Yo-ho! Avast ye swabs, the Mumblings be a come over all nautical of late! I've embarked on a new project with some pals, and we are assembling some warbands, terrain, monsters and such for Ghost Archipelago. The plan is to build and paint now, and play later when things allow for it. It keeps us all hobbying, and gives us something cool to look forward to down the road.
As you may have guessed, Ghost Archipelago is all pirates, treasures, strange islands and terrible beasties. I took this as an opportunity to finally paint some undead pirates. As with orcs, everyone gets to pirates sooner or later.
So, having chosen the crew of the ghostship Kraken as my salty swabs, I picked out a band of ten undead buccaneers. I need at least four crew, so I picked out the first two as testers for the group.
Empty Isaac is a lowly deckhand aboard the Kraken. He is a forgetful fellow, and struggles to find the words to communicate with his shipmates. Happily, Benjamin, his gull, is most articulate and can express what poor Isaac no longer can. This may have something to do with the fact that Benjamin has eaten most of Isaac's brain over the years. Many postulate Ben isn't actually a real gull at all, but some phantasmal flicker of Isaac's persona. Ben ascertains this is nonsense, and he is a perfectly normal talking seagull.
Both the minis here are from a Kickstarter run by
Warploque Miniatures for their Arcworlde game some years back. They released an entire crew, so there will be a few more from the range appearing in the band.
Yardarm Tom has been a deckhand aboard the Kraken ever since he was cut down from the gallows, though he had been left there a little too long in truth, and the crows had had their way with him. The experience has made Tom somewhat grumpy, and he whispers hoarsely to himself constantly. It's better not to listen to what he is saying. There's a lot about crows.
I used a lot of Contrast paint on these two fellows, especially on their skin. Red, green and purple, thinned down with medium makes for fun painting. A round or two of highlights and that was them done. I added some planking to my usual basing technique to give it a more seabed flavour, while still sitting well with my normally based undead. I added some dead lichen, which could be dead grasses, wavy seaweed or dead coral, depending on how you squint at it. I've accrued a few fish and sea creatures from the Idoneth Deepkin range, so I'll be lashing them onto the next bases I do. Some are big enough to make for individual miniatures in their own right. I feel a pet moray eel coming on.
With these two lowlifes done, I'll be moving onto more prestigious members of the crew next.
