Gotta Paint

It's no secret that I'm a huge fan of the Conan stories by Robert E. Howard. One of the reasons I first started reading the books that collected the stories was the amazing artwork that had been selected for each. Frank Frazetta and Boris Vallejo were the artists who created the 12 covers for the collected works that Lin Carter and L. Sprague De Camp put together from the complete and incomplete stories that Howard had created and I've read and re-read them many times.

It occurred to me that I could marry my passion for the stories to my painting hobby and I'm now embarking on a plan to create homage works to each of the 12 paintings that adorn the original Conan collected works.

Up first this famous Frazetta piece that is on the cover of the second book in the series (ignore the banner at the top which is from a Dark Horse series of comics, not the books I mentioned):


Keep in mind, this is not an attempt to recreate the paintings in metal miniatures (probably impossible unless I learn to sculpt miniatures of my own) but rather to create homage pieces that blend the elements of the paintings and the stories that they're based upon. To that end I found this fantastic barbarian warrior figure that I think nicely evokes Howard's Cimmerian while also having a similar feel to the Conan that Frazetta created and painted.


I forgot to take a picture of the unpainted (and untrimmed - I had to cut a brace out that was between his raised foot and the ground) figure, but since all I've done so far is a quick layer of black on various parts of the figure, it's not like you've missed much.

UPDATE:


I didn't realize that the brown paint I bought was a gloss, so that's not great, but the brown is a deep undercoat, so once I layer a few coats of flesh tone on the skin and some lighter brown on the fur portions of the outfit, it'll likely be fine.

On the upside, I'll have a nice gloss finish on the belt when I'm done.

Further updates:

Using a new paint (that I'm not sold on - too yellow to be Caucasian fleshtone) added the flesh tones.


Now some brown on both the flesh and fur parts. Still too yellow.


Some steel on the sword, shield and belt buckle. A touch of gold on the sword too. A little more touch-up work still to be done to "de-yellow" the skin areas.