This is an old Ral Partha frost giant. It’s quite different than Boerogg. This one is from before things got quite so cartoony in D&D art. Early versions of D&D had giants conceptualized as extra large humans, with frost giants modeled after vikings, like this guy.
The snow is washed out in these photos, sorry. But that’s just as well; I didn’t get he snow mixture quite right here. It was a little too thick, so it didn’t self-level well and had some bubbles in it that show in real life.
I got a hill giant, frost giant, and fire giant a while ago as a way to sort of memorialize the D&D campaign I ran in which the players went through the Slavers series and Against the Giants series. The three “Giants” modules pit the players against hill giants, frost giants, and fire giants, so…
I worked on this guy off and on for darn near a year I think. I got side-tracked by playing World of Warcraft. Also, the paint I was using for his skin was the Reaper Pale Flesh triad that had the clotted highlight color, which I posted about a few months ago. All the nooks and crannies in this guy were tiresome, too. There might be such thing as too much detail…at least for lazy me.
Most people these days make frost giants’ skin blue; a visual cue that the guy is cold-related. I don’t really like that. In my mind, giants are really just extra large people who live in certain habitats. So this guy is up in some muddy tundra somewhere, getting angry.
I agonized over the colors, of course. A continual problem I have is in getting realistic colors that aren’t drab. This guy is pretty drab. The mini painters I admire most are able to paint with bright eye-popping colors while still getting the overall tone come across as muddy and drab.
Anyway, this guy has a sword made of bone strapped to a huge hunk of slate. He wears polar bear fur that’s been dragged in the mud a bit. I’m happy with the way he turned out. He’s obviously a collector of trophies, and he’s got quit a few strapped to his arms, chest, waist, and hands.
My gaming group is starting a new game based on pirates in 1600’s Jamaica. As a token of my appreciation for Ken, our previous game master who ran a terrific Wild West + Call of Cthulu mashup game, I’ve painted Barnabus as a gift. Ken put a CRAZY amount of detail and work into his game for the year and a half we were playing it. He included all kinds of historical references, actual people from the 1850’s, and real places and artifacts. He must be a history buff, cuz he knows his shit.
This is the Reaper’s version of the D&D Remorhaz. The creature dwells in cold climates, hence the snow base. The back of the creature gets furnace-hot when it is agitated. I sculpted a pair of eggs out of Green Stuff that mommy is protectively coiled around.
In our Against the Giants campaign, when the characters found this creature at the bottom of the Glacial Rift of the Frost Giant Jarl, they purposely woke it and then ran away. The remorhaz crawled out of its lair, stretched it out across the chasm floor, tucked in its legs, and steamrolled down the length of the rift, flattening and frying about a dozen winter wolves, ogres, and giants. Good times.
