I See You!

 In my efforts to continue to expand my menagerie of monsters for games like Frostgrave and D&D, I painted these Beholders a while ago - just got round to photographing them nicely while I was doing a few extra shots for the D&D campaign. 

Beholders are a classic D&D enemy, so I knew I needed at least one. I ordered the Nolzur's version, but wasn't sure how good it was going to be based on the pictures online, so I also ordered the Gale Force 9 Xanathar model. When they both turned up, I wasn't disappointed by either of them - they are both great models with some lovely details and strong character. Now I just need to get the party up to a high enough level that they can take two of them on at once - it may be a while!!! 😅

I decided I didn't want to use the flying bases for either of them. I've sort of gone off the clear plastic flying bases - they can be a pain when assembling a model, as you don't want to hit them with spray undercoat, but then they can also go frosty when using matt varnish spray when they're painted. And, at the end of the day, you can still see them either way. So I used a couple of Warhammer 40mm Hero Bases, attached to 50mm lipped bases to give them a more stable footprint (though the Xanathar needed some extra pennies under the base to add weight for a bit more stability as well). Getting the flying base off the Nolzur's nodel was a bit of a pain as it was pre-attached and quite thick, but it came off eventually. 

I'm really happy with the finished result. I wanted the bases to be a bit different to my normal grey dungeon bases, representing some ancient sandstone architecture, which gives a good contrast to the models without distracting from them. They appear to be floating just in front of these bits of stone, which was exactly what I wanted so that worked well. I think each of them needed a couple of pins to get them securely attached, but now they're rock solid. 

In terms of painting, I went for contrast paints followed up by some drybrushing. The contrast blue didn't work so well on Xanathar so he needed some extra layers. Overall, very pleased with both models and look forward to using them at some point.

As a bonus, these are a few of the earliest D&D enemies I painted up for the campaign we were playing a long time ago (when I was first introduced to the game as a young, inexperienced Half-Orc!). The spiders are classic old Games Workshop spiders that I had in my bits box for years, and work perfectly on those small bases. The crabs and cave fishers were both from Antediluvian Miniatures, who make some great stuff (I'll be putting up photos of some of their dinosaurs at some point). 

These were just generic creepy crawlies for dungeons, painted nice and quickly with basic colours and heavy washing, but they do the job perfectly. I wanted to add a fair bit of rockiness to the bases to give a sense of them crawling over objects to get at the adventurers, plus add some variation to the models, which I think worked out well, seems like even the monopose spiders are swarming along a dungeon floor to get you!