Painting Blood Rage

The Bear Clan offered a unique challenge to paint bear fur that would look unique yet realistic. SOme delving into Google images of various bear colors offered a wide palette to choose from. The miniatures are quite bulky but with enough details so as to provide interesting poses. Not a fan of the mystics though, especially facial features.

While I was not (and still am not) in love with the models sculpts of the Wild Boar clan, painting them added some details to them that makes them bearable to deploy on the table. I found the regular clansmen legs to be strangely sculpted and failing at a dynamic pose, without even comparing them to Games Workshop masterpieces such as the ones recently designed for Warcry single pose miniatures. In the end, another clan has been added to Blood Rage and offers another fielding possibility for games such as the excellent Ragnarok from Osprey – https://ospreypublishing.com/ragnarok .

The Raven clan for Blood Rage was a pleasure to paint. I particularly like the ‘beefiness’ of the miniatures and the ‘wicked witch’ style of the shamans. These miniatures would be a perfect fit for viking fantasy skirmish games, such as Ragnarok. I know I have mentioned this Osprey game before so that should be a hint that it is coming to a blog near you soon ?

For my Blood Rage miniatures, I adopted a very simple technique that exceeds board game/tabletop standards in many ways and takes minutes to perform. All you need is:

Step one – Apply paint to your base

No need to ensure complete coverage or lack of streaks. This paint layer is only there to mask basing material irregularity. I am using craft paint for this step, burn sienna being my go to color.

Step two – Choose your basic material.

For this job, I chose Army painter Grass Green, Brown Battleground and Ash Grey and GW Glade Grass.

Step three – Apply glue to the part of your miniature base you wish to cover with your first choice of basing material.

Use a toothpick (for 20/28mm bases) or a brush/sculpting tool for larger ones). Be parsimonious with the glue as it will ease the next step and avoid white splotches in your basing aspect. When dealing with a large group of miniatures, such as this viking clan, try to process 3 or 4 at a time.miniatures at a time.

Step four – Dip the base of the miniature in your basing material container.

While there is always a risk of contaminating the content with glue, if you followed step 3, I found it to be less wasteful on the basing material than to pour some in a separate container.

Step five – Apply glue to the other part of the base and dip the miniature base in the other basing material.

Apply glue in the same manner to the rest of the bases and repeat step 4. Of course, you are free to choose more than two basing material types and thus repeat this step as many times as you have basing material. Keep in mind, however, that if you are working with board games pieces or rank and file wargame miniatures, you really do not have to get to this level of sophistication. That allows you to deploy these miniatures on the table faster.

The Ram clan was a pleasure to paint as the sculpts had interesting personality, except for the clan leader which, like all of the leaders in Bloodrage, is quite unremarkable, probably due to the need to present them with a recognizable pose.

The sea serpent was, in my opinion, one of the mosts iconic miniature of the game and I both looked forward and drewaded painting it. Adrian Smith wonderful art served as an excellent inspiration and I am quite pleased with the end result, feeling the creature merges quite well with the ocean from which it emerges. I used satin varnish instead of matt so as to maintain the ‘wet’ look.

The Valkyrie miniature does not have a very dynamic pause but, as it is usually the case, painting the miniature added a lot to its appeal.

I decided to split my Bloodrage monsters into 3 groups so as to pace my painting and integrate the last two clans I have to finish to complete the game. This first wave contains small and large monsters, all of which I am rather happy with.

The giant boar (dire boar) makes for a very interesting monster. I particularly like the base which allowed me to use moss.

This clan was probably the most enjoyable clan I painted so far, along with the Raven clan. The miniatures achieve an excellent balance between the feminine form and a sense of dangerousness. I moved away from the artist depiction (using red as a dominant color alongside green) so as to preserve the clan identity.

Here comes the second ‘wave’ of Bloodrage monsters and they were a blast to paint.