Reaper Bones 77454 Ogre Clubber, 77455 Ogre Smasher, 77456 Ogre Guard - Palette Cleanser 8

I've not posted as much recently. I've been very busy painting, but of the room decorating variety rather than the fantasy miniature variety. Hobby productivity will be down this month, but the house will be better for it, so I'm not complaining. I'm between rooms at the moment though, so time for another blog post.

My latest Palette Cleanser is another completion job, this time three jolly ogres.

"We be ogres three, pardonez moi, je vous en pris."

Ogre Clubber

Ogre  Smasher

Ogre Guard

The Smasher was already more or less finished. The other two were at the basecoat stage. When I started these three I'd planned to properly shade and highlight the flesh, being the most obvious area on each ogre. I started with the clubber, blending up from Vallejo Extra Opaque Heavy Skintone, adding increasing amounts of Vallejo Game Color Dwarf Flesh and then VGC Elf Flesh. However, the end result was chalky and didn't look right. I know the fifth edition D&D ogres are quite pale, but I wanted something darker. I tried a wash of Vallejo Flesh Wash. The result was much better, and the reddish tint kind of ties him in with my 15mm ogres.

I never got round to finishing the other two ogres, so when I grabbed the guard out of a box of bones it seemed a good opportunity to finish off all three.

This time I just drybrushed the flesh before giving them a wash, using the same colours as I used for the Clubber. I'm not convinced there's much difference in the end. The various bits of clothing and equipment were painted fairly simply, just a dark basecoat then a couple of highlights.

Varnishing and basing was as standard.

Now these are lovely minis, possibly my favourites for D&D ogres, but they have a lot of little details, straps, bits of looted stuff, shields etc. The Clubber even looks like he has stuffed a crumhorn in his belt. They look good and tell a fun story, but they do not make painting them a quick job. This might be partly why I left them unfinished before.

Anyway, they are done now, and will be very useful once we get back to face to face gaming. I have the set with the female ogre shaman (shawoman?) and the leader in heavy armour, along with various goblin servants, and I've also got another set of the clubber, smasher and guard. Altogether they should make a great series of encounters. I might do a bit of conversion, such as weapon swaps, with the second set to give them some individuality. I can also see them coming in useful in the fantasy version of Fistful of Lead. Maybe I should include the rest of the ogres as a mini project in the near future?