Darklands: The Fomoraic

Today I'd like to show you another kindred of Darklands, the tabletop game by Mierce Miniatures: The Fomoraic. Actually I wanted to spare those for a later article, as one of the models is very special to me and they actually aren't the second host I painted. Those with keen eyes might have spotted my second host on one of the pictures of the Ysian article, but I'm still waiting for a base and a model to complete these. So here we are.

The Fomoraic are the great evil of the Darklands world. The immortal, deep-sea deities Baalor and Conand advance from the north and aim to enslave the living and create a world of ice. Their armies are mainly composed of heavily armoured humans, different types of beast-men (from minotaurs over rhino-men to mammoth-men) and most important to me: horrors from the deep .Also the beasts are nice miniatures, I want to follow a "Terror from the Deep"-Theme with my host and will only include these loathsome deep-sea creatures and humans. The following 500 Gold host consists of only 2 miniatures. A human Warchief and Uuthüll, the risen Kraaken, one of the most unique and stunning "miniatures" Mierce produces and basically the reason why I backed their first kickstarter.

Nevertheless, let's talk about the Warchief first. The model is actually a character called Kraan. For the humans I have decided on a colour-hierarchy: The darker the armour, the higher the rank. That comes from the idea of having white-armoured infantry, which I believe, will look really nice. So Kraans armour was painted really dark blue, highlighted to a medium blue grey and then inked blue and black again. For contrast I added white hair and the slightly metallic, blue-white shield. The eye, the symbol of the Fomoraic is painted with true metal paints (those I use on my Kingdom Death minis as well) to make it shine and stand out.

I'm quite happy with the miniature itself, but might add a bit snow or ice to the base one day and am thinking about repainting the axe with glowing runes...we'll see.

As I've already said, Uuthüll is very special to me. Rarely have I encountered a model that fascinated me like him and it even made me begin reading Lovecraft, as I felt he was certainly Cthulhu-inspired. Uuthüll was originally thought for a diorama, where he's pitted against a dragon on a stony cliff, but due to my inexperience and the lack of materials the project stalled, so when I decided to create armies for Darklands I was very keen on painting him. My idea for him was a grey-bluish body with a realistically coloured octopus head. My goal was to make it seem like the octopus overtook the body.

I had completely built him, but left the head loose. So I started with the main body and used my cheap airbrush again, that did so well on the Ysians. It worked great at first and I planned to use it on the head too, but soon I felt like the spray wasn't that smooth anymore and as I applied the last but one layer the compressor suddenly lost pressure and turned unusable. After digesting the anger I decided to leave the skin the way it was and not spoil the smoothness with my bad blending skills. I went on with the tentacles and used a nice Vallejo skin colour named Heavy Warm grey, inked it with flesh tone and highlighted with the same colour again.

For the head I used the picture of a real octopus for inspiration, also I get goosebumps only by thinking of it. It is strange that I am fascinated by Uthüll and giant Kraaken in general, but can't even get close to a real one. I had done the tentacles lower side when I did it on the main body and blended the warm grey upwards. Then went on to Tan and finished with pure Terracotta. The whole head was then washed red and dark brown. The result was nice and easily achieved.

The dragon ship prow he's using as a club was painted from brown to light grey and then washed with dark brown wash and highlighted only with grey afterwards. I had seen wood of that colour, when I looked at pictures of real life wrecks that were washed ashore and had rotten away on the beach.

The anchor needed to be something special and I knew I wanted it as realistically as possible for an anchor that lay at the ocean floor for a long time and so simply painting rust was out of the question. So I used Vallejo pigments, which I normally use to do dust, and mixed it with glaze medium until it became a nice paste. I applied different shades to the anchor and some to the prow and then, when it had dried, I painted the smoothest parts and all on the prow in a light turquoise. I was stunned myself how nice the pigments turned out and even thought about applying the same treatment to his leg armour, but decided against it, as I feared to overdo it.

I hope you enjoy these models as much as I do and will stay tuned for the next presentation.

Cheers,

Sven

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