DIY Lemures - fiends in low places
Not to be confused with lemurs, lemures are hell's most wretched: the spirits of the damned who lack the gumption to become devils in their own right. If nothing else, they're fantastic for reminding your players that hell is a really nasty place to be avoided at all costs and not just a fiery and slightly camp amusement park.
AJ Pickett does a great job of describing just how wretched a role lemures play in the world of D&D. I'm not feeling wealthy enough to pay these sorts of prices for creatures that are essentially scenery with a stat block, particularly since you need quite a few of them to give the effect of a massed population of the damned.
Let's see if we can do better than that.
For this build, I'm going to use:
• Cheap tiddlywinks for bases, although any small, disk-like plastic thing would do.
• Lengths of paper clip cut down to make half-inch or so long pins.
• Cheap, pre-drilled plastic necklace beads.
• Tin foil.
• Lots of hot glue.
• A bit of Das air-drying clay.
• Spare arms. Zombie and skeleton arms without weapons are ideal.
• Spare heads.
I wasn't going to make a crafting video for this one, my plan being to reuse a partially successful mini cloning technique I'd recently used to make myconids out of hot glue using a blue stuff mould. This official lemure model, although small and uncomplicated, which lends it to that sort of cloning, is just that bit too fine in the arms and digits. The hot glue method, which may be a video in the future, ain't going to work here.
Here I've already changed tack, drilled some tiddlywink bases in the middle and super glued some lengths of wire cut from paper clips, around which the body of the lemures will be built.
The flabby, sagging lower body of the lemure follows a rough cone shape. Tin foil is perfect for filling out most of that bulk. A generous dollop of hot glue will anchor it in place around the paper clip pin.
This is all five of the lemures-to-be packed out with tin foil.
You could superimpose a globe over the upper body of the lemure, which would account for the majority of that mass. Let's represent that with these nice 'n' cheap beads. I've got to leave a little bit of wire sticking out of the top of the bead to be able to pin the heads to the bodies.
With all five custom models beaded, I can compare the basic forms with that of the original, to make sure I'm on track. Yup, I'm happy with that. For the heads, I've either got these left over Wargames Factory female Zombie Vixen heads or these similarly spare Warlord Games Woodland native American Indians.
In the end I went with the Indians because the heads are hairless by default and because their war scream posed mouths could just as easily be issuing the screams of the damned.
This is all five models with heads glued on.
I was lucky to have enough arms, not just both lefts and rights, but also lacking weapons. The Zombie Vixen sprue provided the majority of this haul.
It doesn't take much imagination to repurpose those out-stretched, brain-seeking arms to the imploring gestures of the hopelessly forsaken! Hot glue keeps them firmly in place.
I want to represent the horrible folds of flesh all around the lemure's body with droplet shapes, working up from the bottom so that they overlap each other.
Das doesn't hold up to this too well, but I know just the thing for creating droplets en masse.
That's right friends, hot glue steps in to save the day again. By the end of this craft, I'd worked out that skipping every other flab-drop then going back round to fill in means that drops have time to harden before their neighbours can mess them up.
Now Das clay does come in useful. It's suited to hiding the upper tails of the lard-sag hot glue drops and hiding the join between the body and the arms. I'm also using it to bulk out the head with yet more folds of horrible flesh. This shot of the back of the official mini shows what I'm trying to recreate.
A wetted, rubber-tipped colour shaper is ideal here to form the folds in the back of the neck. I'm trying not to see it as a judge's wig at the moment.
A white bomb will do this time. These are super simple models with no hard-to-access nooks and crannies, so I can get away with not using the more forgiving black primer.
The base coat is a bit of a flamboyant recipe of red and sepia inks mixed with red and pomegranate colour paint.
With the base coats done, I can start to work up to the highlights. A bit of flesh colour goes in.
… then a bit more.
By the time I'm using pure flesh tone, the models are starting to look a little pallid. Some red ink diluted with flow aid should take care of that.
I could get away with leaving the models as they are, but let's black the bases in and give them some eyes.
I have to muck about with the filming angle here while I'm doing the eyes. Normally, the camera mount is attached to the arm of the angle poise magnifying light for the top-down shots, but I need the glass for the close-up work, or I won't stand a chance.
Here's our wretched friends suffering away on a suitably hellish battle map taken from Tanner Yarro's Immersive Battle Maps book.
I'm showing off these Mantic Kings of War fiends for no other reason than they look awesome.
Check out the Callathiforay series if you'd like to know more about the world in which the lemures are due to turn up.
Until next time, insert snappy sign-off here.
