Faces in the Void - Nightmare Edition Herald of Obliteration Crew, part 1

Though I almost immediately took a shine to the concept, it took a long time for inspiration to hit for this paint job.



The crew's theme (aesthetic and narrative) hit me as something special almost immediately. Then I saw the preview rules and was sold- for me, this was Leveticus for second edition, in that it felt like a very unconventional and counter-intuitive playstyle. Where Leveticus was built around killing himself, Tara's crew was based on removing your own models from play and giving enemies bonuses. So, with all that weirdness, I wanted to do something extra for the crew's look. So... back to the models.

What I was going for with the crew is attempting to invert the tone as well as I could: recesses are bright and edges are dark. The photo above was my test, after the fact, to see if it worked, and I'm happy with the results: I think the inverted Nothing Beast looks pretty close to how you'd normally highlight black and shade white. The B+W was partially because I thought it had the right bleak look, partially because I think I'd have gone insane trying to invert the hue too.

The Void Wretches (dubbed "the sand fleas") were the first of Tara's Crew that I painted, though. I added black around their faces to make the eyes and mouth stand out, as the alternative (doing both in black) looked a bit conventional. The speckles were just to give some variation.

The Nothing Beast was quite a lot of work, and this is my third or fourth pass trying to get the feel just right.

I extended his "torso" by around half an inch, as I felt the arms were getting a bit ape-like, since they were too close to the ground and thought he was a little too compact for a scary ethereal beasty. Also, I added a fair amount of freehand to his back, because I wasn't really sure how to blend the carapace part with the tentacle-y bottom.

I'm still not sure, should he have a sandy base like the Void Wretches, or does he look better with his swirly base?

Oh, and not as refined b/c I thought of it after shooting so don't have a pic on a white backdrop, but another pic of a Void Wretch and its inverted colors: