Queen Zosga

“There upon the ancient, tusked throne of Gorblud sat Zosga, hobgoblin queen of the Misty Vale.”

My first model for this year’s Orktober is Trixia the Hobgoblin Queen by Artisan Guild. I tried a new technique, well it’s new to me, for painting green skin. It’s in Dr. Faust’s Painting Clinic video on layering and glazing. You use layering to paint a Caucasian skin tone and then use glazing with a dark green to turn the skin green.

Instead of priming the miniature black, I used Quinacridone Magenta.

For my Caucasian skin tone palette, I used Vallejo Hull Red and Reaper’s Rosy Skin Triad.

I used layering to build up the skin tone.

Once the layered skin tone is dry, I put two drops of Reaper Olive Shadow on my palette and then added eight drops of water to make a glaze. I then applied the glaze until I got a green tone I liked. She’s actually a little darker than she appears in the close-up photo.

While not the focus of painting the hobgoblin queen, I painted the throne using three different browns and two ivory colors. Here’s the finished throne:

In the next painting session, I painted all of the details on the hobgoblin queen. The miniscule amount of clothing was painted using Dioxazine Purple. The hair was painted Vallejo Cadmium Red and then highlighted with Reaper Chestnut Brown. Leather was painted with Reaper Coal Black. Horns were painted with a mix of Reaper Stained Ivory and Vallejo Ivory. The fur stole was painted with Reaper Shadowed Stone and highlighted with Reaper Weathered Stone.

The final step was to paint the metals, do edge highlighting, and tidy everything up.

Perhaps I forgot to mention this, but Queen Zosga is a Rep 6 Black Moon Caster and is usually accompanied by four Rep 4 Hobgoblin bodyguards.

It took just a little over 4 hours of painting time, not counting time for the paint to dry, to paint this model from start to finish over a three-day period. What do you think? Dr. Faust says that you can use this technique to paint any skin tone.

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Here is the video which inspired how I painted my hobgoblin queen: