Fully Painted: Barbarians of Frostvale

I'm slowly developing bits and pieces of Frostvale, my homebrew fantasy setting, which will exist alongside our club campaign world to create fun options for scenarios and crossover games. The setting represents my fantasy ideal -- a windswept, Scandinavian-inspired land of teetering mountains, dark forests, mysterious runestones, benighted dungeons, tumbledown ruins, overgrown altars, lonely watchtowers, hardscrabble villages and plenty of unexplored wilderness.

This is the land of Frostvale. Most of my existing warbands will figure into this setting -- some, like the Cursed Riders of Frostvale, hail from these hard lands and wear their allegiance like a badge of honor. Others are merely exploring Frostvale to plunder the abandoned keeps and ancient barrows that dot the hilly uplands.

My newest addition to the world of Frostvale is not really a warband per se ,.. rather, it is a collection of barbarians from the countless hill tribes that occupy the foothills of the Blue-Rime Mountains. They can ally with other warbands seeking additional muscle, or occasionally they will sweep down from the foothills and raid the frontier villages in the valleys below.

I have been wanting to try painting up some ridiculously muscled dudes for quite some time, and half-naked barbarians seemed like the perfect excuse to do so.

I tried some blending and shading techniques with these guys to really accentuate the insane muscle sculpting. I'm pretty pleased with how it came out, but of course there's always room for improvement.

Perhaps most importantly, I didn't use the magic dip on these guys (as I typically do for figures with lots of skin and earth tones). I also based them on 30mm round lipped bases to set them apart from most of the rest of  my fantasy stuff, which is based on 25mm round bases.

The terrain piece is a small rocky forest that I completed recently. It represents a pretty good aesthetic for Frostvale ... lots of exposed boulders and scrubby vegetation.

I have a few more barbarians to paint before the warband is complete. Keep your eyes peeled for a future installment!

-- Patrick, Chicago Skirmish Wargames club member