Hobgrot Hangover

These Hobgrots were originally meant for the Gobsmacked challenge, but, as so often happens, I missed the deadline. Rather than abandon the little creeps, I used them as an opportunity to experiment.

The main painting goal was to get a better feel for saturation and brightness across different blue and green skin tones. I wanted plenty of variation between the individual Hobgrots while still making them feel like one thoroughly disreputable mob. After an evening of painting, I would sometimes show my progress to my daughter the next day and ask what she thought. One morning she finally looked at them and said, “Cool!” My heart just about exploded. Highest painting award achieved.

I also used all their armor, shields, and weapons to experiment with TMM in preparation for the upcoming challenge, which I am definitely, hopefully, perhaps going to finish on time.

Another ambition was to photograph all twenty Hobgrots together. It turns out that arranging twenty tiny, colorful subjects across a rocky landscape, then getting them all visible, well lit, and somewhere near in focus, is quite a different challenge from photographing a single miniature. The resulting images may not be the clearest possible showcase of every painting decision, but I enjoyed trying to make the mob feel like it was swarming through an actual environment. They are crowded and chaotic, which seems appropriate for Hobgrots.

The rocks and scenery were another experiment of their own. I’m planning a separate post about how I made them and will come back to add a link here once it is finished. I’m also working on a post about the photographic setup, what I tried, and what I learned from trying to squeeze all twenty models into the same scene. I’ll link that here too once it exists.

For a couple of the shots, I deliberately used plain backgrounds with the grand intention of adding something atmospheric in Photoshop. Then Photoshop became intimidating, I became lazy, and the backgrounds remained plain. Maybe that experiment belongs to the next batch.

Miniature photography and scenic staging are both ongoing projects for me, so I’m treating these images as another step in that process. These Hobgrots are late, colorful, slightly over-photographed, and still carrying the hangover from their original challenge, but I’m glad I kept working on them.