Darkness Elemental miniature – Rackham Confrontation
Rackham produced some of the best sculpts ever… Their Confrontation line is composed by “heroic scale” 32mm miniatures and many characters are hulking figures definitely larger than humans. The company was active from 1996 and unfortunately liquidated in 2010*. We’ll speak about the factions, sculptors and styles in the future…..
This great mini was sculpted by Stéphane Simon (I’m a fan!), he has a lot of spectacular figures in his portfolio and is still doing great works.
The Darkness Elemental is one of my favorite miniatures, it’s full of (gory!) details and has a nice dynamic pose. The tissues, skins, tentacles, bones and ooze seem to be moving, crawling up forming the figure and entangling themselves.
All those details and parts were really fun to paint and experiment on. Many of them can be noticed only by closely examining the figure. Before painting I had to search the sculpt thoroughly to figure out all that’s there, so I could define the main tones and color accents.
The miniature is metal (of course), I cleaned it, searched for a pose I like and pinned it. I usually drill holes and use small steel pins on multiparts miniatures, so to better keep them together with cyanoacrylate. I also use epoxy putty to fill holes and do minor sculpting works on bad-fitting parts or heavy modifications (this is not the case).
I also put up some decoration on the base using blue/yellow Kneadatite and solvents: darkness “veins” and some larvae.
I painted the elemental mainly with oil colors, of course I started from black priming 😉
The finishing is matte (spraying 2-3 protective layers), but I varnished some details and elements of the base, to give them a more wet and oozy look.
*At least some of Confrontation IP (and maybe some of the original moulds) have been acquired by Cyanide Studio, that is currently producing through Legacy Miniatures and distributing through CMON… unfortunately in resin! There are also a number of other “less official” producers around on the net offering metal minis. From various forums I’ve understood that the quality of the minis offered varies greatly, from cheap recasts with less details, to (almost) the same quality as the originals.
Sources and research:
http://haekel.free.fr/spip.php
http://simonminiaturesculptor.blogspot.com/
http://underthemountainblog.com/athenaeum/aarklash-archive/factions/elementals/