For the last couple of months I have been posting about the name generator and I felt a bit of change of pace was in order. I haven’t done any painting or sculpting for two years due to my health so I had to try to get back into it to get some other content. I decided to tackle my Vargheist and a Minotaur for my 3rd edition Chaos Dwarfs.
The picture above is the Minotaur from the 1994 third edition Talisman and/or 1995 Warhammer Quest. I really like this era and their miniatures but I wanted to include hooves on my minotaurs.
I chopped off the feet and the axe. I feel that the gloves fit really well with the 3rd edition chaos dwarf sculpts. In this image you can see my early attempt with green stuff where the feet used to be but I ultimately decided to break it off and start again as I wasn’t happy with the proportions. To the left you can see the current Blood Bowl Minotaur.
Above is the second attempt I made at sculpting hooves and lower legs. I extended the bones down to the hoof to look more proportional. I'm still working on trying to get the actual hooves right. To the right you can see my second vampire thrower getting some puffier sleeves on his shirt while I had the green stuff out.
I had sculpted some hooves I was decently happy with but when I took a look at the current minotaur's legs for reference, I saw his hooves where very different. Since they looked so good I questioned my own work, covered it over but couldn’t quite get it right. So I did what you should always should do when sculpting, I gathered a good selection of references materials, a lot of pictures of cow hooves! They turned out to look a lot like the hooves I had sculpted before second guessing myself.
From my research I discovered that the hooves on the current Minotaur are actually horse hooves with a notch in them. I would also argue, though it is hard to distinguish at this scale, it looks like a single bone leading up from the hoof, rather than the two digits that cows have. It is a bloody good looking Minotaur, better than anything I could make, so please take all critiques with a pinch of salt! I bet the sculptors at Games Workshop have a lot more experience sculpting horses and therefore horse hooves come more naturally to them. All that said, I know what I want my Minotaurs to look like, and I haven’t filled my search history with cow feet for nothing.
I chopped off the second attempt because the tibia was looking too long. I shortened it a bit but I believe the real problem is that combining an accurate representation of a cow’s hind legs and a human torso cannot work. This is because the hip and the spine are rotated 90° between the miniature and that of a cows. So, even though the femur of a cow is significantly shorter than that of a man, we need to meet in some sort of middle ground to accommodate for the hip and spine rotation. Games Workshop's answer to this issue is to use human proportions on all bones and then put a hoof instead of the toes. I don’t know how well those proportions would look if it stood upright instead of being bent forward in a run.
I’ve spent way too long on this diagram so you better enjoy it! No really, I did… That is the reason the blog post is late this month, instead of writing the actual post I was fiddling with this diagram.
Above you see the latest minotaur version. This is the third iteration with altered proportions. I’ve overlaid the diagram so you can see how I've tried to combine cow and human physiology. The femur is longer than a natural cow femur and the tibia has been shortened to cow proportions. As I will give him heroic proportioned hooves, they will encroach on the length of the foot bone, but I think it will look alright once I’ve added a bit more of the heel bone.
Above shows my continued work on the Vargheist/Vargskyr. I decided to pose him with his arm up to make him more practical for play so his arm was contained within his square. The raised arm also serves as something to easily get hold of to move him around.
Including this guy (below) as well, a side project I’m working on not to do with Blood Bowl. As you can see he is on a bit bigger in scale so therefore he’s a big guy. Still early days but good sculpting practice.
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