Today I bring you the Yuan-ti Anathema. This was another creature redesign for Dungeons and Dragons 4th Edition as well as a miniature turnaround for the Against the Giants miniature expansion. It is always an honor to have a chance to add my voice to the legacy of Dungeons and Dragons. One of the coolest aspects of this design was the fact it was slated to be a 72 mm "huge" scale miniature. Bigger is always better in my book when it comes to miniatures.
This creature was changing a bit from it's earlier incarnations and it's changes were at first causing me some headache. The body mass had to be a huge swirling mass of little snakes. The problem was I was concentrating on the "little snakes" aspect and not the "huge mass" aspect of the design. Once again I was fretting about the details and forgetting to address the bigger picture. I had some rather horrifying false starts before I got my act together on this one. I remembered a piece I had done previously that involved a creature of twisting tentacles and allowed me to move forward in the right direction.
Now with a better outlook on how to proceed I moved forward with the official first pass on the Yuan-ti Anathema and come up with this...
© 2007 Wizards of the Coast LLC
Hurm... the body is working but the head... yeah... Onto another revision. Moving back to the smaller head with the elongated body but this time a bit of a neck...
There we go! Much better. This version is approved and I moved forward with the complete turnaround.
You can see how the Yuan-ti Anathema turned out in it's final production miniature form, HERE. That's all for this week. See you next week for a fresh start in a new year!