The Goat-Man Cometh

Konrad leapt up the stairs as fast as he could manage. Sweat cascaded down his neck and soaked his soggy leather armor. His shield thumped erratically on his back and he winced as it aggravated recent wounds. Behind him was the clinking of broken chains and the echoing bleat of a creature he - they - had all thought to be a myth. He stopped to catch his breath as he took the last flight of stairs. Moonlight bled onto his face, revealing the way out. He was almost free- or so he thought. 

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    Konrad is the miniature named Kornak from the board game Cadwallon: City of Thieves. The titular Goat-Man is from the same board game, the miniature named Tortok, but differs in that he had substantive conversion work done. I bought this board game in early 2020 for a steal ($12 for 20 miniatures!) off of Facebook marketplace and have been slowly painting it up since then.

    The quality of the miniatures within is not the best and is partly why I have done a lot of conversion work on the more recent ones I've been painting. The plastic is bendy (similar to the Reaper Bones line) with weapons frequently being warped so badly that they break off when you try to correct them. I typically run them through some hot tap water to adjust the offending pieces and then through cold tap water to set them back in to position. 

    I think it's easy to tell that of the two models I painted Konrad first, a few months after I made the purchase. He has some fairly obvious brush strokes on him and his highlights, or what highlights I bothered to do on him, are messy. While certainly not the pièce de résistance of my miniatures, I do really like the Mignola/comic-esque style he has. I think this is most noticeable where his eyes should be, I left it purposefully shadowed to try and pull off that effect. I'd be interested in trying more of this style with future miniatures.

    I painted the Goat-Man (Goat-Hammer-Man as my girlfriend and I dubbed him) approximately a week ago. I took the original Tortok miniature from the Cadwallon board game and chopped off his head! Then I removed the cartoonish hunk of plastic that was his sword. Now I had to figure out what to do with this mangled plastic humanoid. I settled on making him into a minotaur like figure who was imprisoned at the bottom of a dungeon. He has, obviously, since broken free and stalks these halls with his massive hammer. His victims hear naught but the clinking of battered chains as he comes up on them from the darkness.

    Those chains are jewelry chains bought from Hobby Lobby, his goat head is from a Games Workshop Beastman model, and the hammer is from a Games Workshop Stormcast Eternal Liberator. One of the coolest details on the Goat-Man is the hoof that my girlfriend sculpted into its present form. Her first attempt at sculpting and it looks great! 

    When it came to painting him up I was set on giving him a dark skin tone but ran into issues when trying to distinguish it from the various leather bits such as his belt and his hand wraps. I ended up painting over these features multiple times and set him down for the night in frustration. When I got home from work the next day I picked him up, did one final paint over, and called it done! Looking at him now I wish I did a better job on his cloak. It seems chalky and you can see my brush strokes at some points.

    I'm currently working on more miniatures from the Cadwallon board game that I hope to have done soon. My pile of unpainted plastic has a total of 106 miniatures NOT counting my Cthulhu: Death May Die and it's Unspeakable Box miniatures. My goal for 2021 is to paint all of my unpainted miniatures so that I don't feel bad about backing the Darkest Dungeon board game Kickstarter and eventually purchasing HATE.

    Until next time!