In yet another repaint I used the Half-Elf Hexblade (Aberrations #33) miniature from WizKids to create a villain for my current D&D campaign. Balmorrer Borngrey leads the Cult of the Dragons attempts in the Mere of Dead Men.

This post again will contain spoilers for the Hoard of the Dragon Queen adventure. If you want to avoid them, just scroll down to the pictures. As with most of the art in the adventure, Bryan Syme is to credit. I really like the look with the eye patch which gives him some personality.

Balmorrer Borngrey is a member of an elitist organization that sees elves as masters and all other races as inferior. He believes, the Dragons will spare the elves, if they help the Cult to clean the world from the lesser races. So he is kind of a nazi elf. He is also in charge of Castle Naerytar in Rezmirs absence and trains the lizardfolk.

The art from Bryan Syme reminded me of an old elf miniature I had, and when I found it, I could really see the resemblence. Altough the Half-Elf Hexblade did not have a shield, it would serve its purpose well as Balmorrer Borngrey.

Basing and Priming

I put some sand and small stones on the base and primed it with black and white.

Painting

Balmorrer has fair skin and platinum blond hair. I used VGC elf skin (slight yellow tint) for the skin and sand/yellow ochre for the hair. The miniature is made of plastic and the hair has almost no texture, so I tried to paint the different strains of hair seperately. For the leather armor I mixed  a dark-blue-grey. My version had little hints of green in it, but it looked similar enough to the reference art. I used a very dark grey for the leather boots and gloves, and chocolate brown for other leather parts (belt, pouches) and washed all parts with black ink. For the details I used VMC red leather brown and VMC polished gold. Finally, I painted on the eye patch.

Here is the final version of the repainted Half-Elf Hexblade as Balmorrer Borngrey:

As miniatures look nice in groups, the last two pictures show Balmorrer with a group of Dragon Cultists at Castle Naerytar and a band of lizardfolk he is training.