Pathfinder Battles Preview: Heroes & Monsters Behind the Scenes

Friday, September 23, 2011

So far we’ve revealed the digital sculpts for 11 of the prepainted miniatures in our Pathfinder Battles: Heroes & Monsters base set, including the mighty Huge Black Dragon! Digital sculpts give us the chance to see what a miniature will look like in full color, and allow us a chance to make minor (or even major) adjustments to ensure that the miniatures accurately model the characters and creatures that inhabit the Pathfinder world.

But digital is not the only way to sculpt a miniature, of course. Even though our partners at WizKids use the most modern methods to create their beautiful minis, sometimes the best way to make a miniature is to sculpt it by hand using precision tools and modeling putty. This is the same process by which most metal miniatures come into the world. Because the epoxy putty used by most sculptors is usually green, minis lingo refers to these preliminary miniature sculpts as “greens,” no matter what color they turn out to be.

Below you can see the green of the tallest miniature in the Heroes & Monsters set, the two-headed Ettin. The pose is an amalgamation of a black-and-white ettin image from a Pathfinder’s Journal fiction piece and the ettin entry in the Pathfinder RPG Bestiary. When WizKids provided this image to Paizo for approval, Senior Art Director Sarah Robinson and I thought it captured the creature perfectly, and gave the sculpt our stamp of approval almost immediately.

Once a sculpt has been approved, WizKids technicians use the green to form the basis of the mold from which the entire production run will come. At about the same time this is being done, painters must determine what the final paint job of the miniature will look like. In the case of digital sculpts, general paint guides come with the sculpt itself. In the case of traditional sculpts, however, the artists must interpret colors from the original art, and take their best shot at how they think the final colors should look.

Just this week, WizKids sent over the proposed paint deco specs for the Ettin, which looked like this:

Like the sculpt before it, the paint deco sample passed inspection with very few changes. We like the way this guy looks. That said, from experience with the Beginner Box Heroes set, WizKids improves the painting with each step, so the final miniature will likely look a little more “weathered” than this one, giving it a slightly more realistic look.

So the Ettin went very smoothly, transitioning from art to green to mold to paint deco with virtually no hitches. I’m happy to say that this has been the case for most of the miniatures in the Heroes & Monsters set, but a few have been somewhat more stubborn, requiring more substantial changes at each step in the process. A good example of this is the Human Ranger.

When we decided to put the Human Ranger in the set, we provided this great illustration by Eric Belisle to WizKids.

Their sculptor’s first crack at this miniature captured a lot of what we thought was important about the character’s costume and general demeanor, but Sarah and I were concerned that the pose was too two-dimensional, and wasn’t as dynamic as Belisle’s original illustration. Our WizKids counterparts agreed, and came back with the following major improvement:

We really liked this approach, and approved the sculpt. Now here was a bowman we could see people really wanting to play, and the pose really tells a lot about the character. We were excited! But things got a lot more exciting earlier this week, when WizKids sent over the following paint deco for approval:

And that, as they say, was a bulls-eye.

From here the paint decos will be turned into “masks” that go over the unpainted miniatures, allowing paint application to go in all the right places. Add some hand-finishing to bring out the tiny details, and the Ettin and Human Ranger are on their way to production!

Next Week: Goblins, Goblins, Goblins!

Erik Mona
Publisher