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Reaper Lizardmen I (03551)

Delving deeper into the swamp, the adventurers encounterd a tribe of lizardfolk. Reaper has several great lizardmen miniatures, both in metal and plastic. I bought the Lizardmen I & II sets with three figures each for this tribe.

Lizardfolk have a long tradition in fantasy literature and RPGs. Often, they are primitive, large reptilian humanoids with simple, nature based/shamanistic cultures. In the Forgotten Realms, they live in marshes, swamps, or tropical forests. They also live in the the Mere of the Dead Men, the saltwater swamp between Neverwinter and Waterdeep where our D&D adventure took place.

I wanted my lizardmen to have colors like this lizardfolk hero from Johnny Morrow:

I really like the green/yellow/mustard/brown approach and I wanted to emulate it. The folk over at the Reaper Forums painted them in similar colors (brown, colorful green/yellow, grey, or exactly the way, I wanted to paint mine).

Basing and Priming

As always, the minis were cleaned first with water and soap. I also remembered to remove mold lines this time. All figures were then placed on 25mm bases which I decorated with small rocks, twigs and sand. After that, the minis were airbrushed with black primer and then dusted with withe primer.

Painting

For the skin, I mixed an olive green tone from different Vallejo Model Color greens. Unfortunately, I don’t remember the exact recipe. I painted the belly scales a little bit lighter, mixing a little bit of Sky Grey into the base skin color. After this basecoating, I applied Green Vallejo Model Wash and a little bit of Black Ink wash on the lizard scales to achieve depper shadows.

Next, I drybrushed the scales a little bit with a lighter version of the base skin tone. The details were done pretty quick: Most of the lizardmen did not wear any clothes. For those who did, I painted them in Vallejo Game Color Leather Brown and Model Color Flat Earth. I also drybrushed the furs with VMC Chocolate Brown and Bone, the wodden weapons (spear/bow/shield) with Chocolate Brown and the spear tip with Stone Grey. The spines and teeth were also painted in VGC Bone and then washed with Vallejo Model Ink Sepia. Finally, the lizardfolk got yellow eyes.

The bases were drybrushed using a reddish brown (I think it was a mix of VMC Saddle Brown and Chocolate Brown) to have a little bit more contrast to the browns of the figures. After finishing the paint job, I decorated the bases with bright green tufts of grass.

Here are all three models from the Lizardmen I set together. I painted both sets (and a lone bones version from my Kickstarter Bones 1 set) at the same time. So in the next post, I’ll show you the rest of them.