Gloomhaven is a game that lives and dies on (among other elements) its emerging story and sense of stakes to every decision. With that in mind, I recommend avoiding the contents of this article until the Angry Face and Circles classes are unlocked in your game.

As to why there are two copies of Circles in this post, my spouse’s game group had a birthday for someone that had just unlocked that character and they commissioned me to paint up both that and Angry Face. Our group, meanwhile, had unlocked Circles as well, so I figured why not do it in a batch?

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As with my first Gloomhaven post, I started with Krylon gray primer and applied a drybrush of white to simultaneously give the piece some highlights and desaturate the colors of the finished paint scheme.

Then it was time to do up the Aesther Summoner. The art for that class is backlit more heavily than usual, and has a lot of black underneath sharp glowing lines. This is not similar to the other characters whose art I’ve seen to date, so it presented an interesting challenge. First, a coat of relatively-saturated pinks, blues, and purples went on, followed by a drybrush of (mostly) lightened versions of the same colors.

A few more drybrushed coats and pale yellow and blue details in spots lit by the portal in the character art left the main paint job done. The base normally would have been all-black, but since the character is pictured with a glowing summoning circle I decided to give it a radiant light effect around the feet.

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Next up is our Angry Face, the Orchid Doomstalker. I haven’t actually played with this character but he seems to be some kind of hunting type with interdiction melee weapons – long knives, suggesting a kind of assassin build. I was particularly struck by the variety of colors on him, particularly with his feathered pauldrons and the (comparatively) bright fletching on his arrows.

It was tempting to try to fight the gray primer and brighten up all of those oddly colored bits, but I decided to lean into it instead. By keeping the colors desaturated as I originally intended, I got an effect of faded clothing and dirty feathers that still have a lot of personality to them. The purple skin and crystalline outgrowths of the Orchids offsets the clothing nicely, giving the whole piece a sort of glow around the deep shadows.

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Normally I don’t love the cartoony, cel-shaded look that’s so prominent in some schools of Games Workshop-style painting, but I actually don’t mind it too much on his clothes since it emphasizes the worn look without too badly compromising the smoother coloring on the rest.

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With all three pieces done, it was as always time for a coat of Dullcote to seal up the paint, and some group shots. The owner of the two pieces was, as I understand it, very pleased with his birthday, which was gratifying.