This week’s showcase features a slightly converted Mantic Ghoul. A head-swap made him into a vampire thrall. He also looks a bit like edgy Yoda in his teenage years, but that is incidental. So buckle up and I give you some pointers regarding the conversion, paintjob and basing.
Converting the Ghoul
The conversion is fairly simple: Just take a Mantic Ghoul body and add a Warlord Orc head. I chose the bald one with pointy teeth and eye patch. All of them have pointed teeth to some extent, but this specific head worked best for a Vampire thrall in my opinion.
Purple is the new black – painting the thrall
Just like Gruff last week this chap is a bit older. In fact I painted him when I got back into miniature painting after a longer hiatus due to work commitments in 2018.
I wanted something a bit different for the skin and decided to go for a desaturated purple combined with a medium green tunic. The only other colour is introduced via the thin yellow line on his tunic and the yellow moss on the base.
Nowadays I would push the contrast using a rather dark shadow colour (violet blue maybe) and add a bit of colour variation to the skin, maybe red, yellow or a warm brown.
The tunic would also benefit from more shading with a dark green with a red bias.
This was also the first time I used Tamiya dry pigments to add dust effects to the clothing. They come in what looks like a make-up dish and can be applied with a small brush. They stay put, so don’t need fixing.
Fallen angel – basing the Thrall
The base is extremely simple. Just a bit of XPS arranged to look like stairs hewn in rock and a few flowers and brushes. I also added a broken angel statuette. I made a press mold of a cake topper with such little angels and can now reproduce and weather them as needed.
Worth noting are the Vallejo effect paints. The range also features a yellow lichen colour, which provides a good base to work from. You apply it in an irregular fashion with a sponge and then mix a bit of orange in to depict the slighter darker inner areas of the lichen. You can also add a faint dark grey line around the edges to delineate it more from the rock.
There we are. A simple conversion, that you could use to make a few thralls for an encounter. I hope you enjoyed the showcase and stay tuned for next week’s installment. As always, wield your brush with honor.
That is a very nice conversion idea, and great painting of course. You are always going the extra mile as showcased by the decoration on the tunic.
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Thanks. It is a fairly simple conversion, but makes use of the Orc heads. I never liked the torsos of the set, but the heads are nice. I might come back to the Ghouls in some point and try out some other colour variations on the skin.
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