The Hounds of Hell

For gamers of a certain vintage 'Chaos' will always be synonymous with Ian Miller's iconic artwork for Realm of Chaos: Slaves to Darkness. From the writhing body horror of the page borders to the full page illustrations, Miller's art gave the wargaming supplement the look and feel of a forbidden, blasphemous tome.

I was already familiar with Ian Miller from his Fighting Fantasy gamebook covers and his work in the Tolkien Illustrated Encyclopedia (more on that below), but Realm of Chaos era Miller blew my teenage mind. I don't think another artist has captured the vibe of chaos so well. Chaos should be weird and Miller turns the weird up to 11. The pieces are also beautifully realised, with dense engraving-style linework making all the grotesque, misshapen wiggliness incredibly detailed. It's like Durer on a seriously bad trip. I absolutely love this stuff.

So when I saw that John Robertson/Myriad Miniatures was doing a third collaboration with Ian Miller, this time based on his chaos illustrations, I got very excited. Check out some of the sculpts on the Osmoticmeld: The Hounds of Hell Kickstarter page. They are wild!

The scope of the Kickstarter is ambitious. There should be enough options to build a full army. I doubt my fun budget will stretch to a whole set, but I'm particularly taken with the followers and knight sculpts that I've seen so far. I will definitely be picking up a few odds and sods.

I did something similar with the first Osmoticmeld Kickstarter. I was a bit skint at the time, but when I saw the sculpt for Signum, based on an uruk hai from Helms Deep (1979), I knew I had to get him. I'd first seen the piece in the Tolkien Illustrated Encyclopedia when I were a lad and it made a lasting impression.

I'll be honest. I was intimidated by this sculpt. Where to even start? Eventually, I committed to painting it for the Golden Gobbo over on the Oldhammer Forum and I made a bit of a hash of things. I was aiming for the red and silver gear in the original artwork, ballsed it up badly and then tried to cover my crime with bronze. I was chuffed to bits to get a 3rd place, but I wouldn't have personally put this paint job in the top 5. I think I may have picked up the odd vote purely on how cool the sculpt is.

So where did I go wrong? I think the wheels started coming off at the undercoating stage. I went for a matt black undercoat with base coats applied immediately on top. The detail is so fine I think I would've been better off giving the undercoat a white or grey drybrush to help pick it out first. I also think I should maybe have started with a mid-range colour and used inks to get into the nooks and crannies, rather than starting with a base colour and trying to work sequentially outwards. Finally, I can see where I was in a rush to finish towards the end. So, not my best work by any stretch, but good enough to find him a place in my orc army. 

A couple of years on, my confidence with painting has improved and I have a few more tricks in the bag. I'm looking forward to getting hold of some of these new sculpts and challenging myself to do them justice. I may even pick up another Signum and see if I can can make a better fist of things second time round.