By The Pricking Of My Thumbs...

The Burgomeister woke up, sweating, breath hoarse in his throat, ragged, panting. His wife snored beside him, obvlivious to the horror that had awoken him. A cold, high, piping child's voice that had ripped through his dreams and threw him, wet and mewling into the cold night air. 

"Flies, flies, eat up his lovely eyes. The Burgomeister's lovely eyes!"

He tried to get his breath back under control. But then he heard it, outside in the night. Beyond the village.

The sound of drums. 

Something was coming. 

This is the start of my new AoS28 carnival: Dr N R Gull's Patent Medicine and Pandemonium Shadow Show, based on the old Realm of Chaos description:

The idea has been kicking around in my head since 1991 and it's only now I've really had the skill and the time to find a way to do it justice. So these are the first two members of the travelling show - The Little Drummer Boy and Stilts.

Mr Here Come The Drums was pretty easy, a straight kitbash with some greenstuff to rebuild the back of the head and making a pair of drumsticks.

Stilts was a little more involved in execution but very simple in conception. It's a little bit Bosch, a little bit Dali and a lot of Francis Bacon - all of whom were influences on Ian Miller and John Blanche.

The body is a plaguebearer with two legs cut off and mounted backwards. They were then extended and the forelimbs constructed out of wire. The joints were sculpted from greenstuff as were the hooves and then the bare wire given a thin coat of liquid greenstuff for texture. 

Painting for both was manly done with glazes and washes. Stilts had a few green and dark flesh filters applied which gives him the impression of darkening as he moves down the body. Pustules and boils and veins were then picked up with thinned colours. broadly speaking it's the same technique I developed on the Great Goblin but with many, many fewer layers. 

I'm very happy with these two and the easy win here has spurred me on to more ideas for the rest of a cavalcade of corruption. 

The next two, suggested by a few people online, will be the tarot card reader and the carnival barker.