Storm King’s Thunder also involves Cloud Giants. It even starts with one in the introduction adventure. But later in the campaign, Cloud Giants come into play as adversaries. Of course, there are nice miniatures from Wizkids from the Storm King’s Thunder set. I bought two (28A and 28B) and repainted them.

Cloud Giants in D&D 5th Edition got a makeover from previous editions. They still have fangs (I don’t know why) but don’t use them. In Tyranny of Dragons, there was also one Cloud Giant at the end with his own Cloud castle. I did a pretty nice battlemap for Skyreach Castle, you can download here.

In the Storm King’s Thunder Campaign book, Cloud Giants got further development. There are also Cloud castles, but the Cloud Giants are more mysterious now. They have wide, flowing robes, green-gray and blue tones, and literal clouds form from their bodies like hair in regular people. It’s a cool new look. A look I really wanted to have for my Cloud Giants, too.

I bought two Cloud Giant miniatures from Wizkids Storm King’s Thunder set, aptly named Cloud Giant #28A and Cloud Giant #28B.

As you can see from the pictures, the factory paint job features brown and tan colors and a greenish metal for the armor pieces. The sculpts themselves are really cool, and the features are elongated. The Cloud Giants’ faces are hidden under masks and their weapons are exotic. Almost perfect, if you ignore the color scheme. But this could be easily improved.

Basing and Priming

I did not want to rebase the miniatures, and I just added some texture to the bases, i.e. sand and small pebbles. The miniatures were not primed or stripped of previous paint – I painted over them.

Painting

I took some inspiration from the existing Cloud Giant images from D&D 5th Editions Monster Manual and Volos Guide to Monsters. For this, I just needed green-blue colors for the clothing. I decided on one Cloud Giant having teal/blue robes and the second one having teal/green robes.

The skin tone was nice already, I remixed the same color but added shades and highlights. A serious deviation from the original paint job was the metallic armor pieces. I wanted the overall colors to be cold, so I did not include any gold or bronze here. I painted the armor in darker burnt iron and highlighted it with silver and mithril.

To get a little bit of warm-cold contrast, I painted the base in a warm sand tone.

The final detail of my Cloud Giants was the idea to use stuffed toy animal filling to simulate clouds. This stuff is pretty robust, and it was easy to glue on with superglue.

So finally, here are the two repainted Cloud Giants!