Painting Ancients

The Ancients are the first faction I painted for Cthulhu Wars. It’s also the least ambitious.

The teal-to-turquoise faction colour is VMC 70.808 “Blue Green”. All the gold is VMA 71.066 “Gold” over a basecoat of VMC 70.829 “Amaranth Red”.

Acolytes

The first nine factions of the game all start with six Acolytes on the board and no other units. Therefore, when I painted the faction, I didn’t start with the Acolytes. I painted all the Structures, Monsters, Terrors and Great Old Ones of the Ancients, the Tcho-Tcho and Crawling Chaos before I painted the Acolytes of all three factions, and then I did it all in one batch. I knew I had to make all of the game’s Acolytes look good together. For the six remaining factions after that, I painted the Acolytes with the faction’s other figures.

The krises are steel but the masks and trim are gold.

Reanimated

The gold looks more aged on the Reanimated. I like that; it makes them look less like dieselpunk zombie labour and more alien.

Unmen

I intended for the Unmen to be ghostly, as Lovecraft describes them. There’s not much definition to them, but I like the subtle dustiness of the drybrushed highlights.

Yothans

Yoth in the story is red-litten, hence the reddish-brown contrast colour.

Cathedrals

The Cathedrals were inspired by the golden city of Tsath from “The Mound” (1930). They’re injection-moulded with thin shells, and these had been bent in cooling, so I put mine on rigid printed bases.

Retrospective

In my own collection, this faction now stands out because it looks more homogeneous than the others. If I were to do it again, I would use a turquoise ink for deeper contrast and depth of colour, and I would have used dirtier rust-like colours on the Reanimated and the Yothans. I probably wouln’t bother with red OSL for the Yothans, but obviously that could look very good. I would have tried to liven up the Cathedrals, too, perhaps with more gold.