Painting Tcho-Tcho

This is the second faction I painted for Cthulhu Wars.

All of the faction’s models on top of their box, before painting began.

All of the faction’s models on top of their box, for comparison with the unpainted version.

The faction colour is VMC 70.944 “Old Rose”.

The recurring contrast colour is VGC 72.029 “Sick Green”.

Acolytes

The complete set of individual models of this type.

This is a detail of my paint job on one particular figure, photographed to its advantage, not for ease of comparison to other figures.

Unlike other factions, my Tcho-Tcho do not exhibit variations in skin colour, because they’re supposed to be ethnically homogeneous. The robes on both types of Cultists are shaded with a mixture of mostly red and some violet ink, in Les Bursley’s wash recipe.

High Priests

This sculpt is similar to a generic High Priest available for all factions, but it’s distinct.

I typically avoided special effects and dressing on the bases for Cthulhu Wars, but the High Priests had to have something. The blood is just red ink from Citadel/GW.

Protoshoggoths

The bodies beneath them are all unique, painted to look bloodless and emptied from the inside, but the bodies of the Protoshoggoths are pure black. I used gloss varnish for everything except the insides of the mouths, which are matt. There is a bit of colour—white and faction pink—to the eyes, which are supposed to look like distended slivers of the black base material over the temporary organs. There are no pupils.

Ubbo-Sathla

Lovecraft mentions “the proto-shoggoths” only as one of the “disjointed and irresponsible things” Danforth whispers in At the Mountains of Madness (1936). To come up with a colour scheme for Ubbo-Sathla I fantasized about the blackness of the shoggoths, Danforth’s “primal white jelly”, the interpretation of that jelly as protomatter in Delta Green, and the extreme contrasts in Poe’s The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket (1838).

I recognize that directions are subjective with this one.

The tablets emerge smoothly out of the black ooze.

I stuck some transparent acrylic gel on the topmost protuberances.

The eye reverts back to black, restarting the white-to-black development from the ooze to the body.

Retrospective

When I painted the Protoshoggoths I had no paints with chromatic variations, so I could not easily emulate Lovecraft’s description of shoggoths as iridescent black. If I had painted them today I would have used some special iridescent paint, the way I did for the mature shoggoths of Cthulhu’s faction.