nice dark flesh tone on top of this brownish primer. I was a bit aggressive and the shadows were a bit deep, but I just rolled with it.


I blocked in all my base colours. This is a really muted palette, but I wanted to stick to skin, cloth, and leather. This just means I needed a bit of a stronger highlight afterwards to differentiate parts.


All done. A bit of metallic highlighting, some drybrushing on the cloth and hair, simple eyes, but mostly highlighting the muscles with a ruddier skin tone and adding some pinky flesh and breaking up the colours a bit. Nothing fancy, but a quick 1-2 hour paint job start to finish.




Also, I was jamming to Mastodon's album, Emperor of Sand the whole time. The album art by Medusa Wolf has been a huge inspiration for me, so painting Conan to psychadelic desert metal while looking at psychadelic desert art was a good time.




Comments

  1. GamerJamesFebruary 7, 2022 at 5:12 AM

    I never realized you’re so into Conan. I remember watching the movie in the 80s and loving the fantasy setting, and how so much of my watching after that was compared to it. I was young enough that at the time I thought anything set in a fantasy setting was part of Conan’s world, and even when watching things like Willow, I assumed it was all connected, lol.

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