Fearful Symmetry - Watchmen's Rorschach

When I saw that Knight was putting out a Watchmen set of miniatures, I knew I had to paint Rorschach's. I'm still on the fence about the others, since they're all based on the movie iterations, and those diverge more for the other characters, but, well, Rorschach was too classic to mess with.


For me, Watchmen's aesthetics are largely defined by John Higgins's ugly, clashing, weird color scheme that totally works (after you can get used to it), and I wanted to give proper respect to his oft-overlooked contribution. I considered trying to mimic it closely, but decided that something that flat on a model would look like I didn't know how to shade, so I decided to go with a looser homage, with a nod to his palate, and added just a little reference Gibbons's hatching in the deepest recesses.

And before anyone asks, no: Rorschach is not my favorite character in Watchmen. While I think he's got a great mix of dark humor and pathos, the honor of favorite would have to go to Nite Owl, and probably for a reason few others share: I think that his ornithology article, in the context of all the other themes in the book, does a pretty much perfect job characterizing him while making describing an existential counterargument to nihilism, though it superficially feels like a throwaway.