Descent: Journeys In The Dark

Good morning/afternoon/evening everyone!

This week, I have decided to delve into the archives a bit, and have a chat about some miniatures I painted a few years ago. This set of miniatures was from the dungeon-bash boardgame Descent: Journeys In the Dark 2nd Edition, produced by Fantasy Flight Games, which is now, sadly, out of print.

These were painted on commission and the brief was to do them to a decent gaming standard, but not to go too over the top on detail and finish. This gave me a bit of leeway to to have some fun with them. The miniatures themselves were quite nice in themselves, with some really characterful sculpts and poses but, as you can see in the pictures, the detailing left a little to be desired. This was mainly, I suspect, due to the material they were cast in. The plastic used was quite soft and flexible, and didn't hold the detail well and was an utter pain in the arse to glean up properly. When trying to sand or cut the mould lines off, the plastic would fragment into tiny fibres, rather than leave a clean, smooth surface. With some of them I simply gave up trying to remove a lot of the mould lines, for fear of destroying any more detail. The other issue was the scale- these were considerably smaller than GW heroic scale (more in line with the GW LOTR miniatures in terms of scale and proportion) and, while I liked the more realistic proportions it did make for a challenge to get them to look good without taking too long on them. That being said, the smaller scale did mean I could take quite a few shortcuts with the main bulk of painting, allowing me to get away with minimal blending and fewer layers of highlights than I would do for larger-scale miniatures. A couple of layers of highlights and some selective glazes was usually more than enough to get the job done. 

THE CHARACTERS

Alric Farrow	Ashrian	Avric Albright
Belthir	Eliza Farrow	Grisban The Thirsty
Jain Fairwood	Leoric of the Book	Merick Farrow
Syndrael	Tomble Burrowell	Widow Tahra	Zachareth

With the characters (some of which I think came from supplements, rather than the main game, I stuck as close as possible to the character art. As you can see, there's bags of character in the sculpts, and there was plenty of scope to have some fun and even play around with some glow and OSL effects.

THE MONSTERS

Barghest
Cave Spider
Air Elemental	Fire Elemental
Ettin	Ettin
Flesh Moulder
Goblin Archer
Merriod	Merriod
Shadow Dragon	Shadow Dragon
Zombie

I had a lot of fun with the monsters and I could play around with the colours a bit more, especially as they all had duplicates. I was particularly pleased with how the Fire Elemental came out (it's a shame there wasn't a couple more Elementals too, to do Earth and Water. The Barghests were fun, too, with all their open wounds. 

Looking back on these now, a good few years on from painting them, I'm still quite pleased with how they turned out. Undoubtedly I would paint them differently now. When I did these, I hadn't discovered the technique of zenithal priming and preshading and there was no such thing as Contrast paints (or the many alternatives that have come out since) and I think those are all tools and techniques that I'd put into play if I was to approach them now. Casting material issues notwithstanding, they are a nice set of miniatures and worth spending the time to make them look good. I'd happily have another crack at them, if asked, and it's a shame that the game is no longer in print.

Next week I'll be having a bit of a ramble on about painting competitions, and what I'm planning for Golden Demon...

Thanks for reading!

Stu